249672 Pte. Reginald Donovan British Army 16th Battalion Middlesex Regiment from:London Reginald Donovan was my father. He joined up in London at the Cockspur Street recruiting office in Autumn 1915 when he was 18 years old and got to France in November 1915. He was with the 16th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment, which we discovered was the Public School Battalion as he went to St. Dunstan's College.
He told me very little about his time in France but I know he was at Ypres (Wipers) and he would say that in the trenches he felt sorry for the Indian soldiers who were always so cold. He told me about the bully beef they had to eat. He somehow survived the Somme but said he was shot, not seriously, early on and lay in No Mans Land until dusk when he crawled back to the trench.
After two months he returned to France and was transferred to 3rd Battalion and shipped off to Salonika. Sometime during his service he was shipped to Malta with malaria which I believe he caught there. He said that the quinine they were given ruined his teeth. But he came home at the end of the war and lived on until 1983.
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