Contemptible Little PoWs - The BEF incarcerated

Here's the slide-deck from the talk I gave on behalf of Findmypast at yesterday's WDYTYA session at the NEC in Birmingham. To all those who attended, thank you for coming.

Searching from the home page is only a realistic option if you are looking for an individual with an uncommon name. I have referred to Vernon Swatman in two posts on my Army Forms and Attestations blog. Here's one of those: Vernon Swatman's medical chart.

The documents you can typically expect to see returned in search results are transcriptions, images and PDFs.

From the home page select the search option and then choose whether to search across all records, search by category, or use the A-Z search (below).

The importance of wildcard searching cannot be under-stated. It is an extremely flexible and useful tool and you should use it with abandon. Failing to do so can seriously limit the results you can expect to see returned. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders example below is a good example of this. Use the wildcard asterisk * with as many or as few letters as you like - and use it before and after text.

There are a number of stand-out series in Findmypast's Prisoners of War collection which covers the period 1715 to 1945. I drew attention to the records in WO 161 at The National Archives which is a series of PoW interviews conducted before the Armistice with men who had been interned, repatriated, or who had escaped. I have posted separately on Prisoner of War reports in WO 161 and included copies of the questions that were asked. This is a TERRIFIC series, worthy of serious study (not to mention further indexing).

The arrows in the image indicate the PoWs British Army cap badges and their tin badges which bear their PoW numbers.

It is common to see "P of W" written on the cards of many men who were captured in 1914; less common to see this on cards of men who were captured later than 1914. The number in the top left hand corner is an anachronistic reference to the regiment of foot; in this case the 50th regiment of Foot which was the pre July 1881 designation of the Royal West Kent Regiment.

A good example of a man with records in WO 364 (on the left) and WO 363 (the so-called "burnt documents"). The images below and in the slide after that, are Crown Copyright, The National Archives.

The images in the next two slides are also Crown Copyright, The National Archives.

The ICRC PoW collection is important but challenging to use. This is a site that would certainly benefit from improved indexing.

Some images give a wealth of information.  In the example above, in the space of three short lines, we are told date of birth, next of kin, date of capture, place of capture, the fact that the man was unwounded, and the company he was serving in. Terrific information.

This is not my image and I apologise for any infringement of copyright.

The screen grab above is from the auctioneers, Spink & Son.

Libraries probably hold out the nest hope of getting access to the Gale Cengage data. It is here that you will find images (albeit poor quality) of those lists of men who had become PoWs on or before 25th December 1914. Read more about this on my 1914 PoWs page. 

The Great War Forum is a great resource, as is The Long, Long Trail website and the Western Front Association site.

As well as the book above, also check out the British Red Cross and Order of St John Enquiry lists which are held by the IWM and which have been re-published by N&MP.

You are welcome to use and refer to these slides for your own non-commercial usage but I retain the copyright in the content and soldier images unless otherwise stated. 

And remember, I research soldiers!

Contact me if you need help.

Identifying the 1st Sherwood Foresters in 1912

I recently purchased the Sherwood Foresters Regimental Annual for 1913 and am publishing some of the photos that appear in it, below. I have become more and more interested in military photos of late, and it's clear from correspondence that I receive that identifying ancestors in military photographs is something that interests a lot of other people too.

In 1912 the 1st Battalion, Sherwood Foresters was stationed in India and the photographs below, all of which identify the men by rank and last name only, were therefore taken in that country. Taking the first photograph below as a test case, where it has been possible to identify men further, I have added in forenames and/or regimental numbers and indicated these in bold.

My first recourse was to the 1911 census which, so my reasoning went, would probably unearth many of the men in these photos. And so it turned out. An added bonus here was that it enabled me to positively identify all of the F Company men on the 1911 census. The 1st Battalion Sherwood Foresters was enumerated by company and whilst I had guessed that these men were from F Company - because it was the sixth company to be enumerated -  it was good to see my theory proved correct.

Having first checked the 1911 census, I then looked for the same men in the medal index cards. All of these men, unless they were discharged, transferred, or died between 1912 and August 1914 would have seen service in France. The battalion shipped out of India in September 1914 and by November that year was facing the Germans in trenches at Neuve Chapelle.

