A REAL SOLDIER'S SON

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23109, 6 August 1938, Page 15 (Supplement)

A REAL SOLDIER'S SON

PARTY of English holidaymakers, visiting Ypres battlefields, came on the grave of Rifleman Valentine Joseph Strudwick, of the Rifle Brigade, killed in action at Ypres on January 14, 1916, and the inscription on the small white tombstone made them stop. "Aged fifteen" was carved in the stone. This was the gravo of the youngest soldier killed in the war. For years that grave had remained among the thousands which cover fields in Flanders, forgotten. Forgotten by all but the men who cut the grass and keep these cemeteries peacefully beautiful and by the i father of this boy who ran away at

fourteen to fight and die for his country. For that is what he did. The Imperial War Graves Commission, who know of no other soldier to have died so young, helped a representative of the London Daily Express to find the father, 78-year-old Mr. Jesse Strudwick, who still lives in Orchard Road, Dorking, Surrey. " A Daredevil" Jesse Strudwick, an old Inniskilling Dragoon, has only his old age pension to live on and has always been too poor to visit his boy's grave. He told about his boy: "Joe, that's how we always called him, was a bit of a daredevil. "I used to tell him stories of the campaigns I'd been in. Perhaps I shouldn't have. Well ...

"He left school at thirteen and went to Croydon to work in a brewery. He'd been there only a few months when war broke out.

"He wanted to. join up there and then, but we pleaded with him. In October, 1914, he walked the eleven miles to the recruiting office in Whitehall. "He was a big lad and he said he was eighteen, byt they didn't believe him. So he walked back. -

"It was only a few days later> that he walked to London again. That was the last we heard' until a letter came to say he had got his uniform and was going overseas. He was fourteen then. "We had a postcard or two from the front. Then he wrote that he expected to come home on Christmas leave. But he never returned.

"It was only 'after the war that the War Office got to know of his true ft age.