Military misdemeanours: John Rushworth’s war

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!

The Rushworths in the First World War

Today I’m staying with the First World War but heading over to the other side of the family. My mum is a Rushworth and I’ve been looking into the experiences of my great-grandfather Edward Rushworth, born in 1898, and those of his brothers who served during the war.

Edward was the third of eight children born to Charles Rushworth and his wife Mary Ann, nee Green. Charles worked in the leather trade: in 1911 he was a tanner and leather currier at the firm of J.W. Stocks in Leeds where his eldest son John, aged 17, also worked as a labourer.  Two other sons, Charles Haydon and my great-grandfather Edward, worked as errand boys in the leather trade.  The family were from Leeds and lived there in 1911 but seem to have moved around a lot, spending a few years in Northampton at the beginning of the century. They can’t have been well off: tanning was a notoriously unhealthy industry and according to the census return, in 1911 the ten of them were living in three rooms.  They lived at no. 6 Gresham Street which was derelict by the 1950s, as seen in this photograph on the Leodis website, and was included in the slum clearance programme in the early 1960s.

I thought that Edward Rushworth would probably have served in the First World War due to his age: he would have been 18 in 1916 just as the National Conscription Act made military service compulsory for single men aged between 19 and 41.  I found proof that Edward had served on his marriage certificate. He married Emily Ellis on 24 May 1919 and was still in the Army at that time: under ‘rank or profession’ his marriage certificate states ‘Private No 82975 M.G.C. (Boot Operator).

Unfortunately, as with many of those who served during the First World War, Edward’s official Army records don’t seem to have survived.  His medal index card shows that he was entitled to the British War Medal and the Victory Medal, but I couldn’t find anything in the online family history sites to add to that.

My main sources of information for his war service are an entry in the National Roll of the Great War cut from a newspaper by someone in the family years ago, and family memories. I’m very grateful to whoever decided to cut this clipping from the newspaper presumably in the early 1920s.

I know it refers to the right Edward Rushworth as it gives his address, which is the same as that on my great-grandfather’s marriage certificate from 1919. I had imagined he might have been conscripted in 1916 but the clipping shows he actually volunteered a year earlier, when he was possibly only 17, though why he would have joined the Durham Light Infantry rather than a local Leeds regiment is something I have yet to explain.  He served in the Middle East during the war – something else I need to research further. It also shows he stayed in the army after the war’s end and served in India, probably in the Third Anglo-Afghan War, though he must have come home on leave in May 1919 as that’s when he married Emily.

I was able to flesh out Edward’s story a little bit by talking to my uncle. Born in 1940, he and my grandma lived with Edward and Emily during the Second World War while my grandad was away. My uncle remembers Edward talking about his time as a Lewis gunner during the First World War.  Edward had apparently talked about using guns cooled by water which got so hot that the water boiled and they could use it to make tea.  In this instance he must have been talking about the Vickers, which was a water cooled gun used by the Machine Gun Corps (the Lewis gun was lighter,  air cooled and was issued to infantry units because it could be carried and used by one soldier) though Edward probably used both.  This photo from the Imperial War Museum collection shows a Vickers machine gun crew in action during the Battle of Menin Road Ridge in September 1917.

A Vickers machine gun crew in action. (c) IWM (Q2864).

Edward also talked about being at the Khyber Pass, which must have been during the Third Afghan War in 1919 (more on that from the National Army Museum here). My favourite anecdote, however, is about Edward’s tattoo. My uncle remembers him having a huge tattoo of a cross on his chest, big enough to stretch from neck to waistband. Edward said he got the tattoo in India but couldn’t remember how – he just woke up one morning and there it was.  That must have been an impressive night out.  I imagine there are squaddies still having similar experiences today.

In later life Edward was apparently a round, jolly man who liked a drink. The photos we have of him certainly fit that description. He died in March 1972.

Register of Soldiers’ Effects

Last time I wrote about my great-uncle Fred King who was killed during the First World War. One of the more moving aspects of Fred’s story for me is the response of his family, particularly his mother Katherine, to his death.  We know nothing of her private grief, but she did include information about his family in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission register. Families had to pay to include this information and Fred’s mother, who was widowed and not well off, included information about his family. She also commissioned the words ‘Ever Remembered’ on his headstone.

In my grandfather Leo’s papers we have an autograph book containing entries from June 1918 when Leo was conscripted into the RAF. Among them are a number of messages and poems from his mother.

When I first read this I didn’t know that Leo’s older brother had been killed a year earlier. At the time I thought the messages were sentimental; now I know the circumstances I find them very moving.

Recently the genealogy website Ancestry.com released some new First World War records: the UK Army Register of Soldiers’ Effects. This documents the money owed to soldiers serving in the British Army who died between 1901 and 1929.  The records list the soldier’s name, rank, battalion and his date of death, plus his next of kin and who the money was owed to.

When I searched for Fred’s record I was expecting to find that his effects had gone to his mother Katherine. Fred had been married, but his listing on the CWGC website indicated that his wife Emily had died before him. I had imagined that, because Emily was dead, Fred’s mother would now be his next of kin. However, the record doesn’t show that. Fred’s ‘wife and sole legatee’ Emily is indeed noted as ‘deceased’, but instead of Katherine receiving Fred’s effects the grantee was listed as ‘Herbert Westerby Tate’, who I know from the census was Emily’s brother. If I’ve read the record correctly, Herbert received the sum of £11 and 10 shillings. I wonder if he also received the ‘death penny’ sent to bereaved families, and Fred’s war medals.

