Conduct Unbecoming … crimes and misdemeanours committed locally by World War I soldiers

My attention was drawn recently to two 1916 newspaper items concerning legal cases brought against two of the Canadian Foresters stationed in Virginia Water during the First World War. To put them in context I trawled rapidly through Exploring Surrey’s list of newspaper articles[i] and discovered that these were not isolated incidents.

Many of the young men who marched off to fight in the First World War failed to return and, looking back, we rightly remember them all as heroes. However they were ordinary men from all walks of life, living ordinary lives, and subject to the same human weaknesses as the rest of us, no doubt magnified by their fears of war and the horrors of the trenches. The sort of crimes and misdemeanours they committed were not so very different to peacetime, involving motoring offences, theft, drunkenness (sometimes leading to serious assault) and, sadly, crimes against women.

Motor Offences

• In January 1915 a member of the Territorial Army was knocked down by a military lorry in The Causeway, Egham, driven by Private Edwards of the Army Service Corps. The injured man, Private Anchant of the Reserve Middlesex Regiment, 9^th Battalion, was said to be satisfactory in the Cottage Hospital.[ii]
• In September 1915 the case was adjourned against  Lt Vernon Francis Symondson (stationed at the East Cavalry Barracks at Aldershot) for exceeding the speed limit and driving without licence at Egham. [iii] A week later he failed to appear at the Chertsey Petty Sessions for his postponed hearing.[iv]
• In October 1915 Sir John William Montague Sinnerton Byer, an army officer, was charged after an accident, with driving without a licence.[v]
• In September 1916, Canadian soldier James Blackmore was fined three shillings for having cycled without a light[vi]
• In June 1917 there was an accident on Egham Causeway involving a tractor and a motor car driven by Major Eric Williams of the Suffolk Regiment.[vii]
• The same newspaper recorded the funeral of Private Samuel Hunter of the Canadian Forestry Battalion who was killed after being run over by a lorry at Virginia Water. He is buried at Englefield Green[viii].
• In October 1917 a Sergeant Greening was riding a motorcycle in Egham High Street when the sidecar, occupied by Private C Andrews, detached, throwing both men (of the Royal Flying Corps) to the ground. It appears they could not fly! Private Andrews was sent to the Cottage hospital.[ix]
• In March 1918 Private Charles. Leach of the Canadian Foresters was  fined for speeding in his car in Egham[x]
• In June 1918 Lieutenant, The Honourable Herbert E Eaton, younger son of Lord Cheylesmore was fined for motoring offences in Englefield Green.[xi] The Cheylesmore family lived at that time  in Cooper’s Hill House, formerly The Royal Indian Engineering College.

• In July 1918 2^nd Lieutenant E W Parish was accused of ‘joy riding’ in Egham.[xii]

Theft

• In May 1915 Sidney Fineberg, who had been discharged by the army, broke into a house and stole various articles.[xiii]
• In October 1915 Private Charles Filling of the Princess Charlotte of Wales’s Unit (Royal Berkshire Regiment) was charged with the theft of a horse [xiv]
• In  March 1917 Hector Poquette of the Canadian Forestry Corps, 230th Battalion, was charged with the theft of a bicycle. [xv] And in May 1918 Emit Richards, described as a Canadian serviceman, was charged with the same offence.[xvi]
• In March 1918, James Forey, a soldier who had been shot in the chest at Mons and subsequently discharged  was accused of encouraging a boy to steal.[xvii]
• In September 1918 three Canadian servicemen were charged with stealing food from a house[xviii]

The Canadian Foresters were also the victim of theft, for example, in November 1917,  Joseph H Clarke was charged with receiving a pair of brown boots, valued at £2, the property of Captain Forbes Graffick of the Canadian Forces stationed at Englefield Green. Clarke was remanded on bail.[xix]

Drunkenness

Public perception at the beginning of the war was that drunkenness was an increasing problem. Indeed David Lloyd George  said in 1915

“We are fighting Germans, Austrians and drink, and so far as I can see the greatest of these deadly foes is drink” [xx]

A series of laws restricted opening  hours of licensed premises to between midday and 2:30pm, then from 6:30pm to 9:30pm. Additionally beer was ordered to be ‘watered down‘ to make it less potent. It became illegal to buy drinks for other people or ‘treat’ them – a regulation which was frequently breached, especially on behalf of wounded soldiers.

