This time last year I wrote about a cousin of mine, Mark Cameron, who was killed at Jutland in 1916. This year I will detail someone closer in the family, my great-grandfather Charles Hodgkins.

Charles was born in 1891 in Uttoxeter and had worked as a labourer before enlisting on the last day of August 1914. He was assigned to the 4th North Staffordshire Regiment and sent to Guernsey for training. Almost a year later he was finally sent on active duty when he was drafted into the 7th Battalion and ordered to Gallipoli. Earlier in the month the 7th had seen fierce fighting at Hill 'Q' which was "one of the fiercest fights of Gallipoli. Every inch of ground was disputed with bayonet and bomb." By the time Charlie arrived they had moved forward to Sulajik where a long period of trench warfare commenced, most of the work consisting of digging forward, wiring and patrol work. Captain Missen records that "heat, sand and flies accounted for nearly as many lives as did the bullets and shells of the enemy". During this month Charlie got pneumonia and was sent to Malta for convalesence, then finally back to England by December where he was sent to Lichfield Military Hospital at Whittington to recover. It was here, sometime in 1916, that he met his future wife, Minnie, a local farm girl who brought eggs for the soldiers there. Charlie was lucky, in a way. A month after he left the 7th Battalion were subject to lots of trench flooding when icy water would sweep through with no chance of escape for the men, many of whom were drowned. The trenches remained waist-deep in water for some time.

Charlie was discharged from the army as he was no longer fit for service. He became a baker's boy in Lichfield, married and had two daughters. But his strength was always diminished, and in 1925 he died when an oral infection got the better of him, aged just 34.