Humour in the battalions' war diaries

Amongst the mournful statements of a battalion's losses in action, there was also room for the occasional humour.

The 7th Borders diary for 10th April 1917 says:

Covered 1 1/2 miles to ARRAS and went into billets in cellars of Bibliolake [sic] Museum [...] Bn at 50 minutes notice to move. [...] Inveterate propensity of british soldier to light fire and make tea at slightest opportunity was again emphasised.

The 10th Sherwood Foresters, another battalion in the same brigade as the 7th Borders, noted this for 9th July 1917:

Two Coys [companies] of Borders moved into HURRUM Trench [just SE of Gavrelle] and did not leave the area. These came under the orders of O.C. 10th Sherwood Foresters. These two Coys of Borders were used for various carrying parties. Patrols were sent out by the Bn. to try and ascertain (1) whether the shell-holes were occupied in front of CONRAD [Trench] & (2) the condition of the enemy's wine. The shell-holes were empty & the wine was found to be quite good.

Royal Army Medical Corps and the chain of evacuation

According to their service records, both Herbert and Redford experienced being treated by the various stations of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

There was a well-established chain of evacuation (see also here)which started with the Regimental Aid Posts and Advanced Dressing Stations providing first aid just a few steps from the front lines. Each division also had three Field Ambulances (FA) - think M*A*S*H - attached to it, usually situated at a relatively safe distance from the front. The next step in the chain were the Casualty Clearing Stations (CCS) and finally General Hospitals which were situated some tens of kilometres behind the lines.

So-called hospital trains were used to transport cases to Channel ports where they would then be ferried over to England. One nurse's fascinating diary (gutenberg.org or LibriVox recording) tells of her work on these trains in 1914-1915.

Recovering and fit soldiers would move to an Infantry Base Depot before being passed on to their units.

Amy Bell

Herbert's service records show that he married an Amy McGee on 18th April 1915 at the Presbyterian Church in Willington, Durham. Their address was given as 6 Cumberland Terrace, Willington in County Durham. A transcription of their wedding certificate is available online (fee required). At this point Herbert had already enlisted and so this event was added to his service records:

Redford Bell, 1889 - 1917

Redford was born on 18th January 1889 in Bishop Auckland, County Durham and died at the age of 28 on 23rd April 1917 during the first day of the 2nd Battle of the Scarpe, east of Arras in northern France.

Redford's records

Redford signed on with the Army on 11th September 1914. He had received his call-up notice from the 6th Durham Light Infantry but was for some reason assigned to the 7th Battalion of the Border Regiment. He was trained there as a machine gunner, a far cry from his previous occupation as miner.
By the time he died, Redford was a veteran of the Great War, having seen action at Ypres in 1915/16, the Somme in 1916 and Arras in 1917. During his time on the Somme he had suffered from trench foot, spending about a month in hospital before returning to active duty:

Redford's service record

War diaries

During the First World War, each Battalion kept a war diary where locations and significant events would be recorded. Officers would be mentioned by name while "other ranks" were rarely noted, except in the casualty figures.

After a search in the UK's National Archives and the payment of about £3 per diary, I've managed to obtain and transcribe the 8th East Yorkshire's war diary for September 1915 (ref. WO 95/1424/2) and the 7th Borders' for April 23rd 1917 (ref. WO 95/2008/1):

Herbert Dobson Bell, 1887 - 1915

Herbert was born on 31st July 1887 in Bishop Auckland, County Durham and died aged 28 on 29th September 1915 from wounds suffered at the Battle of Loos, near Lens in northern France.

Prior to enlistment he was a miner by occupation and his height was given as 5ft 41/2in (1m 64cm) and weight as 126lbs (57kg).  He served with the 8th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment, service number 16250, and had spent less than three weeks in the country.

