Culls was J R Tolkien's flatmate and friend at Oxford when the War broke out. Tolkien wrote:
‘Not a single man I know is up except Cullis,’ Tolkien lamented at the start of his final year as an Oxford student. It was 1914, war had just broken out, and their friends had left in droves to enlist in the army.
Colin Cullis was born on 28 March 1892 at 27 Christchurch Road Streatham, the youngest of eight children (though he lost two siblings before he turned three). His mother Mary was approaching 40.
His father Thomas, secretary of the Surrey Guild commercial dock company, was ambitious for his sons and sent all three to Dulwich College
(Source John Garth)