Enlistment Stats

[bclivingmuseum]

Hello,

This may have already been answered somewhere, but is there any way of finding out how many people enlisted each month from the start to the end of the war for the whole of the UK? Also is there this information to be found at a local level. I'd ideally like to compare rates of national enlistment to those locally.

Heres hoping, thanks in advance

[ss002d6252]

You'd probably need to check the War Office records at the National Archive.

Craig

[kenf48]

You will need to be more specific and even then I'm not sure there is a simple answer. From March 1916 under the terms of the Military Service Act every man between the age of 19 and 41 was 'deemed to have enlisted (the Act was subsequently amended to include other groups).

See the LLT for starters http://www.1914-1918.net/msa1916.html

Turning to 1914 do you mean enlisted in the Regular Army, the Territorial Force or Kitchener's 'new Army'? again see the LLT

Do you mean Other Ranks or Officers?

The Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War HMSO - is available as a massive free download from https://archive.org/details/statisticsofmili00grea

gives the monthly national figures for 1918

The number of voluntary enlistments to Dec 1915 (and the introduction of conscription by the MSA) were;-

England 2,092,242

Wales 145,255

Scotland 320,589

Ireland 117,063

Individual units have been researched and their recruitment is well documented but afaik there is no specific information at a local level, and the figures have to be extrapolated from a number of sources, but I think the lowest possible breakdown would be at County level. In addition many of these figures refer to those who served with a Battalion and do not take account of, for example significant numbers of discharges

during training.

There are a number of generalisations that can be made, for example initial recruitment in rural areas was slow, it was harvest time; a study of the Bradford Pals shows the highest number of recruits came from young men in clerical jobs seeking an opportunity to escape from the humdrum of office life.

Ken

[ss002d6252]

Not quite what you want but

Craig

[Guest]

You need Statstics 1914-1920. Mike Skipman has a link to an on-line downloadable version I think. More data than you can shake a very large stick at. It will not give sub-divisions of the country other than totals for the four home nations. It does have very detailed monthly data but this is a complex subject and it depends on your definitions.

MG

[bclivingmuseum]

Thanks for all your replies, i'm sure its going to take me a while to check all these avenues out. I knew it was going to be complicated, isnt it always. I'll take on board everything above and let you know how i get on

Thanks again

[clive_hughes]

The Ministry of National Service papers at the NA include some monthly and even daily statistics, (ref. NATS 1/84 and 85) divided into "Regular" (incl. Special Reserve, New Armies) and "Territorial" enlistments. They don't go below Recruiting Area, however, and that might be sizeable. For example, the 23rd Recruiting Area based at Wrexham covered the 6 counties of North Wales. So by itself it wouldn't tell you how many men were attested at Caernarfon or Denbigh or Newtown.

They also aren't guaranteed to cover the whole of Britain, or to give consistent figures for the entire war period, but there's a lot of stuff in there from recollection (not looked at it since 1980!)

Clive

[JefR]

Craig

Thanks for posting your table, it's the most concise summary I've seen - where did it come from?

I assume it summarizes British Isles figures only.

Jef