D.W.M.C. - Any ideas please? DWMC acronym - possible Eastbourne link?

[Rewe-Netherexe]

STOP PRESS - D.W.M.C. & Eastbourne - hospital link disproved

 

I have now acquired death certificates for the two original cases who died in Eastbourne hospitals to test the hypothesis that DWMC is code for a specific hospital there. But our two Eastbourne registration district deaths were in two different institutions:

 

10 April 1915 (Snell) - Borough Sanatorium U.D.

17 December 1915 (Dewdney) - 1/1st S.W. Mounted Brigade Reception Hospital, Millfield, Selwyn Road, U.D. (not registered until 29 Dec)

 

So far I have been unable to find either of these on lists of military, Aux & other WW1 hospitals.

 

My Heritage Centre visit now unlikely to be this week, hoping for next week.

 

Paul

[johnboy]

As I said earlier, Soldiers effects shows Dewdney died St. Leonards on Sea. Might help with location of hosp?

[Rewe-Netherexe]

Many apologies for the long break in communications regarding this topic. Here at last is an update:

 

I did manage to re-visit the Devon Heritage Centre just before it ’temporarily' closed for the duration. An original Devon Roll of Honour is not on their catalogue for some reason, but they knew how to find it! They did not however have any knowledge of any documents for a Devon War Memorial Committee or similar.

 

The Roll is a beautiful thing in a brown leather cover with a lovely engraved picture on the front. The extensive contents (one hundred or more pages) are all hand-written in attractive script. My plan was to revisit and have a day with a camera / digital copying licence taking pictures of this and other documents that I have been saving up. However, this plan is still on hold until the centre re-opens! When I am able to do this I will post some pictures.

 

So, the result of this view of the Roll of Honour was as follows:

 

a) Some entries do have a hand-drawn symbol (a cross with a dot in each quadrant) sgnifying ‘died in hospital’. If the characters & spacing reproduce properly it is a bit like this where each ‘o’ is a full-stop dot:

 

o  |  o

———

o  |  o

 

b) These symbols do not seem to be reliably applied.

 

c) For example for Netherexe parish the CWGC site has ‘D.W.M.C.’ on grave registration forms for 2 men and there is another who is also known to have died in hospital (all in UK). NONE of these are flagged with the relevant symbol in the Roll of Honour. There are many  complete double page spreads without the symbol, but there are also plenty of entries WITH it.

 

SUMMARY

 

Unless anyone can suggest otherwise and / or find some documentation for a D.W.M.C. it does seem that these initials did refer to a Devon War Memorial Committee as an indicator of hospital death to be communicated to that body. However, it seems that incomplete / inaccurate data or error meant that not all such cases were so flagged, and that not all flagged cases resulted in the relevant indication in the Devon Roll of Honour.

 

Apologies again for getting diverted away from reporting back sooner. 

 

Paul Sandy

 

[charlie962]

thanks for update.

[MaxD]

Yes, thank you, I was pretty happy with Devon War Memorial Committee.

 

Max