Private John Turner, 2/5th LF, d.o.d 12/9/1916, Signaller?

[A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy]

Thank you as ever, to both Russ and Peter!

[A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy]

On 23/06/2020 at 21:47, RussT said:

You can therefore effectively re-construct the whole Bn that disembarked on 04/05/1915.

 

Just one more question, probably for Russ. Can you tell from the 1914/15Star medal roll for the 2/5th landing on 3/4 May 1915 how many Ogdens there were? I'm rather hoping that there will be just the one, Francis, Service no 1786, but maybe that's too much to hope!

[RussT]

There are 4 men with the surname Ogden on the roll, all disembarking on the 4th May 1915:

 

2645 T Ogden, Died of Wounds 11/08/1916

1786 F Ogden, Death Assumed 28/06/1916

2762 A Ogden, Discharged 24/04/1916

2640 J Ogden, Disembodied 03/03/1919

 

Regards

 

Russ

 

[A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy]

Thank you very much Russ, not exactly what I wanted to hear, but it is as it is - Ogden must be a more common Lancashire name than I had realised.

Incidentally, I find that my grandfather mentions 2645 T Ogden (Company Quatermaster Sergeant) being wounded near Guillemont on 8 August 1916, but I don't think that he can have known that he died of his wounds 3 days later or he would have mentioned it. Sadly, another one for the Roll of Honour at the end of the published book.

I still think that Francis Ogden was probably the signaller, but I don't think that we will ever know for certain unless I am able to turn up something in the local press.

[RussT]

Hilda Ogden - you can't get much more common than that !

[A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy]

2 hours ago, RussT said:

Hilda Ogden - you can't get much more common than that !

 

Oh dear, I should have thought of that !!

 

More seriously, as an addendum to # 13 I would just add for completeness that, having read a little further in the 2/5^th LF Battalion Diary, I see that there are another couple of MMs recorded subsequently, to Sgt F. Hudson and Pte E. Fizpatrick, which means that the lists in the Battalion War Diary and Thomas Floyd’s book now almost coincide, save that the former has J.Turner while Floyd has L/Cpl Furnes; it is now obvious to me that these are one and the same, the result of a transcription error on behalf of someone in Floyd’s book (he has also got “Rodwell” rather than “Rothwell”).

 

Can I also just enquire whether I am right in thinking that it would be unusual to have two cards for the same man in the ICRC records (# 24)?  Or might there be one for when a man was taken prisoner, and one for when he was repatriated? Although I am not primarily interested in James Turner, looking at the second ICRC link provided by Peter, it is quite striking that this is a 1^st Battalion man from Rochdale, which is two points of similarity to the MM man; so, if there could be two ICRC records, maybe this was the same man, in which case the only point of difference would be that the age is that the MM man would have been 27 on 10 March 1919, not 28, but perhaps that is not an enormous discrepancy?

 

If it was the same man, apart from, disappointingly, not knowing exactly what he was awarded his MM for, it has been possible to reconstruct an amazing amount of detail about this James Turner, with only a very little to go on.

 

Incidentally, Peter said that he was captured unwounded at Sailly on 11 April 1918 in # 17. I assume that information is on the ICRC card somewhere, but I don’t read German, and am not sure where. Can you enlighten me please Peter? I suppose that even if he was technically “unwounded”, he might have been suffering from nervous illness, which might have accounted for the Silver War Badge, though I see that Peter says in # 21 that he was “physically unfit” to serve. Or maybe he became physically ill while in captivity?

[PRC]

16 hours ago, A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy said:

Can I also just enquire whether I am right in thinking that it would be unusual to have two cards for the same man in the ICRC records (# 24)?

 

In my experience not all that unusual. Sometimes ICRC have eventually picked up on it and the ICRC website has them all bundled together – it can be perfectly possible for there to be multiple cards. But in my experience the part of the ICRC who prepared the cards were passive receivers of information, (probably from overwork) and sat at the end of a chain of communication involving individuals for whom English was not a language they were necessarily familiar with and involving a process for which there was little reward for accuracy and a task that was not a war priority.

 

16 hours ago, A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy said:

Incidentally, Peter said that he was captured unwounded at Sailly on 11 April 1918 in # 17. I assume that information is on the ICRC card somewhere, but I don’t read German, and am not sure where. Can you enlighten me please Peter?

 

It’s more the absence of a reference to him being wounded and that he goes straight into the Prison Camp rather than the Prison Camp hospital.

 

16 hours ago, A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy said:

I suppose that even if he was technically “unwounded”, he might have been suffering from nervous illness, which might have accounted for the Silver War Badge, though I see that Peter says in # 21 that he was “physically unfit” to serve. Or maybe he became physically ill while in captivity?

 

The card shows him arriving directly from the Front. In the immediate aftermath of each phase of the German Spring Offensive large numbers of prisoners were retained close to the Battle Zone and used as slave labour – quite often on tasks directly related to the German war effort, freeing up German troops to maintain the offensive. All of this was in contravention of the Geneva convention. Given the state of German supplies these men were unsurprisingly kept on little more than starvation diets, (by not informing the Red Cross of who had been captured and where they were held there could be no food parcels or medicines made available from that source) and so in June and July you find allied soldiers who died from this treatment and who are buried towards the rear of the German positions.

 

By July\August 1918 many were too weak to carry on and were shipped off to the camps in Germany, Austria and Poland, often arriving in an emaciated state. Some suffered permanent health issues as a result or were then vulnerable to other infections that were prevalent in the camps. At that point the reports start to flow through to the Red Cross of who had been captured. Until then the Germans effectively had plausible deniability, and the Red Cross had no power to enforce compliance with the convention & access by their representatives.

 

Hope that helps,

 

Peter

[A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy]

Thanks, Peter, all very interesting, and it looks as though it may have been the same man after all, though, as you know, James Turner 200980 is not my main focus here.

Thank you to all who have contributed to this thread.

 

Unless I discover something in the local press that gives a more definite indication as to whether either or both of F. Ogden 200350 and J. Turner 3122 were Signallers, my footnote to “Signallers J. Manock and J. Turner were killed” in the to-be-published version of my grandfather’s diary entry for 28 June 1916 will now read:

 

No J. Turner appears in the Battalion War Diary casualty list for this raid or in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s records as having died on or about 28th June 1916. If a second Signaller died in the raid, it was almost certainly Private Ogden, Service no 1786 (later 200350), who is listed as missing in the Battalion casualty list next to J. Manock. A Private Ogden is listed with J. Turner as a Signaller in the diary entry for 19th April 1915. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s records Francis Ogden, Service no 200350, the brother of John William Ogden of Radcliffe, Manchester, was aged 25 when he died., and is commemorated at the Arras Memorial, Bay 5. If J. Turner, the Signaller, also died in the War, he was John Turner, Service no 3122, son of Jane Turner of Bury, who died aged 27 on 12th September 1916 and is buried at Delville Wood Cemetery, reference XII.H.I, as only two J. Turners landed in France with the 2/5th Lancashire Fusiliers in May 1915, and the other survived the War.