Clearout reveals ‘jaw-dropping’ mementoes of Great War hero

ONE of the largest collections relating to an individual soldier has been donated to the Imperial War Museum after the step-grandson of a First World War officer discovered a trove of hundreds of wartime letters and other artefacts stuffed into suitcases in wardrobes and under beds.

In those letters, Captain Reg Malerbi wrote of the horrors of war, conditions in the trenches and how he almost lost his life. At the Ypres Salient on the Western Front in Belgium, he was commanding a trench mortar battery aged 24 when he was severely injured on Sept 20 1917, sustaining 12 shrapnel wounds and losing an eye while assisting a wounded man.

The collection includes a fragment of the shell that nearly killed him and his glass eye, as well as his uniform, his service revolver, photographs and letters, mostly written to his parents and his brother, Will, who was then in the army in Mesopotamia.

A letter from Sept 19 1917 is particularly poignant as it could have been his last, written hours before he would go over the top of the trenches into battle.

It was to have been sent to his parents had he been killed in action: “If this letter ever reaches you, you will know that I have ‘passed over’. I am going over the top in the morning, and you know what that may mean. My greatest worry at this moment is the grief that hat this news will cause you.”

This remarkable collection lection will feature as part of Channel 5’s documentary series, Secrets of the Imperial War Museum, to be aired on Dec ec 17.

Alan Wakefield, head of f First World War at the Imperial War Museums, told The Sunday Telegraph: “We’ve got everything here – his letters, rs, his course notebooks when he was as training, photographs.

“We get offered lots of individual objects or collections. It’s impossible to take on everything.

“We’re trying to collect t really exciting material like this collection.” ction.”

In the documentary, he says: “We’ve got very few collections this his extensive relating to one individual person. Apart from having him actually standing tanding here, this is as close as you’re going oing to get to answer that story of what one individual went through.”

The donation has been n made by Dr Dean Clarke, a retired probation bation officer.

He discovered the extraordinary xtraordinary mementoes in clearing out t the house in Dore, on the outskirts of Sheffield, heffield, that had belonged to his step-father, Bernard, who was Reg Malerbi’s son. He said: “My stepfather died two years ago. I was left in lockdown sorting out his bungalow, getting rid of everything, that’s how I came across all this stuff. There was a huge number of suitcases in wardrobes and under beds with jaw-dropping letters.” Those letters include one that Malerbi wrote on Oct 28 1917, to his brother from hospital: “I am afraid I am out of this war for good. Have lost my right optic and got lumps of metal of all sizes in various parts of my anatomy.”

There is also a letter sent to his parents by the hospital: “I am very sorry to tell you that your son Captain Malerbi has been severely wounded. “His right eye was so much injured that the surgeons at the clearing hospital had been obliged to remove it.” Malerbi wrote close escapes and the dangers of venturing into no man’s land, the nightmarish wasteland between the enemy’s lines. Mr Wakefield said: “He’s telling his parents how dangerous it is in the front line. He mentions decaying corpses in No Man’s Land in the trenches, the chance that you might be killed just walking down the trench by a stray artillery shell and the danger from snipers. He lays all that out. So I expect his parents were pretty worried.” Malerbi wrote of the stench of death: “We could smell the bodies in our trenches” and the pain of losing friends: “Poor Webb was killed last night. “Webb and I were together the day before… He was rather down in the mouth, and seemed to have a premonition that he would not come through, and we all felt the same thing ourselves about him.”

Malerbi, who died in the late 1970s, came from a comfortable Southampton family. After the war, he travelled regularly. In 1933, he met a woman called Beate Kneiphoff on a train. She was to become his wife. She was, ironically, German.

Secrets of the Imperial War Museum continues Fridays at 7pm on Channel 5. The episode featuring the Malerbi collection airs on Dec 17 , 7pm

‘We’ve got everything here – his letters, his course notebooks when he was training, photographs’