Amongst cases of drunkenness recorded in the local papers were

• “Mild and Bitter” [xxi] in which three soldiers from the East Surrey and Royal West Surrey Regiments were accused of  disorderly conduct at the Railway Hotel, Virginia Water on 2 June 1915, following a military funeral. Perhaps sympathetic to the soldiers’ experience, the magistrates dismissed the case.
• Two soldiers, one a lieutenant, who visited a Virginia Water recruitment meeting in July 1915, after drinking, and used bad language, were not so lucky and were  each fined 40 shillings.[xxii]
• Compare this with the £13 fine imposed on Canadian soldier David Mardens at Chertsey Petty sessions [xxiii]. There was further inconsistency in February 1917 when another Canadian from Virgina Water, Richard Irving, was given one night in the cells before Chertsey Sessions let him off after one night because of his general good record of behaviour. [xxiv]

Drinking and assault

Sometimes, of course, excessive drinking was associated with much worse behaviour. The magistrates were understandably concerned  when Canadian Army Medical Corps soldier David James Andrews was brought before them in March 1918 charged with being drunk while in possession of a loaded firearm[xxv]. He does not appear to have assaulted anyone with his revolver but in June 1916 [xxvi] fellow Canadian Adrien Laderoute made the mistake of  drunkenly assaulting  a police officer. He was sentenced to three months in jail with hard labour – and suffered the additional indignity of having his name misspelt in the newspaper.

In August 1916, Canadian Forester John Floyd was charged with indecently assaulting Lily Clara Gwynn, aged 16, from Woking.[xxvii] Lily Gwynn claimed to have cycled with two friends from Woking to Virginia Water, to walk by the lake where Floyd approached her, grabbed her round the waist and dragged her into the bushes where he “committed the offence complained of.” Her friends screamed and a nearby man (who happened to be Deputy-Lieutenant for the County of Essex) ran up. Floyd and his companion, another soldier,  ran off.  Although Floyd pleaded guilty, his version was that after drinking in the clubhouse, he and others went for a walk in the park and met the girls, with whom they walked for about an hour. He and Lily fell behind and ran into the bushes, whereupon they fell and she started screaming. After all testimonies had been heard, the charge of indecent assault was reduced to common assault. Floyd was given 2 months’ jail with hard labour but this was lessened by 10 days for good behaviour.

John Floyd had been born in Ottawa in about 1892 and was a bricklayer by occupation.  He was married and had served two years in the militia before the war. In 1915 he joined the 77th Battalion Canadian Expeditionary Force  and remained with them for about 4-5 months in Canada until he was transferred to the 224th Canadian Forestry battalion in March 1916.  He arrived in the UK in the spring of 1916.  He suffered from bouts of pleurisy and pneumonia and was discharged on health grounds on 31 December 1917 and returned to Canada.  But in June 1918 he re-enlisted and served with an HQ Detachment in Kingston Ontario until he was finally demobilized in August 1919.

Lily Gwynn (full baptismal names Clara Lilian Elizabeth) was born in Walthamstow in December 1899, to William Alfred Gwynn, a glassblower, and Mary Louisa Gwynn who died when Lily was 2, probably in childbirth. She lived with her father and his second wife, Minnie Jane Gwynn, at 150 Maybury Road from about 1909, not at 152 as stated in the newspaper. Her friend, Rhena May Shortland, who also testified at the court hearing lived close by at number 153.

John Floyd’s case raises the question of whether Lily and her friends cycled to Virginia Water especially to see the Canadian Foresters and  perhaps to flirt with them. There are other cases recording young girls trying to impress the Canadians, for example Lily Ivy Masters who was charged with stealing while reportedly ‘running after soldiers’ in the Virginia Water area.[xxviii] The definition of assault was also undergoing changes and the same newspaper which reported Floyd’s crime quoted a new  lighting order in force from  1916 which stated “If a person within arm’s length threatens to strike another he is guilty of  assault.” 

