More Great War Service Records from Veterans UK Files

[Justinth]

Dear All

A number of additional Great War service records drawn from the remaining Great War pension files, which were until recently held by Veterans UK, are likely to find their way into The National Archives (TNA) at Kew.

In a 2008 article looking at the psychological effects of chemical weapons on Great War veterans researchers said they had used a sample drawn from the ‘7,800’ case files held by the ‘War Pensions Agency’ (a predecessor organisation to Veterans UK).[1] My enquiry via a Freedom of Information request (FOI) to MoD about the fate of the Great War Veterans UK records mentioned in the article received the following response:

‘…Statistics obtained in connection with the Ministry of Defence's War Pension Filestore Retention, Relocation and Destruction Project confirmed that there are no surviving Great War veterans. In view of this, all of the Great War Pension files were removed from Nelson storage facility and delivered directly to the TNT file storage depository. TNT staff removed the service documents and any x rays from the files, and arranged for the remainder of the contents to be destroyed.

As Great War service documents are of historic value they were all sent to the Public Records Office in Portsmouth for permanent retention [Editor's note: this probably means the MoD DBS Knowledge and Information offices at Portsmouth].’

It has not yet been announced when this newly recovered batch of Great War service records will be available for public access at TNA. It will be interesting to see whether they are added to the existing WO364 or the PIN records.

Regards

Justin

[1] Jones, E., Everit, B., Ironside S., Palmer, I. & Wessely S. (2008) ‘Psychological effects of chemical weapons: a follow-up study of First World War Veterans’ Psychological Medicine (2008) 38, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1419-1426. The article can be found at http://tinyurl.com/oovlcho

[johntaylor]

This is very exciting news Justin - well done for your work, and please keep us posted on any further developments.

All the best, John