British Army cooks Fovant 1918

[Moonraker]

Recently I bought a postcard showing some 24 men outside a hut with "COOK-HOUSE" on the door and postmarked "FOVANT CAMP 21 OC 1918" - with no publisher's name and no helpful message.

I'm careful about assuming that photographs on cards such as this actually relate to the camp indicated in the postmark, the more so in this case as in 1918 camps in the Fovant area housed Australians (almost exclusively, I think).

I've cropped the card to show several cap badges - and some headgear that I presume to be Scottish. I'm hoping the badges are distinct enough for experts to suggest the appropriate regiments.

And several of the men are wearing white coats that make them look more like civilians than servicemen - and note the lad who looks too young to be in the army. But I'm unaware of civilians helping out in cook-houses. Were such coats issued to army cooks c1918?

Assuming that all the men are cooking staff, it also seems unusual that they come from several different units - I would've thought a particular cook-house would be staffed by men from the unit housed in that part of camp.

Over to the experts.

Moonraker

[FROGSMILE]

Recently I bought a postcard showing some 24 men outside a hut with "COOK-HOUSE" on the door and postmarked "FOVANT CAMP 21 OC 1918" - with no publisher's name and no helpful message.

I'm careful about assuming that photographs on cards such as this actually relate to the camp indicated in the postmark, the more so in this case as in 1918 camps in the Fovant area housed Australians (almost exclusively, I think).

I've cropped the card to show several cap badges - and some headgear that I presume to be Scottish. I'm hoping the badges are distinct enough for experts to suggest the appropriate regiments.

And several of the men are wearing white coats that make them look more like civilians than servicemen - and note the lad who looks too young to be in the army. But I'm unaware of civilians helping out in cook-houses. Were such coats issued to army cooks c1918?

Assuming that all the men are cooking staff, it also seems unusual that they come from several different units - I would've thought a particular cook-house would be staffed by men from the unit housed in that part of camp.

Over to the experts.

Moonraker

Cooks were regimental staff at that time as there was no 'catering corps' per se. Regimental cooks were trained by AOC instructors at Aldershot and then returned as qualified to their units. To feed large bodies of men regimental cooks were 'brigaded' under command arrangements and stayed until their particular unit was deployed. This principle is still used in the British army today, though not for cooks (or chefs as they now prefer to be known). I do not know if regimental cooks still exist, but there was still an establishment of 2 per company as late as the 1980s when they often fed deployed detachments at key points (KPs) on operations, leaving specialised catering corps chefs to concentrate on larger and culinarily more demanding bases.

Concerning Fovant, my understanding is that although the Australians predominated in 1918, there were still young soldier battalions of British infantry and miscellaneous other units there.

As regards cap badges, it looks like RA, Royal Scots (or poss HLI) and Manchester Regt.