In at least one case, assault led to death, following racial provocation. Apparently on the 25^th May 1918, Private A R Macdonald and a Private Johnson were talking to two girls outside the Castle Inn on Egham Hill.

A  soldier by the name of Albert passed by and spoke to them but Macdonald riposted by calling him a  n*****. When Albert said that he had every right to walk along without being insulted, Macdonald hit him. Another private from the Canadian Foresters, John Monroe, ran up and hit MacDonald from behind. MacDonald was taken into the Castle Inn and died that same evening from concussion of the brain. The doctor recording his death said that Macdonald weighed 14 stone so he must have been hit with great force. The jury found Monroe guilty of manslaughter but under provocation – the judge told them that this could not be put on the inquest finding and referred  Monroe to the assizes. Private Macdonald was buried in the Englefield green cemetery on Wednesday 5 June  with full military honours. [xxix][xxx]

His gravestone does not tell the full story, merely stating that Alan Roderick Macdonald (born on 1 January 1881 in Antigonish, Nova Scotia), died in Sunningdale Hospital on Saturday 25 May 1918. His headstone is engraved “Far from home but not forgotten, the voice we loved is still.” A miner, he had joined the army on 5 October 1915 in the 85th Battalion Nova Scotia Highlanders. After arriving in England 18th Oct 1916, he saw service in France on 10 February 1917 and returned to the UK after a nervous breakdown.

Crimes against Women

• in 1915 an Egham soldier, Sidney Tidbury, was summonsed for assault on Mrs Charlotte Ottaway and ordered to pay 5s costs.[xxxi]
• At Chertsey Petty Sessions in January 1918, Sergeant W.B. Green of the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment was summoned for a bastardy order and for encouraging boys to steal holly[xxxii]. It is not clear which was regarded as the most morally repugnant.

Desertion

Because it was wartime there was the additional crime of desertion (punishable in the worst case by death) and we know of a few such cases in the Egham area.

• In August 1915 three men (a Cockney and two Irishmen) who had deserted from their ship in Portsmouth were arrested by a Special Constable. They were in fact tired of wandering from place to place after their ship had sailed without them some two weeks previously. They were detained in Egham Police Station for a week until a naval escort  of seven men, led by a petty officer, arrived to take them back to Chatham.[xxxiii]
• One Sunday in October 1917, shortly before midnight, two police officers were on duty when a soldier, thought to have mistaken the officers for Military Police, bolted from them. The officers found the soldier, and a doctor put eight stitches in wounds he had received through scaling a high gate while fleeing.[xxxiv]
• In November 1917 two soldiers were charged as absentees a day after they were apprehended by the police in Egham for not having passes and trying to get away[xxxv]
• In October 1918, Mrs Emily Crowe of Egham was charged with assisting a deserter, the father of her baby.[xxxvi] The fate of the deserter is not recorded.

But perhaps the strangest crime occurred when fire caused damage of £10,000 at sawmills used by the Canadian Forestry Corps.

The fire was spotted and reported by Peggy Horton who seems to have been visiting a soldier on site. After she raised the alarm twice, two soldiers tried to extinguish the fire before the Egham Fire Brigade arrived. Peggy was then taken to Egham Police Station. The article in the Surrey Herald of 29 March 1918[xxxvii] does not imply in any way that she caused the fire – yet she was fined nearly one pound “for being on military premises without a permit!”

Margaret C Stewart

This does not claim to be a comprehensive study of crimes committed and any assumptions or errors are my own. Many thanks to Dr Kent Federowicz, Reader in British Imperial and Commonwealth History at the University of the West of England (Bristol) and Research Fellow at the Department of Military History Stellenbosch University, for inspiring this article by showing me the newspaper articles about John Floyd and Adrien Laderoute plus additional information about their service records.

