A Noble Company

Major Malcolm ‘The Bobber’ Robertson OBE MC had been profoundly affected by his service in the First World War at Ypres and on the Somme, and prayed that the boys of Sunnyside, the Winchester College house that he ran, would be spared the like. By 1938, he knew that war was coming again, and as each set of boys left he tried to follow their fortunes and to support them and their families as best he could. The resulting correspondence between The Bobber and former pupils in every theatre of war, as well as to and from their parents and siblings, forms a precious and unique record of the impact of the Second World War on the Winchester community. Together with photographs, diaries, and memoirs from almost all the forty boys who sat down with The Bobber for the 1938 house photograph, their letters provide us with a vivid depiction of the wartime careers of the boys, for whom Robertson felt a huge personal responsibility. In this magnificent book these sources reveal the boys’ doubts, successes, boredom, captures, narrow escapes, loves, lifechanging wounds, and – in the case of exactly one in four of them – their deaths. A Noble Company is an ambitious project which gives the reader an inspiring insight into these young men’s wartime experiences.

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