New Feature - Object of the Month
17th Sep 2013
The object for this month of September is a helmet with a bullet hole in it which was used by a Wiltshire Regiment soldier during the First World War which has a special story attached to it.
It was worn by Lance Corporal Thomas Uzzell of the 5th Battalion, The Wiltshire Regiment who is believed to have been part of a reinforcement draft from the 2nd/4th Battalion who were stationed in Poona in India during most of the 1st World War when he was transferred to the 5th Battalion in 1915. He was involved in the siege of Kut, Mesopotamia and was wounded at Gallipoli by a bullet that penetrated the helmet and took out his right eye and came out through his right cheek. He was left for dead but on regaining consciousness managed to reach safety and treatment and lived to the age of 93!
The titanic struggles on the Western front now so dominate the popular view of the First World War that the fact that, as its name suggests, it was a global conflict is often forgotten. Men of the 5th Battalion Wiltshire Regiment served elsewhere; at Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia and on the North -West Frontier of India and Persia, a series of gruelling campaigns in tough environments that cost more than 600 hundred of its soldiers their lives either in battle or from disease. Yet in Wiltshire the unit, raised from volunteers who rushed to join the colours amid the patriotic fervour of 1914, became ‘The Forgotten Battalion’.