482nd (South Midland) Field Company, Royal Engineers
Edmund Herbert Cullis was born in Gloucester on 23 August 1885. He was the elder son of Edmund Joseph Cullis (a Civil Engineer/Surveyor) and his wife Sarah Ann (née Bridges). The couple had two sons and three daughters in all.
Edmund was educated at Sir Thomas Rich’s School in Gloucester and at the Municipal Technical School and followed his father into the Civil Engineering profession and was on the engineering staff of Birmingham Corporation.
In October 1914 he married Edith Holland and the couple lived at Bryansburn, Tuffley Avenue, Gloucester.
He had been a Territorial soldier prior to the war, in the signallers’ section, and on 7 September 1914 he re-joined the 2/5th Gloucester Regiment (number 2810), becoming a Corporal on 1 October 1914, Temporary Serjeant on 30 January 1915 and Temporary Company Quartermaster Sergeant (A Company) on 22 May 1915.
He was commissioned into 482nd (South Midland) Reserve Field Company, Royal Engineers on 26 December 1915. According to a report in the Gloucestershire Journal of 25 August 1917 he spent his service career as an instructor in the UK. He had applied for overseas service but his experience and expertise were considered too valuable to allow this. The National Archives holds his Service file (WO374/17135).
He died suddenly of heart failure on 19 August 1917, whilst visiting friends or relatives at Christchurch, Hampshire, aged 32 years. His body was conveyed by train, with full military honours, from Christchurch to Gloucester, where a funeral took place at Southgate Congregational Church, of which he had been a member. He was buried on 23 August — his birthday — in a private plot in the now disused Wotton Congregational Church Cemetery, in Horton Road, Gloucester.
The above edition of the Gloucester Journal also reported this and at the inquest into his death he was stated to be a ‘most capable and efficient officer’. Notice of his death also appeared in the Birmingham Gazette of 23 August 1917.
His brother, Lieutenant Raymond Cullis, was able to attend his funeral as he was in England recovering from a shell wound to the arm at that time. He survived the war and died in Gloucester in 1957.
Researched by Graham Adams 10 November 2019 (revised)
(Thanks to John Williams for certain information)