Herbert's records

His Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) record shows that his grave is in row 1D of the Noeux-les-Mines communal cemetery and that he died on 25th September 1915, aged 29. The age is clearly wrong. Regarding his date of death, a letter to the regiment's Officer in Charge of Infantry Records in York states:

War Office List, C.611, received on 11.10.1915, reported 16250 Lce Cpl H. Bell as admitted to 6th London Field Ambulance on 28.9.1915 (G.S. [gun shot] abdomen).

Resources

Many online resources are available for genealogy and World War 1 research. The following have been particularly useful during my search.


General information on the war and units:

• World War I military maps (how to read WW1 map references, such as 51b U.22.c.7.3)
• Searching the Great War Forum, also works for non-registered users. It's a mine of useful information and has many helpful participants.
• A World War 1 channel on the rootschat.com forum.
• Imperial War Museum search, brings up many documents, photos and recordings.
• Various unit histories at The Military Archive
• War diaries of army units can be found at the National Archives. Those which are available online require a payment of just over £3 to get hold of a PDF file. 
• New York Times search of news articles from the time, e.g. http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/Scarpe/

8th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment

• Dedicated web site
• The war diary of the 8th Bn East Yorks for September 1915 (National Archives, ref. WO 95/1424/2, can be downloaded for £3.36). The scanned and transcribed version can be read in this post.
• 50th Division at 1914-1918.net
  
• Battle of Loos at the Long, Long Trail 
• Battle of Loos on Wikipedia
• Battle of Loos from the Old Front Line Battlefields of WW1 
• Loos: Hill 70 (Battlegroup Europe series) by Andrew Lawson, ISBN 0850529042
• Accounts of the Battle of Loos from the Out of Battle blog 
• A History of the Great War, Volume II: 1915 by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1917. Chapter VII covers the Battle of Loos. 
• 9th Dispatch of Sir John French
• For Love and Courage: The Letters of Lieutenant Colonel E.W. Hermon from the Western Front 1914 - 1917 (Hermon was in action at Loos and the surrounding areas)
• The Great Push, a novel by Patrick McGill based on the Battle of Loos in which he participated.

7th Battalion, Border Regiment

• Border Regiment, basic information
• The war diary of the 7th Borders for July 1915 to March 1919 (National Archives, ref WO 95/2008/1). The scanned and transcribed entries for April 1917 can be read in this post.
• Border Regiment Wiki
• 7th Battalion Border Regiment in the war
• 17th (Northern) Division
• German HQ reports on the Arras offensive

2/5 Lincolnshire Regiment

• Lincolnshire troops thrown in at the deep end during the Easter Rising
• Lt. Walker at Hargicourt
• Hargicourt at The Long, Long Trail

Resources concerning individuals:

• Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Their searchable database of all war graves, along with the National Archives' Medal Index Cards, is a good starting point for tracking down individuals.
• Find Your Soldier resources at The Long, Long Trail, an excellent source of information.
• Combatants' Medal Index Cards can be found at the National Archives, searchable by unit, name, etcetera. The found MICs are partially obscured, requiring a payment of £3.50 to get hold of a PDF of the full scanned record. 
• How to interpret Medal Index Cards.
• Pension record cards lookup request.

Other resources:

• Access to the UK Births, Marriages & Deaths Index via FreeBMD
• ancestory.com, a genealogy site with a monthly fee but also a 14-day free trial
• Family Search, a free resource run by the Mormons

Medal Index Cards

The 1914-1920 records of First World War medals can be searched online at the National Archives.  Along with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site, this is a useful source of information on British servicemen. While the CWGC information is free, excerpts from the National Archives cost £3.50 a time.

Herbert's Medal Index Card, along with his unit, rank and serial number, lists the common set of medals for a serviceman of the First World War: the Star, Victory and British War Medals. Over 2.5 million such trios were issued and were known irreverently as Pip, Squeak and Wilfred after popular newspaper cartoon characters of the time.

The qualifying date for the medals is the date at which the serviceman arrived in the theatre of war. In the case of Herbert it was 9th September 1915 in France.

