Conscription/Exemption

[Petroc]

Folks,

I've tested the Forum archives and 'googled' all over the place and have yet to come up with any satisfactory answers to this most complicated subject. I have a number of inter-related questions, and would be most grateful for hard facts or informed opinions...

1) Were any records kept (and, if so, do they survive) of the numbers conscripted per county/region/Home Command?

2) What were the exact criteria for exempted trades and occupations? How and when were they revised according to the worsening domestic/military manpower situation as the war progressed?

3) To what extent can it be supposed that, just because an individual was in a supposedly protected industry, he was totally immune from compulsory enlistment?

4) When individuals were conscripted, were they automatically accepted by the State as being Regular/Territorial/New Army? (I'm thinking of the continued, though blurred, distinctions between the three...eg...a conscript sent to a TR Battalion was a 'New Army' conscript, and his comrade sent to a Special Resrve unit as a Regular conscript)?

5) What was the comparitive situation with regards to the Royal Navy, RNR, RNVER etc

6) Are conscription levels/figures distorted by the fact that a man was deemed to have been conscripted into the military forces PRIOR to a medical examination that might have ultimately resulted in his 'rejection'

Any thoughts or comments would be massively welcome, as they may confirm or deny my own ideas and research on the topic.

Many thanks,

Andy

[centurion]

As I understand it conscription was never applied to Ireland. One wonders if the rules for conscription varied between Scotland and England

[MelPack]

Centurion

The Military Service Act introduced in April 1918 did extend conscription to Ireland but, in the event, its provisions were never enforced.

The April 1918 Act was the most draconian in the sequence of Military Service Acts was introduced in the midst of the political panic caused by the initial success of the German Spring Offensive.

The provisions included:

The lowering of the minimum age to 17 with the maximum raised to 55.

Time -expired soldiers who had been discharged before the second Military Service Act of May 1916 were subject to recall.

Conscription was extended to Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

Exchanged or released POWs were no longer exempt where fir to serve again.

The discretionary powers of the Exemption Tribunals were curtailed.

Regards

Mel

[Petroc]

Thanks for the swift responses...but they still seem to confirm my suspicions that we are dealing with such an incredibly untouched area of Great War research...forgive me for saying so, but both previous responses have merely re-iterated generally accepted facts. I mean no slight, gents, but hope you appreciate the fact that most of you have posted is the 'generally accepted'...and also hope you agree about the need for more reearch on the subject

[centurion]

Your first port of call should be the legislation itself all of which should be a matter of public record, especially all the detailed appendeces that are attached and nobody ever reads even when the bill is in committee stage. When a piece of legislation receives the royal assent the original is filed in the Victoria Tower in the Palace of Westminster (where it aint easy to go) but bound copies are kept in the H of C library. Copies would be sent out to various legal bodies and one of these should be in the British Library. There was a study carried out by a consultant seconded to the P of W way back in the 1970s to see if all the old acts (and the procedings of the House) could be held and accessed in electronic form but I'm afraid I concluded that the problems of scanning and retrieval were too difficult for the technology of the day. IT has advanced somewhat since those antedeluvian days but I don't know if anything has happened in this area since. Facilities used to be made available for serious researchers to access old statutes and dropping a line to your MP might work wonders (especially if its a marginal seat).

[Terry_Reeves]

Petroc

You will most of your answers in John Rae's book Conscience and Politics OUP, 1970, which is easily available on the internet at very reasonable prices. Dr Rae died very recently.

Terry Reeves

[Petroc]

Cheers pal,

but what I'm trying to establish is the 'wrong-ness' of any assesment of the conscription era based upon examinations such as that undertaken by Jay Winter..for eg..an examination of 'military fitness'; for the south-west, for instance, Winter's assesment includes industrial centres like Bristol, where urban poverty is bound to 'downgrade' figures for the wider peninsula which was, after all, predominantly rural..also tha nature of the application of Tribunal regulations..some of which I have read as being 'too leniant' (i.e too concerned with the nature of local life and economics) and others which (according to those concerned with domestic production and, as locals viewed it, regional enonomies and employment) were more designed to secure military manpower at all caosts...