Southampton FC Remembers

Pictured above, left to right: Charlie Sillett, Alec Campbell and Sid Gueran.

On the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the club remembers the Southampton footballers – four airmen, three sailors and two soldiers – who died as servicemen in the Second World War, along with four civilian ex-Saints killed on home duty. All 13 men are named on the club’s Roll of Honour that can be found on the stadium’s external wall where the Itchen and Chapel Stands meet.

Six of the servicemen had played for the first team, four of them before the War and two as 1940/41 debutants. The three sailors, who lie at the bottom of the sea, from Crete to Cornwall, are here honoured first.

Arriving in Southampton as a child, Liverpool-born Norman Catlin captained the Southampton side that shared the English Schools Shield in 1932, a competition in which he scored 62 goals in 13 matches. Arsenal had hurried to sign him on amateur forms, but it was Southampton for whom Norman turned pro on his 17th birthday in 1935. Yet after only six first-team appearances, he quit league football. With a day job as a shipping clerk, he could now play part time, latterly in the Saints “A” team.

Having joined the Royal Navy on the outbreak of war, Norman went down with HMS Gloucester off Crete in May 1941, when only 85 men of the ship’s 807-strong company survived an attack by Stuka dive-bombers. Able Seaman Catlin is commemorated on the Plymouth Naval Memorial.

Norman Catlin went down on HMS Gloucester

In 1931, Charlie Sillett, a PT instructor based at Tidworth, celebrated both his 25th birthday and the end of a five-year stint in the Army, during which he had won all manner of army representative honours and championships, not just at football but at boxing and rifle shooting, too.

Whereupon, he joined Southampton and was soon thrust into Second Division action, as the manager ran out of fit centre-forwards. Charlie responded by scoring twice in a 3-1 win at Burnley. His reward was to play in most of that 1931/32 season’s remaining games, in four different positions, finishing at left-back. Over the next two seasons, he added two new positions to his repertoire, yet managed only 11 appearances. But then, from the start of the 1934/35 season to the end of January 1938, he seldom missed a game. After only a few more runouts, he left for a Southern League swansong with Guildford City.

He had barely settled in the New Forest, as landlord of The Lamb at Nomansland, when war broke out. Charlie enlisted in the Royal Navy. On 27th February 1945, he was one of three RN Gunners protecting a cargo of coal, bound for Plymouth on the SS Corvus. When the ship was torpedoed and sunk off the Cornish coast, Charlie was among those who went down with her. Leading Seaman Sillett is commemorated on the Chatham Naval Memorial.

He left two young sons. Both would join Southampton, but each is best known for later achievements: Peter, as a full-back for Chelsea and England; and John for managing Coventry City to victory in the 1987 FA Cup Final.

Terry McSweeney had kept goal for Hampshire Schools on his way to playing a few times for the Saints in 1940/41. In April 1941, he played his fifth and final game in the war-time Football League South. Having joined the Royal Navy, Terry was serving, in August 1943, on HMS Egret, hunting German U-boats in the Atlantic. On 27th August, his ship became the first Allied victim of a new German weapon, a radio-controlled glider bomb. The Egret was a sloop, a comparatively small vessel, so that when the bomb struck it amidships in the Bay of Biscay, most of the 229-strong crew were inevitable casualties of the explosion. Able Seaman McSweeney, one of the 194 men killed, is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial.

As a pupil at King Edward VI School in Southampton, Alec Campbell played for England, at amateur level, vs Holland – the only recorded example of a schoolboy representing the country at that level.

He would have three spells with Southampton, starting in November 1908. He arrived for his third stint in 1915 as “official” football was being suspended and his appearances would be confined, when he was available from officer training, to war-time leagues and friendlies. Commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery as a Second Lieutenant, he went to France in July 1918.

Becoming the club’s captain upon the resumption of league action in 1919, Alec played regularly until 1926. Following a flirtation with management, an unsuccessful business venture ended in bankruptcy. He served, during the Second World War, as an officer in the Royal Artillery but, after contracting pneumonia, he died in Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Cosham, on 16th June 1943. His name is recorded on the war memorial at South Stoneham Garden of Rest.

Sid Gueran arrived at The Dell in March 1936, on loan from Margate, Arsenal’s nursery team. He had only three first-team runouts before returning to Kent in January 1939, via half a season at Third Division Exeter.

Sid then spent his war with the Royal Engineers, No 1 Parachute Squadron. Having taken part in the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, followed by the landing at Taranto to seize the heel of Italy, the squadron was back in England when the call came, in September 1944, to join Operation Market Garden. The objective was to take and cross a number of bridges in Holland, notably the crossing at Arnhem, where Sapper Gueran would die, holed-up in a schoolroom, as daylight broke on the second day of the British landings. Designated to sit on guard at a window that looked out on to the coveted bridge, he was fatally shot in the mouth. His body was removed to the cellar, where it remained in the rubble when the building was abandoned, never to be recovered to a known grave. Sapper Gueran is commemorated on the Groesbeek Memorial at the Canadian War Cemetery, south of Arnhem.

Like Terry McSweeney, Denis Angell played for Hampshire Schools in 1936/37 and a few times for the Saints in 1940/41. Born into a leading Woolston footballing family, he was the son of Walter Angell and the nephew of Jim, so long associated with Southampton FC, from his first-team appearances in 1906 to being the builder whose name occupied the facade of The Dell’s West Stand for so long after the Second World War.

Denis Angell (back row, second right) and his Lancaster crew

Joining the RAF Volunteer Reserve, he became a rear-gunner flying in Avro Lancasters as part of Bomber Command's Pathway Force, whose role was to find, and mark, targets for bombing. It was on such a recce into enemy airspace that he was shot down and killed over Berlin on 20th October 1943. He is buried in Berlin's 1939-45 War Cemetery.

His descendants will be the club’s guests at the November 2025 Armistice ceremony at the memorial plaque to the Fallen Saints.

Three other airmen – Reserves Alf Bennett and Bert Bushell, and “guest” player Albert Bonass – were killed in action in this war, while four ex-Saints – Tom Norris, William Thomson, Henry Weeks and Ernie Williams – were civilian casualties.

This commemoration has been compiled by David Bull on behalf of the club and its Official Historians, who have shared in the research. Photos from the collections of Duncan Holley, Dave Adlem and Barbara Hadfield. David is the author, with lead-researcher Gary Chalk, of the Historians’ new book, Saints in the Great War. Visit hagiologists.com for details of the book’s 45 chapters and of how to acquire a copy.