Kitchener Bn men drawn off to fill Regular Bns in 1914

[Keith_history_buff]

I see that some of the content of this thread ended up in the following article:

Stand To! 102 January 2015
British Line Infantry Reserves for the Great War – Part 3 by Martin Gillott

Quote

pg15
The records show that 64,223 time–expired men re–enlisted in the Infantry [in the Special Reserve under AO 295] in 1914, roughly equivalent to 868 men per paired battalion. With New Army [service] numbers it is difficult to separate them [into those who reenlisted, as distinct] from raw Kitchener recruits [from the 297,533 up to 30 September 1914].(6)

p17
As we shall see, there is also strong evidence that Kitchener recruits, surplus to the K1 and K2 Divisions, were accelerated through training and sent as reinforcements as early as mid–November 1914...
Perhaps of greater interest is the early arrival of large numbers of Kitchener recruits some months before their training was supposed to have finished. 1/Royal Berkshire Regiment, recorded that roughly half of the 8th Reinforcement draft of sixty men were Kitchener’s Army. These men would have received a maximum of four months training.

p18
Case Study: The Royal Sussex Regiment
Exactly six months into the campaign, the regiment had sent out 616 more (trained) men than it started with. If we assume every one of the 247 men in training in August had become ready and were included in the later drafts, it still means that at least 369 extra trained men had been obtained from another source. (28)

One source could be the ex–servicemen who re–enlisted under AO 295 into the Special Reserve. Given their age (30–42, later extended to 45) many would have been utilised in the New Armies. A larger source of manpower was the Kitchener recruits. Once the first Service Battalions had been formed there were still large surpluses of untrained men.

We therefore know at least 210 of the 369 extra men were Kitchener recruits. The wording of the diary is open to interpretation. Were these the first Kitchener recruits to arrive or were they simply the first whole draft? Could smaller numbers of Kitchener men have made up some of the 159 extra men? The CWGC data provides some tiny clues: men with an S prefix to their Army Numbers appear in small numbers starting on 30 October 1914 and men with a GS prefix appear on 23 December 1914 which shows that some men Kitchener men arrived before the end of 1914.

p19
By the end of April 1915 3/ Reserve Battalion had sent out 1,875 men. (30)

Sources
(6) General Annual Report on the British Army 1 October 1913 to 30 September 1919, p.25. Table 3A.
AO 295 dated 6 August 1914 ‘Re–enlistment of ex–regular soldiers in the Special Reserve’.
AO 328 dated 24 August 1914 ‘Re–enlistment of ex–Regular NCOs in the British Army’.
AO 341 dated 30 August 1914 ‘Enlistments for the Regular Army and Special Reserve’.
(28)(30) 3/ (Reserve) Royal Sussex Regiment ledger 1914–1918 (West Sussex Records Office).