AN Australian academic is researching British Territorial soldiers who served in India in World War One and is focussing on Hampshire men who served there, 1914-18.

Prof Peter Stanley, of the University of New South Wales, is one of Australia’s most active military and social historians.

His major current project is “Territorials in India” on the experience of the 50,000 British Territorial Army soldiers who served there. No one has written on these men in a century.

Prof Stanley has conducted extensive archival and field work in Britain and India.

Most of the British “Terriers” in India came from the southern counties and many of the book’s sources are drawn from regimental museums and county archives. The TA were part-time soldiers who were called up in their hundreds of thousands in the Great War.

Now, with research assistant Emily Gibbs, he is seeking to discover what happened to these men when they returned home. Did they thrive? Did India change them? Did any return to live in India?

Ms Gibbs gave the Chronicle the example of Victor Strode Manley from Winchester who served with the 2/4 Hampshire Territorial Battalion, arriving in India in November 1914.

The Territorials were sent to garrison India, freeing up regular troops for active service. Manley’s diary provides valuable insights into the little-known experience of TA soldiers in the Raj.

A schoolteacher in Winchester, in the course of his war service Manley was an infantryman, deck-hand, hospital orderly, postman, batman, trench-digger, burial identifier, road-maker and railway clerk.

Typically, his voyage to India was monotonous and cramped. The food was inadequate and there were only six wash basins for the 2,400 men aboard.

Arriving in India, Manley’s company were sent to the North West Frontier. Despite difficult conditions – especially extreme heat and cold – Manley was entranced with the colours, the people and their culture. He learned the local language and wrote sensitively of the local villages – their sumptuous apricot and mulberry trees and interesting Mohammedan customs. He included excellent diagrams of agricultural implements, terraced fields and farming methods, and it was clear he is fascinated with geology and the irrigation methods used in a barren landscape.

He underwent the Kitchener Test, and volunteered (though was not selected) for active service in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq.

In 1917 he was sent on active service to Palestine, and was later stationed in Egypt for a year. Returning to England he resumed duties at Winchester Training College and wrote books on geology and local history, and died in 1965.

Ms Gibbs told the Chronicle: “It would be fascinating to get in contact with descendants and families of Terriers, and may even flush out more primary material.”

Ms Gibbs and Prof Stanley can be contacted on: indiaterriersgreatwar@gmail.com.

They only want to hear about the experiences of Territorials and not regular soldiers.