1st Garrison Btn North Staffordshire Regt Diary ?

[MERLINV12]

Looking for the 1st Garrison Btn North Staffordshire Regt Diary, have searched NA, with every keyword I can think of, but only come up with the "normal" 1st battalion diary, and a few MIC"s for 1st Garrison btn.

 

Could someone please check for me, wouldn't be the first time I've spent ages looking and not found what I wanted, and someone found it in 10 secs.  There must be a knack to it, but I am yet to learn it .

[Guest]

  War Diaries are only kept when a unit is in a war zone.  Thus, most war diaries for,say, the battalions of the Kitchener New Armies, have war diaries that only commence with embarkation for France,etc- NOT all the formation and training. Thus, a UK-based garrison battalion will NOT have a war diary-unless it was transmogrified later in the war and sent off for service.

[Guest]

Wrong county!!  Start again

 

 

 

Edited 25 January , 2021 by Guest

[MERLINV12]

  War Diaries are only kept when a unit is in a war zone.  Thus, most war diaries for,say, the battalions of the Kitchener New Armies, have war diaries that only commence with embarkation for France,etc- NOT all the formation and training. Thus, a UK-based garrison battalion will NOT have a war diary-unless it was transmogrified later in the war and sent off for service.

 

Thanks for your continued help, LLT says they were in France from May 16 until the end ??

[EDWARD1]

1st Garrison Battn  went to France May 16. On 31 7 18 became 13th Garrison Battn , Brig E A James British regiments 1914-18

[MERLINV12]

5 minutes ago, EDWARD1 said:

1st Garrison Battn  went to France May 16. On 31 7 18 became 13th Garrison Battn , Brig E A James British regiments 1914-18

 

Thanks, spotted that on LLT 

Edited 25 January , 2021 by MERLINV12

[Guest]

1 hour ago, MERLINV12 said:

 

Thanks, spotted that on LLT 

 Hi Merlin-  I am having no luck either.  I know that one little wrinkle that helps with searching on "Discovery" is to put up the full geographic name if it is part of the unit you are looking for- eg  Search on Devonshire not Devon, Northamptonshire not Northampton, etc. Discovery is getting even more temperamental than me.

     That said, 13 N Staffs must have been in a hierarchy and the next best thing is to zap the brigade, then the division- or the options around the odds and sods out of the usual infantry structure, such as Headquarters Troops. Alas, I have failed to find any reference to who this unit answered to and, from memory, I think the regimental for the North Staffs is poor on non-frontline units. But they must be there somewhere.

[MERLINV12]

 Hi Merlin-  I am having no luck either.  I know that one little wrinkle that helps with searching on "Discovery" is to put up the full geographic name if it is part of the unit you are looking for- eg  Search on Devonshire not Devon, Northamptonshire not Northampton, etc. Discovery is getting even more temperamental than me.

     That said, 13 N Staffs must have been in a hierarchy and the next best thing is to zap the brigade, then the division- or the options around the odds and sods out of the usual infantry structure, such as Headquarters Troops. Alas, I have failed to find any reference to who this unit answered to and, from memory, I think the regimental for the North Staffs is poor on non-frontline units. But they must be there somewhere.

Thanks for your efforts once again  

 

Forgive my ignorance, but what would a Garrison Btn have done in France, and would they have never been at the front ??

 

Managed to find several MIC's for 13th Garrison Bat.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, MERLINV12 said:

 

Thanks for your efforts once again  

 

Forgive my ignorance, but what would a Garrison Btn have done in France, and would they have never been at the front ??

 

Managed to find several MIC's for 13th Garrison Bat.

 

    I simply do not know-   yes, a Garrison batallion should do what it says on the tin- but 1917-1918 and the army reorganisations with the manpower crisis meant a lot of "needs must when the devil drives".  I cannot see that 1 Garrison aka 13 N.Staffs were awarded any battle honours.  In theory, they should turn up in the "Order of Battle" reference books, which I do not have.  At the moment-without a war diary and the inference that they were not doing anything that warlike-well, they could have been making Douglas Haig's afternoon tea or keeping his slippers warm   (I know this is not true....he had a Lancers escort for that)

[MERLINV12]

We need a banging your head against a wall Emoji on here 

 

Why do I always pick an OR, with no SR, and one who survived the war, far too hard, going to pick a General with a VC and Knighthood next time, then there may be some info available 

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, MERLINV12 said:

We need a banging your head against a wall Emoji on here 

 

Why do I always pick an OR, with no SR, and one who survived the war, far too hard, going to pick a General with a VC and Knighthood next time, then there may be some info available 

 

    Its called History-and the fun is tracking it down-that's why!!

