Hullis, Shaun A Noble Company

Bobber's Boys at War

Major Malcolm The Bobber Robertson was deeply affected by his service in the First World War at Ypres and the Somme, and prayed that the boys of Sunnyside, the Winchester College boarding house he ran, would be spared. When he realised in 1938 that war was once again imminent, he tried to track the fate of every boy who left the boarding school and to support them and their families as best he could. The resulting correspondence between The Bobber and former pupils on all theatres of war, as well as with their parents and siblings, forms a valuable and unique record of the impact of the Second World War on the Winchester community. Together with photographs, diaries and memoirs from almost all forty boys who posed for the house photo with The Bobber in 1938, their letters give us a vivid picture of the war experiences of the boys for whom Robertson felt a great personal responsibility. In this book, these sources reveal the boys' doubts, successes, boredom, captivity, narrow escapes, loves, life-changing injuries and, in the case of exactly a quarter of them, death. A Noble Company is an ambitious project that gives the reader an inspiring insight into the war experiences of these young men.