Leslie de Selincourt

News has reached us of Leslie’s death in Switzerland, aged 30, on July 14th.

During the war he served with the Hampshire Regiment, but in 1916 was attached to the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. He was part of the army sent to relieve Kut which ended in failure. Leslie was wounded and was taken to recover in India, where he recovered but also caught malaria.

He stayed in the army through to October 1920, at which point he transferred as a Captain to the Territorial Reserves. Thereafter we rather lost touch with him. Given he died at Hotel Les Chamois in Leysin, a sanatorium, it seems likely he died of tuberculosis.

Leslie did not marry, but leaves a considerable family behind including his brother, Aubrey de Selincourt, who was shot down, we now know by German ace Werner Voss (his 31st victory), and spent the final year of the war in captivity. He is now teaching at Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight.

Before the war, their sister Dorothy married Mr A.A. Milne, an assistant editor of the ‘Punch’ magazine who had a novel (‘The Red House Mystery’) published earlier this year. They have a two-year old son, Christopher Robin Milne.