Finally, understanding when the regimental numbers were issued can also help in identifying the correct man. This volume of the regimental chronicle was published in 1913. The number 11998 was issued in January 1913 but given that the usual practice would have been for soldiers, after enlistment, to train at the regimental depot, then serve with the home battalion and only after then, transfer to the overseas' battalion, I would be surprised to see numbers lower than 11739 (issued on the 3rd January 1912) appearing against any of the names below.

Standing: L-Cpl Frank Frood, 6874 L-Cpl Herbert Barks, 10861 Pte Thomas Sanderson, 10125 Pte John William Clough, 10448 L-Cpl Leonard Rear

Seated: Pte Hayward, Major Henry William Pontz, 10850 L-Cpl John Newcombe, 6780 Col-Sgt Thomas William Pritchard, Pte Harry Freeman

Cross-legged: Pte Barber, Dmr Walsh, 10120 Pte Joseph Handley, Pte Thomas Robinson, Pte Swindler

Major Henry William Poyntz, pictured above and in the team photo above this, died on Christmas Eve 1912 as the result of a shooting accident near Deolali. He was 41 years old. He had been a serving officer with the Sherwood Foresters since 1892 and left a wife and daughter.

In all the photos that follow I have included the details that appear under these photographs in the 1913 regimental annual, augmenting some with forenames, but all of these men could be researched further.

Standing: Pte William Padley, Pte Albert or William Burton, Pte Hill, Pte Combes, Pte Brown, Pte Smith, Pte Sutton

Seated: Pte Herbert Denne, Col-Sgt Brearley, L-Cpl Harry Caunt, Capt Swinhoe-Phelan, L-Cpl Wheatley, Lt Armstrong

Cross-legged:  L-Cpl Tompson, Pte Thomas Morris, Pte Albert or Frank Long, L-Cpl George Foxon, Pte John Worthy

1st Battalion cricket team, winners of Futteh Maidan Cup

Standing: L-Cpl Wheatley, Pte Samuel Cheney, Pte Geoffrey Greaves, Pte Wilkinson, Pte Maidment

Seated: Lt Richard Henry Stranger, Lt George Staple Dobbie, Lt Willesby Douglas S Brownrigg, Lt William Horatio Happell, Lt Jackson

Cross-legged: Schoolmaster Henry Rushton Cooke, Lt John Vincent Earle

Henry Rushton Cooke is recorded on the 1911 Census as belonging to the Sherwood Foresters, however I think that this is an error and that his correct corps would have been the Corps of Army Schoolmasters. He was born in 1884 and so would have been about twenty-eight years old when this photograph was taken.

Standing: L-Cpl Frank Frood, Cpl Walter Rippon, Pte Ellis, Pt Frederick or William Richards, L-Cpl Leonard Rear

Seated: Pte Feer, Major Henry William Poyntz, Pte Beardsmore, Col-Sgt Thomas William Pritchard, Pte Charles Chesterton

Cross-legged: Pte William Crampton, Pte Harry Thornley, 10934 Pte Cyrus Hoult, Pte Denison, Pte Bolton

Note how some of the men in this photo who appear in the first photo posted here, above, have adopted identical poses. Indeed, it requires good eyes to note the minor differences between the poses in this shot and the earlier one. Note in particular, L-Cpl Frank Frood, Pte Chesterton and Major Poyntz.

Standing: Pte Smith, Pte White. Pte Stevenson

Seated: Pte Arthur Corbett, Col-Sgt Charles Chambers, Capt Dixon, L-Cpl Holmes

Cross-legged: L-Cpl Potten, Pte Arthur Bowler, Pte Bignell

There is of course a lot more research that can be done for these men: other census returns, GRO records, parish records, school records and of course, various military records. Many of these men will have medal index cards, medal roll entries and service records. Others will also appear in Commonwealth War Graves records. 10934 Pte Cyrus Hoult, pictured in the football shield photo, falls into this category.  Aged 23 in 1911, he was killed in action on the 20th October 1914 whilst serving with the 2nd Battalion. This suggests that he had returned to England between 1912 and 1914, transferred to the Army Reserve and then been recalled to the colours in August 1914, going out to France with the 2nd Battalion. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial.

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Regimental number research - Why all is not lost

At times, when it comes to British Army research, it can often seem as if Hermann Goering and the War Office were working hand in hand. 