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[i][i] World War I Newspaper Indexes (1914-22) https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/collections/search?s=*%3A*+crime&qa%5Bkeyword_reference_type%5D=0&qa%5Bpartner%5D=SHIND&qa%5Btitle%5D=&qa%5Bperson%5D=&qa%5Bplace%5D=&qa%5Bsubject%5D=&qa%5Bformat%5D=&qa%5Bidentifier%5D=&qa%5Bdate_from%5D=&qa%5Bdate_to%5D=&cbav=2&cbadvsearchquery=%28%28%28%28*%3A*+%2B%2B%29%29+%2BAND+%2B%28partner_code%3ASHIND%29%29%29+AND+%28partner_code%3ASHIND%29 [Accessed 16 April 2025]

[ii] Territorial knocked down – Surrey Herald 15 January 1915

[iii] Exceeding the Speed Limit – Motorist who did not Care – Case Adjourned – Surrey Herald 3 September 1915

[iv] Exceeding the Speed Limit – Surrey Herald 10 September 1915

[v] Motoring Without a Licence – Surrey Herald 15 October 1915

[vi] Chertsey Petty Sessions – Cyclists – Surrey Times and County Express 1 September 1916

[vii] Egham Causeway Collision – Surrey Herald 8 June 1917

[viii] Funeral of Private Samuel Hunter – Surrey Herald 8 June 1917

[ix] Soldiers’ Accident – Surrey Advertiser 6 October 1917

[x] Private Chas. Leach -Surrey Herald 8 March 1918

[xi] Englefield Green – Surrey Herald 7 June 1918

[xii] Chertsey Petty Sessions – Surrey Herald 5 July 1918

[xiii] Trials of Prisoners – Burglary by a Soldier – Surrey Comet 19 May 1915

[xiv] Mare’s Many Owners – Egham Soldier Committed to Trial on Charge of Theft – Surrey Herald 1 October 1915

[xv] A Stolen Bicycle – Surrey Herald 2 March 1917

[xvi] Another Soldier Charged – Surrey Herald 10 May 1918

[xvii] Mons Soldier’s Offence – Counselling a Boy to Steal – Surrey Herald 1 March 1918

[xviii] Virginia Water – Canadian Soldiers Escapade – Surrey Herald 12 April 1918

[xix] Charge of Receiving – Surrey Advertiser 12 November 1917

[xx] Quoted in http://www.eastsussexww1.org.uk/alcohol-first-world-war/index.html  [Accessed 13/4/2025]

[xxi] ‘Mild and Bitter’ – After a Military Funeral – Landlord’s Charge Against Soldiers – Surrey and Hants News 11 June 1915

[xxii] Disturbance at Recruiting Meeting – Surrey Herald 2 July 1915

[xxiii] Chertsey Petty Sessions – Drunk – Surrey Herald 22 December 1916

[xxiv] Canadian Soldier Drunk – Surrey Herald 2 February 1917

[xxv] Canadian’s Loaded Revolver  Surrey Herald 8 March 1918

[xxvi] Drunk and Disorderly Conduct – Surrey Herald 23 June 1916

[xxvii] Canadian Soldier Assaults Woking Girl – Surrey Herald 18 August 1916

[xxviii] Girl’s Numerous Offences – Surrey Herald 18 October 1918

[xxix] Soldier Referred to Assizes – Surrey Advertiser Saturday 1 June 1918

[xxx] Regrettable Affair at Egham – Coloured Soldier Charged with Manslaughter of Canadian – Surrey Herald 31 May 1918

[xxxi] A Soldier and a Woman – Surrey Herald 1 January 1915

[xxxii] Chertsey Petty Sessions – Surrey Herald 11 January 1918

[xxxiii] Deserters Arrested in Egham – Surrey Herald 27 August 1915

[xxxiv] Soldier’s Escapade – Surrey Advertiser 6 October 1917

[xxxv] Police and Soldier Cyclists – Surrey Advertiser 24 November 1917

[xxxvi] A Sad Story – Soldier’s Wife Conceals Deserter – Surrey Herald 18 October 1918

[xxxvii] Big Blaze at Sawmills – damage of £10,000 at sawmills used by Canadian Forestry Corps – Surrey Herald 29 March 1918