Silver War Badge (not)

[davyr]

My Grandfather, Frederick Kendall, was captured at Mons and spent the rest of the war as a POW. On his return, he was suffering from neurasthenia and was turned out of home by his parents because they couldn't understand or cope with his strange behaviour.

Forced to go "on the tramp", he sought shelter one night in a Salvation Army hostel. As he had no money to pay for his bed, he was asked to hand over the only item of value he had, which was a silver badge. This left him with a life-long aversion to the Salvation Army (probably unfair, but understandable in the circumstances).

I have searched the Ancestry database for those given a SWB and have not found him there.

My question is, would any military badge he was likely to have possessed at the time (he was a driver in the Royal Engineers) been of silver? It seems unlikely.

I was told this story as a child, but have only recently been made aware of the SWB. I assumed this must have been the badge in Grandad's story, but it seems not.

[KIRKY]

What a sad tale! May have been a silver badge for sport or school achievement? I have a few of my Grandfathers, silver, for swimming and diving skills?

tony

[Chris_Baker]

It would not be a Silver War Badge as that was given to men after they had been discharged from the army and did not exist before 1916.

[davyr]

Tony, that's a good point. I know he won cups, biscuit barrels, etc. for sprinting when he was a "Blue Boy". I'm not sure of the sequence of events on his return from captivity, but another poster (Steviebee) has mentioned that he was in Lenham Hospital near Maidstone with septicaemia, presumably shortly after he got back.

Thinking about it a bit more, he always described the silver badge as a "cap badge", which does sound as though it might have been a military one. Probably impossible now to be sure exactly what type it was.

[Black Watch]

British War Medal?