NZ Hospital at Codford, Wiltshire

[Moonraker]

Thanks to Dave Swarbrick who recently posted this link

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast

I've been looking up "Salisbury Plain" in contemporary New Zealand papers and coming across some very good information (not least an account of the riots at Sling Camp in March 1919, incidents that were not, I think, reported on in the British press).

There are some excellent descriptions of Codford Camp by the celebrated historian H T B Drew, including one about the hospital there, in which he refers to the staff including "a Quartermaster and Supply Officer, ten combatant officers, and an A.P.M., four Medical and five Dental Officers" and also says that "the O.T.C. officers may be drawn upon".

Presumably A.P.M. denotes Assistant Provost Marshal? And O.T.C. signifies Officers' Training Corps, and I'm wondering if this means that officers who supervised the OTC in New Zealand were brought over to help rehabilitate the patients for active service.

(I'm being foolish in tempting this thread to go off topic from the word go, but there's an incredible article about immorality quoting all sorts of statistics for VD in various armies, and citing a letter from a young man at Sling Camp (next to Bulford) who wrote home to Dad that there were 80,000 "evil women" on Salisbury Plain. Mind you, he also said "on the entire region of Salisbury Plain there are millions of men — more than two" - an exaggeration of at least ten-fold.)

Moonraker