Company Sergeant Major WALTER JAMES (JIM) FULBROOK

Company Serjeant Major Walter James Fullbrook, service no. 4/1738, 4th Bn. Hampshire Regiment, (died 3 November 1916, aged 26)

Walter James (known as Jim) Fullbrook (sometimes written as Fulbrook in the records) was born in Broad Oak, Odiham at the end of 1890 and lived there with his grandparents, Jonathan, an agricultural labourer, and Jane Fullbrook, from birth. By 1911, he was still living at Broad Oak with his widowed grandmother and had become a bootmaker.

Before the war, Jim had served in the Territorials for a couple of years and, like Ambrose Offer and Frederick Porter, he enlisted with the 4th Hampshire Regiment in the first weeks of the war. He, too, would have been included in the first wave which left England for India on 9 October 1914. He, too, would have been in Rawalpindi. He would have known Fred Porter well; both lived in the Broad Oak area all their lives. He is indeed mentioned in Fred’s letter home. He, too, entered the Mesopotamian theatre of war in Basra on 18 March 1915. During his time in Mesopotamia he did well, rising rapidly through the ranks from Private to Company Serjeant Major by the time of his death two years later.

Jim was one of the many in the Battalion who suffered from sickness whilst in Sinn during the summer and early autumn of 1916. He died of pneumonia on 3 November 1916, probably in the hospital centre at Amara, for he is buried in the Amara War Cemetery, Iraq. Jim was awarded the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal 1914-20 and the Victory Medal 1914-19.