1916–17 Aston Villa F.C. season
season of football team
The 1916-17 English football season was Aston Villa's 2nd season of wartime football in England during the First World War. In August 1916, former player, Billy Gerrish was killed in action. In February 1915, six months into the First World War, Gerrish had enlisted in the Football Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment. He was severely wounded in both legs by a shell blast at Delville Wood on 8 August 1916 and died later that day. Gerrish has no known grave and is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.
Walter Kimberley was captured by the Germans at Maubeuge during the First Battle of the Marne and spent two years as a prisoner of war in camps at Döberitz, Dyrotz and Cottbus. Beginning with a six-month stay in hospital with laryngitis and bronchitis, Kimberley's health declined during his internment and he was repatriated to Britain in August 1916 with pulmonary tuberculosis. He was immediately discharged from the army and fell into severe ill heath, permanently losing his voice and dying at home in Aston on 22 April 1917. Kimberley was buried in Witton Cemetery, Birmingham. He was married and had two children, one of whom died in infancy.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1916–17 Aston Villa F.C. season” as season of football team. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as season of football team. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q123456832. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1916, 1915 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “1916–17 Aston Villa F.C. season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.