Even before the Luftwaffe comprehensively destroyed millions of documents in an incendiary attack on the Army Records Store on Arnside Street in September 1940, the War Office had been systematically weeding and destroying soldiers' files for decades. The records that survive in the soldiers' pension files to 1913 in series WO 97 at the National Archives (and now on Findmypast) represent a tiny fraction of the paperwork that would originally have been generated. In the majority of cases a soldier's file may only contain his four-page attestation paper; that is, if a file survives at all.  Files only survive for those soldiers who claimed or might have claimed a pension. So if your ancestor died in service before 1913, forget about finding papers for him.

All of the riflemen listed above died whilst serving with the 3rd Battalion, Rifle Brigade in India in 1898. None of these men has a surviving file because as deceased soldiers they were never going to be making a pension claim and therefore there was no need - so the War Office reasoned - for their files to be retained.  Furthermore, these men's names will not appear in the soldiers' effects registers held at the National Army Museum and published by Ancestry because these records only begin in (or survive from) 1901. In fact, the only evidence that these men ever served as soldiers at all will be found in regimental records if these survive or in medal rolls, if they were entitled to receive a medal. And these are big IFs. A full service record will not survive in regimental archives but names might appear in enlistment registers or Part II Orders if these have been retained by the regiments. The enlistment registers were disposed of by the Ministry of Defence many years ago but before they were all dumped into a skip, the MoD did at least give regiments the option to have them back. Many regiments took up this option and this is why, for instance, some have found their way on-line. Findmypast has now published enlistment registers held by The Royal Artillery, Royal Tank Corps and the Scots Guards, and others may follow.

In defence of the War Office and MoD, an un-weeded soldier's file could potentially contain hundreds of separate pages: a multitude of official army forms, correspondence and internal memoranda. If just one document had to be retained, the four-page attestation paper is the obvious candidate as it records the man's movements from attestation to discharge. It also contains details of where he served, medal entitlement, wounds, and next of kin. Finding the space to store hundreds of thousands of multiple-page files must have been a headache, and an expensive headache at that. 

Unidentified Rifle Brigade marksman

Returning to the Rifle Brigade deaths, above, burial records for at least some of these men have been digitised and appear within Findmypast's India Office collection. So we can see, for instance, that the first man on the list, J Ashworth, was 27-year-old Joseph Ashworth who died of "ague" on the 4th February 1898 and was buried the same day.

The sad reality is though, that there must be hundreds of thousands of soldiers for whom nothing tangible survives. All this, by way of a preamble to emphasise the importance of the humble regimental number.

Let's go back to Joseph Ashworth. His regimental number was 1572 which, looking at my database of regimental numbers, suggests that he joined the Rifle Brigade in Winchester on the 16th or 17th September 1891. He probably enlisted for a period of seven years with the colours and five years on the reserve and had probably been overseas since 1892 or 1893.  If a soldier was serving overseas when his period of colour service was due to expire, he served an additional year with the colours and reduced his reserve service by a year. This suggests that Joseph would, in the normal course of events, probably have transferred to the reserve in 1899 and would have been discharged from the army as a time-expired soldier in 1903. (Note, however, that Joseph would almost certainly have been recalled to the colours in October 1899 and sent to South Africa to fight the Boers).

The Rifle Brigade Chronicle will be useful here and I have just recently acquired a pretty comprehensive collection of these annual publications beginning in 1890 and running right up to 1965. These make nice companions to the King's Royal Rifle Corps Chronicle which begin in 1901 (and I also have a complete run of these from 1901 to 1914).

Just yesterday I completed a research project where all that survived for a First World War soldier was his medal index card and an entry in the British War and Victory medal roll.  By analysing his regimental number details (he had two numbers, one with the King's (Liverpool Regiment) and one with the RAMC), I was able to determine when he enlisted, when he would have been likely to arrive overseas, when he transferred to the RAMC and the RAMC unit he served with). This information is crucial because it then allows an individual to consult the relevant war diaries.

So, despite the best efforts of German airmen and Whitehall clerks, if a service record or pension record does not survive for your British Army ancestor, don't give up hope, there may still be a lot more to discover by digging deeper into his regimental number.

I research soldiers! 

Contact me if you need help with your military ancestor.