It’s been ages since I posted. So long I’ve had to fathom WordPress all over again. The demands of the living have outweighed those of the dead, which I guess is how it should be, but recently I’ve picked back up on the family history trail. I’ve got two more First World War ancestors to talk about before I follow some different stories.
In my last post I talked about my great-grandfather, Edward Rushworth, who served in the Middle East during the First World War then in India in 1919. I’ve also been researching Edward’s brother John. Four years older than Edward, John was born in about 1894 and was living at the family home in the 1911 census, a single man working as a courier’s labourer at the firm of J. W. Stocks in Leeds.
John is so far a rare find among my family in that his wartime service record has survived and made it to the online family history sites. I therefore have a record of his service that takes some of the guesswork out of my research. John attested for the army in May 1913 aged 19 years and 5 months and joined the 1/8th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, known as the Leeds Rifles. He was still working for J W Stocks, now as a leather finisher. The description on attestation lists him having good vision and good physical development at five feet five inches tall and with a chest measurement of 33 inches – possibly not something that would earn him that description today! He was mobilised to France on 16 April 1915, probably with the 49th (West Riding) division which mobilised on that date and went to France and Flanders, taking part in the Battle of Augers Ridge on 9 May 1915 and in the defence against the first phosgene attack on 19 December. The 49th was involved in phases of the batle of the Somme in 1916 and in a phase of the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917.
At some point John was moved into the 3/5th Battalion which was a reserve and reinforcement battalion, and from there into the Labour Corps. It seems likely that these moves could have been due to wounds or sickness, though his disability form – which is undated but contains his Labour Corps details – states that he was not suffering from a disability caused by his military service. I do have a record of him being hospitalised in June 1915, after two months with the field force, though this was due to an eye complaint rather than for any military cause. The record, on the Forces War Records website, notes that John had “Compound myopic astigmatism right eye. Defective eyesight none due to any war cause other than fatigue”. He spent a week in hospital then was discharged back to duty. John would have seen his first major action a month earlier at the Battle of Aubers, where the 49th Division got off lightly with only 94 casualties. It’s tempting to speculate whether his eye condition might have been related to the shock of war.
John’s service record is relatively innocuous apart from one incident on his conduct sheet dated November 1917. The record describes the offence: “whilst employed at C.T.S.C., taking a tin of Maconochie rations from a crate without permission”. According to the Imperial War Museum this watery tinned stew was “more blamed than praised and many considered it only edible if mixed with something else”.
Tin of Maconachie ration, First World War. (c) IWM (EPH 4379).
The offence was witnessed by a Lance Corporal Chapman M.F.P and earned John two weeks of Field Punishment No. 2. This would have involved him being shackled or restrained and doing extra duties – a military historian friend told me it may have involved pack drill, being made to walk around a track for hours fully laden with equipment. Either way it sounds like a serious punishment and a lot to go through for a tin of watery stew! I hope he at least managed to eat it.
John survived the war and received the 1914-15 Star, the Victory Medal and the British War Medal. He died in 1973 aged 79.
There was another brother in between John and Edward whose war record I have yet to trace. Charles Haydon Rushworth will have been about 19 when war broke out in 1914, so was definitely the right age to have been conscripted in 1916, but I haven’t been able to find him in the military records. There are numerous Charles Rushworths on the medal rolls but without an address, regimental number or some other form of identifier I can’t pin mine down. He married Mary Ann Davidson at St Matthew’s Church in Leeds in March 1918 when his profession is listed as ‘Bookbinder’, so he had remained in the leather trade but moved on from his days as an errand boy (interestingly his name is spelt, and signed, ‘Charles Aden’ not Charles Haydon as it appears on the 1911 census form signed by his father). Bookbinding was surely not the kind of profession that would lead to someone being exempted from military service, so it’s possible to speculate that Charles had served and been discharged perhaps due to ill health or wounds. Perhaps this also enabled him to train for a skilled occupation in the leather trade rather than a labouring job. There was a Charles Rushworth discharged from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry due to wounds in 1915 after serving overseas but I’ve no way of knowing whether it’s the same one. Given that two of Charles’s brothers volunteered, his father served at home in the Volunteer Force and his father-in-law was a soldier, one imagines there might have been a certain amount of family pressure for Charles to do his duty and there must be an explanation for him being in a civilian occupation, living in the family home, aged 22 in 1918. Another puzzle to solve!
In Search of Kings 