3846: Second Lieutenant Lorimer Austin Dobson

Second Lieutenant Lorimer Austin Dobson served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Collingwood Battalion at Gallipoli June 1915. He was hospitalised after Gallipoli because of sunstroke. He later lived in a house he called "Collingwood" in Rushwick near Worcester. The house was full of old weapons brought back from the war.

After Lorimer died, the contributor and his brother remember playing at their Grandma's house (Collingwood) with the bullets, knives, British grenades and German stick grenades. He especially remembers a trench knife with a curved 12' blade with a handle. Its single blade became 2 if you pull a slider back. That blade would be opened when stuck in the body. Could it have been Turkish?

After leaving hospital Lorimer was kept on light duties, but this meant being a dispatch rider! Hardly light duties.

When the contributor's Grandma died around fifty years ago, the army bomb disposal team were called in because the grenades he and his brother played with were live! He remembers they were destroyed behind sandbags! It was reported in the Worcester papers.