Selim was born on 5th June 1894 in St. George in the East, Middlesex. He was the eldest child of Alexander and Jane Bernstein. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Germany, had become a British subject by naturalisation in 1893 and worked as an estate agent. Selim had four younger brothers (Sidney, Cecil, Max and Albert) and four sisters (Rae Bertha, Beatrice, Ida and Beryl).
When he left the Ilford County High School, Selim worked as a travelling salesman and moved to Bow.
Selim is recorded on a supplementary list for the first Roll of Honour (in the Christmas 1914 edition of the school magazine, Chronicles). It gives his regiment as the Middlesex Yeomanry (the Commonwealth War Graves Commission give the regiment as Middlesex Hussars). He enlisted on 28th April 1915 (service number 3088) and first served in the Egyptian theatre of war. He fought and died of his wounds in Suvla Bay, near Gallipoli, and was buried in the Green Hill Cemetery in Turkey. The inscription on his grave reads, ‘Beloved son of Jane and Alex Bernstein, London. Gone but not forgotten.’ When he died on Wednesday 8th September 1915, Selim was just 21 years old.
A family friend, Jacob King, donated a stained-glass window in memory of Trooper Selim Bernstein to the newly opened Richmond Synagogue in 1916.
Research by Andrew Emeny, History Teacher at ICHS
Sources:
Ancestry.com
ICHS school records and magazines
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Note
Ilford County High School started life as the Park Higher Grade School in 1901 in Balfour Road, Ilford. It was renamed Ilford County High School (or initially County High School, Ilford) in the years after the school’s management was transferred from Ilford School Board to Essex Education Committee in 1904.