A GENERATION or so ago, newspapers throughout the country, including the Hereford Times, would regularly feature reports on military societies from the 1914-18 war.

The Suvla Bay Association was one, the Old Contemptibles another but, as their members disappeared with the passage of time, many will no longer know what significance these groups once held or, indeed, what the qualification for membership might have been.

While the worth of the Suvla Bay Association - marking the amphibious landing made at Suvla on the Aegean coast of Gallipoli peninsula in 1915 - should not be underestimated, it's the Old Contemptibles which figured large in our family's life for as long as I can remember.

Members of the group earned their epithet from the reported comment of Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, who allegedly issued an order on August 19, 1914 to "exterminate ... the treacherous English and walk over General French's contemptible little army".

My grandfather George Sawkins was a proud member of the association which was open only to those who were already in France as part of the British Expeditionary Force on the day war was declared on August 4, 1914.

The son of the gamekeeper at the south Herefordshire Whitfield estate, George was born in 1895 and so had not yet reached his 18th birthday when he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps (Territorial Division) on March 18, 1913, initially with the South Wales Mounted Brigade Field Ambulance.

A stretcher-bearer, he was then attached to the 7th Cavalry Field Ambulance - he even joined their choir - which crossed to Ostend and then moved on to Bruges in Belgium.

They served the 3rd Cavalry Division which was involved on the Western Front in the first battle of Ypres in 1914, the second battle of Ypres in 1915, battles of Arras in 1917 and battles in the Somme in 1918.

The Somme must have been a particularly difficult experience as he had lost his elder brother William in the Somme in 1916. William's short life, ended by a sniper at just 22, is marked on the war memorial near Perrystone on the B4224, the Ross side of How Caple.

After the war, George worked in the steelworks at Pontypool before returning to the county of his birth as a maintenance man for the Morelands family - who ran the famous match factory in Gloucester - at Foy.

He moved on to be the estate maintenance manager for Col Spence-Colby at Donnington Court, later to become, briefly, the home of Elizabeth Hurley and Shane Warne.

But, despite a bad motor accident when he was hit by a car in 1937, military life had not completely relaxed its grip on him.

When conflict with Germany resumed in 1939, he and his wife Dot, whom he had married in 1923, were both employed at the Rotherwas Munitions Factory - he was a storekeeper - and moved to Hereford with their four daughters in 1942.

The two eldest daughters were also involved in the war effort with one serving as an ARP warden and the other spending time at Bletchley Park.

George served with the Home Guard throughout the Second World War, earning another medal to add to his collection, and his uproarious laughter when Dad's Army first reached TV screens in the late 1960s gave the, probably correct, impression that the incidents portrayed in the series had more than a small basis in truth.

He retired in 1961 and he and Dot enjoyed a happy retirement, three times travelling to Canada where two of their daughters and families had emigrated in the post-war period.

He maintained his link with the Old Contemptibles to the end of his life, serving for a long period as the treasurer of the local branch and wearing his association badge with pride every day of his life.

George Sawkins died on November 23, 1977 and was sent to his final rest a few days later, his coffin draped in the Union Flag - a hero, to his family at least, to the last.