8502 Pte Charles James Hulbert, 2nd Wiltshire Regiment

Arrived overseas: 7 October 1914.

Connection: Postcards (x2).

You could be forgiven for thinking that this man was serving with a Scottish regiment. Nothing of the sort. Charles Hulbert, an infantryman with an English line regiment, has swapped his uniform with a Scottish PoW and posed in what would have been novelty dress for him.

Charles's regimental number indicates that he joined the Wiltshire Regiment on about the 20th January 1910, and he was stationed with the 2nd Battalion in Gibraltar when Britain went to war with Germany in August 1914. The battalion returned to England on the 3rd September 1914, and a little over a month later, on the 7th October 1914, the men, 1100 strong, disembarked at Zeebrugge. Seventeen days later, on the 24th October, Charles was captured. By now, the battalion strength had now been reduced to 450 of all ranks, with just two officers, and by the end of the month, shellfire would reduce the total by a further 200 men.

The location and date of this photo are unknown, but Charles did record his name and address on the reverse of it: C J Hulbert, 107 Lincoln Street, Lawrence Hill, Bristol. He also signed the card: "With best wishes from Buffer to Jack". 

Little is known about Charles's life outside the army. It is possible that after he left the army he worked for the Great Western Railway as there is a 27-year-old Charles James Hulbert recorded in a National Union of Railwaymen register for the Bristol Branch in 1919. There is also a death recorded for a 33-year-old Charles J Hulbert in Bristol in 1925 and this could be the same man.