Redford's Medal Index Card shows he entered France on 24th July 1915 and has a different format but similar information:

Cornelius's index card is different again:

The index cards show not only which medals they qualified for but also where the entries could be found in the official Medal Roll. In the case of Cornelius, this was F/A/826, shown here:

Basic structure of British Army units

Servicemen joined a regiment, often based in the local area and named after it. Within the regiment they would be assigned to one of several battalions. Battalions were split into companies and then further into platoons and sections.

The battalion was the basic tactical unit of the army and that group of men would stay together throughout the war, usually operating away from the rest of the parent regiment. Battalions from different regiments would make up a brigade and two or three brigades were in a division. The division would be moved around different corps of the Army depending on the need for manpower on the extensive battlefront.

A battalion would maintain a war diary of its activities, logging marches, training, action and of course, casualties.

The battalion would usually be referred to in conjunction with the parent regiment. Redford Bell's unit was therefore called the 7th Battalion, Border Regiment or the 7th Borders for short. In larger operations and histories, sometimes only the brigades or the divisions would be named, depending on how much detail was required.

Next stop, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Herbert Dobson Bell ... and Amy

To give some idea of the number of casualties in the First World War, the first search for a Herbert Dobson Bell at www.cwgc.org revealed that 118 H Bells had died during the First World War. We didn't know which unit he was with although coming from the north of England, it was quite likely that both brothers had been with regiments from that part of the country. Eventually I knew I'd found the right H Bell when the "Additional information" showed the names of his parents. This was quite fortunate as not all of the records show this.

We now knew that Herbert Dobson Bell had served in the 8th Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment, had supposedly died on 25th September 2015 and that his grave was in row 1D of the Noeux-les-Mines communal cemetery. The date corresponds to his unit's action in the Battle of Loos which had started at 6:30am on that day.

What was a real surprise was that Herbert had been married. The "Additional information" in Herbert's CWGC record mentioned "husband of Amy Bell of IA, Belle Vue". Belle Vue is most likely the town of Bellevue in Iowa in the US and was named after John D. Bell, an early settler in the Jackson County area. It will be interesting to see if Amy was already a Bell before her marriage. A visit to the Iowa Genealogy Web for Jackson County is on the cards. More of that later.

Redford Bell

 

A search for Redford Bell came up with information about the same parents, showed that he was with the 7th Battalion of the Border Regiment, had died on 23rd April 1917 and was commemorated on the Arras Memorial in bay 6. 23rd April was the first day of the Second Battle of the Scarpe so presumably he had gone missing in that action.

Beginnings of the search

My grandfather, Gerald Fieldhouse, passed away at the end of April 2013. Thanks to his clear memories, we had a good picture of his childhood, his experiences in the Desert Air Force in World War II and his life back home. So that his great-grandchildren could get a better picture of their relations - spread across the Shetlands, southern England and Switzerland - a basic family tree of his descendants was put together.

My stepmother also got out a family tree that showed the predecessors of my grandmother, Mona Fieldhouse (née Bell). It had been put together upon her death in 2007 and showed that two of her uncles (my great, great uncles), Herbert Dobson Bell and Redford Bell, had died in the Great War in 1915 and 1917 respectively. A third uncle, Cornelius, had been wounded but survived the war.

Only a week before my grandfather took ill and died, my daughters and I had stopped off at the Vimy Ridge Canadian War Memorial while on our way over to England for a spring holiday. Little did we know that were standing almost exactly mid way between Herbert's and Redford's last moments on earth, at the nearby Battle of Loos (1915) and the 2nd Battle of the Scarpe (1917). At the time I knew almost nothing about them, having perhaps heard their names mentioned once or twice.

Details on their demise had been hard to come by in 2007 but now it has become a lot easier with the wealth of information available online, if you know where to look. This blog will show some of what I have been able to find out about their last weeks, days and hours.