 

Now, 1 Garrison appears to have no casualties in France-just as a check.  The CWGC listing for 13th N. Staffs  has only 6 fatalities. Of those, we can exclude UK deaths and post-Armistice- although, as an acknowledgement to the doughty service of them, it is possible they were DOW.  That only leaves 2- Private J,Brydon, 3rd February 1918 and Serjeant Wadsworth Fox, 28th October 1918.   I am away from access to Ancestry and Soldiers Died Great War but I suspect they will turn up as "Died", though possible-again-they may be KIA or DOW-I do not wish to impune their lives or their service in a matter of honour. Though, Brydon was 44 and Fox 39- a post-war death, January 1919 was 52.  Its a fair assumption they were not frontline at any point.

[MERLINV12]

How long  does it take to be as good as you, don't think I will be here long enough 

 

So it is beginning to look like my man was wounded with 2nd Btn Manchester Regt (no idea when), and then spent the rest of his time behind the lines with the 13th N Staffs & Labour Corps, however he did end up a Cpl and got a MID in 1919.

 

Forgot to mention, he also managed to get married twice in that period !

Edited 25 January , 2021 by MERLINV12

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, MERLINV12 said:

he also managed to get married twice in that period

 

    So, despite the wounds he had a bit of strength left then!!

[MERLINV12]

So, despite the wounds he had a bit of strength left then!!

 

Maybe not strength, maybe "disturbed" , turns out he received shrapnel wounds to the head (presumably with 2nd Manchesters), which could not be removed at the time, maybe the reason for his service with 1st Garrison Battalion North Staffs & Labour Corps.

 

Having got married twice during the war, he went on to get married another three times before he died, still with the shrapnel in his head !

[Guest]

14 minutes ago, MERLINV12 said:

Having got married twice during the war, he went on to get married another three times before he died, still with the shrapnel in his head !

 

      Gosh!!     There is a serious point in all of this- Of course, that society was well and truly thumped by the Great War-well expressed by the late Arthur Marwick with the title of his good book on the subject-"The Deluge".  We are well used to tales of physically and mentally impaired men of the Great War and their subsequent lives- Here, I always recall that the late Spike Milligan -a "damaged good" of the Second World War - visited men of the Great War at the Star and Garter in Richmond for years.  Your man is an example of one who lived-quote-a "normal" life but one that leaves the speculation that multiple marriages may have, in part, been personality disorders brought on by wounds. An old friend where I live in the eastern end of London can remember an elderly man in the 60s apparently shadow boxing and talking to himself - the man was still trapped in the nightmares of a trench raid during the war.

   When I work away at my local casualties, I try to remember the famous words of Colonel Thomas Rainborowe in the Army Debates at Putney in 1647-he being a Leveller- "The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he"  Just how these tragedies of the Great War affected the survivors and their families  was a commonplace then but as a commonplace, so easily overlooked and forgotten. Wars never end in the minds of those who were in them. 

    We had a good example of this recently on GWF- a colleague seeking information on a man who in his last decades was living in a home-made dug-out by the side of a road in Ireland.  It seems tragi-comic but the reality to the man must have been different- his own way of dealing with the scars of the Great War measured by his own perspectives of what to do- the dug-out may have been what we would now call a "coping strategy". 

[MERLINV12]

I thought I had got all the info I was going to get from his family, then the story about the shrapnel was recalled, so the more they talk about him, maybe they will divulge how he was and why he got married so many times.

[Ron Clifton]

13 Bn North Staffs was employed guarding the Lines of Communication from mid-1918 onwards. I have had a look at the list of L of C unit War Diaries held at Kew, and there isn't one listed. In any case, I don't think the L of C diaries have been downloaded yet. Not much help, I'm afraid, but it might help to reduce time you could be wasting searching for what isn't there.

Ron

[MERLINV12]

THANKS Ron