This image shows the recruits of the 5th Battery of the Royal Field Artillery Reserves returning to barracks after a football match played on Horntye Fields. The match, Hastings versus Eastbourne & District,  finished 5-1 to the Eastbourne team. They are marching down St Pauls Road. The original photo appeared in the Hastings & St Leonards Pictorial Advertiser in October 1914.
Further information about where this brigade served during the war is hard to find. As suggested in my previous post it seems that the Territorials were used to free up the regular forces from the Empire’s outposts sp that they could return to Europe. I would imagine that as the war dragged on, many of the reserve regiments would have been called back for service themselves.
The two photographs used to create the image are below. You can view the top image full size on my Flickr page by clicking on it.
This image is part of a series of Then and Now images I’ve created for East Sussex Council’s World War 1 commemoration website. The website is focussed on the contribution that the men and women of East Sussex made towards the war effort.
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