Growing up in New Cross nu 9 George Carly ...........a soldier of the Great War

Unknown group of soldiers, 1916

George Carly and I were neighbours separated by just 40 years and sharing the same house.

Of course I didn’t know him and only discovered his existence yesterday when I began to explore the history of where I had lived in the 1950s.

The family appear on the 1911 census and were still there three years later when the Great War began.

That in its self has drawn me to them fired also by a curiosity over their names.  Mr Carly’s middle name was Garibaldi and his wife’s was Zilpah.

Not that their birth places were unusual.  Mr Carly had been born in Sussex in 1865 and Mrs Carly in Greenwich

Unknown group of soldiers, 1916

I suspect given his birth year his father may have admired the Italian nationalist Garibaldi and in time I will I hope discover more about Lucy Zilpah Carly.

But for now it is enough to know that in the April 1911 the Carly’s had been married for 18 years and had six children ranging in age from George who was 17 down to Ivy who was three.

And knowing the house so well it is easy to begin to fit them into the different rooms wonder who slept where and which jobs around the place each was given to do.

My dad always talked about how his was the job of cleaning the fire places and bringing up the coal in his home in Gateshead and I suspect the same would have been true of the Carly’s particularly as they did not employ a servant.

At which point it is easy to slip into speculation about the family.

Mr Clark and his son George described themselves as “catering clerks.”
 George Carly of Lausanne Road, born in 1894 and died at the Somme in 1916

The remaining children with the exception of Ivy were listed as “student” or at “school” and so I wonder if Edmund Waller was where they went which is the school me and my sisters attended.

The school dates from the 1887 with an extension added in 1899 so it is possible that at least some of them might have attended.

Greetings ............ circa 1918

And I will go looking for school registers and admission books but in the meantime it is George who occupies my thoughts.

At his death he was serving in B Company of the First Battalion Queen’s Westminster Rifles and was killed on September 18 1916 at the Battle of the Somme.

Now if I have got this right the Queens’ Westminster Rifles had been formed in the August of 1914 at 58 Buckingham Gate and had been a Territorial Force and left for France in the November.

Sadly like so many of the men who served in the Great War George’s military records were destroyed which at present leaves us very little other than a reference on the Thieupal Memorial.

Not that this will stop me.

Now I know we inhabited the same house I feel the need to find out more.

Pictures; Daily Mail War Postcards, 1916, and others courtesy of David Harrop


*The London Regiment, The Long, Long Trail, http://www.1914-1918.net/london.htm