Sidney Lewis was the youngest British soldier to fight in WW1 after he enlisted in August 1915 aged just 12. Lewis, who was only 13-years-old when he fought at the Somme, was a machine gunner on the Western Front.
A stocky boy standing at 6ft 2inches, he managed to fool commanding officers because of his size, until his mother sent his birth certificate to the War Office demanding he be sent home.
Sidney re-enlisted in 1918. And at the war’s end was back in uniform, and still under age, still a machine-gunner, this time with the Guards Machine Gun Regiment in the Army of Occupation in Austria.
Sidney later became a police officer and during WW2 served with a bomb disposal unit.
He died in 1969, the landlord of a pub in Frant, East Sussex.
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