Profile

QUELCH, Victor James
(Service number 13470)

Aliases
First Rank	Private	Last Rank	Private

Birth

Date	20 December 1887	Place of Birth	Timaru

Enlistment Information

Date		Age
Address at Enlistment	Timaru
Occupation	Ironmonger
Previous Military Experience	Geraldine Mounted Rifles - one year
Marital Status	Single
Next of Kin	Mrs E. J. QUELCH (mother), 9 Queen's Drive, Musselburgh, Dunedin
Religion	Roman Catholic
Medical Information

Military Service

Served with	NZ Armed Forces	Served in	Army
Military District

Embarkation Information

Body on Embarkation	New Zealand Expeditionary Force
Unit, Squadron, or Ship	13th Reinforcements, J Company
Date	27 May 1916
Transport	Tofua
Embarked From	Wellington	Destination

Other Units Served With
Last Unit Served With	Otago Regiment

Military Awards

Campaigns
Service Medals
Military Awards

Award Circumstances and Date

No information

Prisoner of War Information

Date of Capture
Where Captured and by Whom
Actions Prior to Capture
PoW Serial Number
PoW Camps
Days Interned
Liberation Date

Discharge

Date		Reason

Hospitals, Wounds, Diseases and Illnesses

20 March 1917 - wounded in action; to Walton-on-Thames Hospital, England; left arm amputated

Post-war Occupations

Death

Date	7 May 1977	Age	89 years
Place of Death	Havelock North
Cause
Notices
Memorial or Cemetery	Havelock North Cemetery
Memorial Reference	Block RSA, Plot 66
New Zealand Memorials

Biographical Notes

Victor James Quelch (born James Victor Quelch) was the fourth son of Alfred James and Ellen Josephine (née Fleming) Quelch. Alfred from Oxford, England, and Ellen from Ireland married in 1876 at Dunedin, New Zealand. There four children were born before the family moved in 1883 to Timaru where Alfred established his own business as an ironmonger. James Victor Quelch was born on 20 December 1887 at Timaru and baptised Roman Catholic on 1 January 1888 at Timaru. Perhaps bankruptcy led to a return to Dunedin in 1891 and two more children were born there. In 1901 Victor received third prize for Standard VII at Albany Street, Dunedin.

Victor Quelch, who followed his father in the ironmonger’s trade, had been employed with John Edmond and Co at Timaru for five or six years when he enlisted. He had served one year with the Geraldine Mounted Rifles. Private V. J. Quelch embarked on 27 May 1916 with the 13th Reinforcements. On 20 March 1917 he was severely wounded in battle and had to have his left arm amputated. By this time he was with the Otago Infantry Battalion. At the 1920 annual meeting of limbless members of the Dunedin Returned Soldiers’ Association, he was elected to the committee of Limbless Commtittee.

Victor married Ilena Blyth in 1924. He fractured his ankle in September 1936 when he tripped over a piece of wood at his home at Brighton near Dunedin. V. J. Quelch died on 7 May 1977 at Havelock North, aged 89 years. Ilena died in 1995, aged 98, her ashes being interred at Andersons Bay, Dunedin. Victor’s brother, Ernest Fleming Quelch served in theSouth African War (as Ernest Michael Quelch), and two other brothers – Alfred Fleming and John Hector – were listed on the Reserve Rolls for World War I, both being married men with families.

Sources

Auckland War Memorial Museum Cenotaph Database [21 March 2021]; NZ BDM Indexes (Department of Internal Affairs) [21 March 2021]; Baptism index (Christchurch Catholic Diocese CD held by South Santerbury Branch NZSG) [21 March 2021]; Havelock North Cemetery headstone image (Hastings District Council) [21 March 2021]; Evening Star, 18 December 1901, 17 September 1936, Otago Daily Times, 11 April 1917, Otago Witness, 4 May 1920 (Papers Past) [21 March 2021]

External Links

Researched and Written by

Teresa Scott, SC branch NZSG

Currently Assigned to

Not assigned.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License unless otherwise stated.

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