I wonder what Katherine made of this. I can’t even guess at her relationship with her son’s brother-in-law.  In the 1911 census Herbert was 32, worked as a tailor’s machinist and lived with his widowed mother, as did Emily and their younger sister Eleanor.  In August of that year he married Annie Fenton at the Oxford Place Methodist Chapel in Leeds.  Emily was a witness at their wedding.

Perhaps Herbert contributed to the cost of Fred’s CWGC listing. Maybe he helped Katherine out if she was still in financial difficulty (the family were not well off, which I’ll explain in a separate post). It’s impossible to know.

Finding Fred: tracing my First World War family

There’s a letter in my family that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. It lives among my grandad’s papers, which are a disparate collection of fading photographs, scribbled notes and official documents, together with what was his pride and joy: an autograph book from his days as a music hall artist in the years before and during the First World War. My grandad Leo King was born in 1899 (or ’98, depending on which source you believe!) and died aged 56 when my dad was just nine years old. An only child, Dad had limited memories of his father and there were no aunts and uncles to tell him about Leo when he was young.

Among Leo’s papers is a leather wallet with his name and address written on it, containing a single, folded document. The letter is written in pencil on two sheets of lined paper, secured with a metal staple.  The top line reads ‘2705 Sgt F W King RFA’ with an address in France.  Frustratingly, the date is unclear. The letter begins, ‘Dear Pudge’. We know it was written to Leo because there are references to his music hall career among the casual references to ‘Zepps’ and chat of mutual friends. It’s signed ‘Fred’ and there’s a lovely page of doodles which Fred notes as ‘The result of a few minutes waste time’.  Fred evidently wrote his letter from the Western Front during the First World War.

As a lifelong history fanatic I’ve always wanted to know more. I began tracing my family history eleven years ago when my dad became terminally ill and the lifelong mystery of his father’s family became more important to him. I found Leo’s family on the census each year from 1891 to 1911 but there was no sign of anyone called Fred, and I had no age or further information about him to go on. Leo’s parents seem to have got away with not registering the births of any of their children, something I’ve never managed to work out. I eventually concluded that the elusive letter-writer must have been Leo’s uncle. Given that Leo’s father Thomas King had been born in Ireland and I couldn’t find him in any official documents before his marriage in England in the 1880s, I didn’t hold out much hope of finding Fred. More frustrating, searches for various combinations of 2705 and F King in the military records on the major family history websites turned up nothing – not even a medal index card. Other than the letter, Sergeant F W King seemed to have vanished without trace.  I turned my attention to less evasive branches of the family tree, though Fred always lingered at the back of my mind.

It would be hard to escape the fact that 2014 marked the centenary of the start of the First World War. I’m working on several First World War related projects and researching individuals’ stories using sites like Ancestry and FindMyPast.  I was finally prompted into action by the launch of the Imperial War Museum’s Lives of the First World War website, a permanent digital memorial to those who served in the conflict created through crowdsourced research. With an opportunity not just to look for Fred but to create a permanent record of his story, I decided to renew my search.

The breakthrough came when I went back to Leo’s papers and found a small photograph album I hadn’t paid attention to before. The dozen or so photos appear to be from the 1920s or thereabouts and document a trip to the continent. Among them is an image of a single gravestone. It’s too faded to read the inscription on the headstone, but underneath someone has written a caption: ‘At Bailleul sire Berthol, France’.

This was the lead I needed. Ten minutes later I was looking at an entry for Sergeant Fred W. King on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission web page for Albuera Cemetery at Bailleul-sire-Berthoult. The regimental number was different to that on the letter but I knew immediately that this was my Fred – his parents’ names and address are familiar to me from tracing Leo’s family tree, and he was born in Aldershot, the same as Leo. Fred was Leo’s older brother and my dad’s uncle. He served with the Royal Field Artillery and was killed in action aged 30 on 22nd April 1917.

The entry has helped me solve further mysteries. I finally found Fred on the census for 1891. He wasn’t in the family home when the census was taken but was next door, with grandparents, and the census enumerater gave him the wrong surname. In 1901 he was still in his grandparents’ household but is now listed as Fred King. I was also able to trace Fred’s marriage to Emily Tate in 1915.  There’s a hidden tragedy here as Emily had already died by the time Fred was killed less than two years after their wedding. On her marriage certificate she is listed as ‘Trade Union organiser’. A lifelong union man, my dad would have loved that.

I’m gradually adding Fred’s story to his entry on Lives of the First World War.  It’s fantastic to be able to contribute to a national project to remember the thousands of individual lives affected by the conflict.  From the detail in Fred’s CWGC entry I’ve been able to find the regimental diary for his unit on the National Archives website which contains a compelling, detailed description of the situation in the days leading up to his death.  Thanks to the fantastic War Graves Photographic Project I’ve also been able to find a recent photograph of his grave, which they’ve given me permission to reproduce here.

Fred’s headstone reads ‘Ever Remembered’. I’d like to think I’ve played a small part in keeping his memory alive.