THE Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum in Winchester has been donated a copy of a World War One pantomime programme written and performed by the soldiers.

Coincidentally it was of Dick Whittington & his Cat, which is this year’s panto at Winchester’s Theatre Royal.

The playwright, Reginald Kennedy-Cox, was a well-known playwright, who later went on to be an influential social reformer.

Kennedy-Cox served in the France in the early part of the war, before the Balkans, which is probably where this was performed.

Susannah Jarvis, deputy curator at the museum at Serle's House on Southgate Street, said the programme belonged to 493118 Acting Lance-Corporal Thomas Harold Trueman of the Royal Army Medical Corps Territorial Force.

A/LCpl Trueman enlisted on April 22 1913, served in the Balkans in WW1 and watched this panto at Christmas 1917. He was discharged on May 10 1919 with a Silver War Badge – under the code XVIa ‘Surplus to Requirement (Suffered impairment since entry into service)’. He was aged 23 and four months on his discharge. After the war, Thomas married Ella Winifred and moved to Bermuda to work.

The donor is Thomas’ son – John Trueman, who lives in Surrey. He found the programme in an old book of his father’s and sent it to the museum due to the playwright – Lt Kennedy-Cox – serving in the 3rd Battalion Hampshire Regiment.

Kennedy-Cox was attached to the 3rd Kings Royal Rifle Corps, in B Company. During 1917 the 3KRRC were based around Lake Tahinos and the River Struma in Macedonia.