Notes
The Bradford Grammar School website (see References) states: 'He was the eldest of three brothers and had two elder sisters. Their father George Kershaw was head-master of the National School in his home town of Cleckheaton, where his daughters assisted him. Milton was a pupil at Bradford Grammar from 1898 to 1905, then went up to Cambridge to read Natural Sciences at Peterhouse College, and he became a member of the University Officer Training Corps. He was then appointed to a lectureship in Physics at the Royal Agricultural College (now University), Cirencester. Kershaw was a talented cricketer—a “capital fast bowler … a very good field, and a very useful bat” and he was “the mainstay of the three-quarter line” for the (Rugby) Football XV until he injured his knee. His military interests were
strong. He commanded the College O.T.C. by 1914, and he was one of the few hundred cadets who fulfilled the obligation to join the Special Reserve of Officers, in his case in the
Gloucestershire Regiment. Shortly before war broke out he was engaged to marry Eileen
Hughes of Barnsley, Cirencester.
At the outbreak of war in August 1914, Kershaw joined his battalion, which landed in France with 3rd Brigade, 1st Division of the British Expeditionary Force, on the 13th. He saw action at Mons, the long retreat to the Marne, and at the Aisne. In October the BEF was sent to Ypres to block the final German thrust of 1914, to seize Calais. For three weeks the Gloucesters were hotly engaged and by early November they were reduced to a quarter of their fighting strength. In dense fog on the morning of 7th November, they were commanded to take enemy trenches near Zwarteleen. The men were exhausted and the advance was
hastily prepared, and they ran into intense fire and barbed wire. Kershaw’s platoon was almost cut off and lay in the open waiting for dusk. He was wounded twice, and then “nothing more [was] ever heard of him.” A fellow officer wrote there was a “faint hope that his wound in the head may not have been fatal” but “it was very slight”. The German Red Cross confirmed his death in mid-1915. His grave was never found and he is listed among
the missing British soldiers on the Menin Gate, Ypres. His final letter to his parents thanked them for all they had done for his education at BGS and Cambridge, and expressed his desire to do his duty to his country and King as an Englishman.'