Dear Karen,
My grandfather, the Rev Sydney Bicheno Smith, was chaplain to the 13th York and Lancaster Regiment, 1st Barnsley Pals, joining them sometime in or before September 1915, went to Egypt with the battalion and then to France. He was definitely with them on 16 April 1916 as we have a letter from Sydney to the officers and men of both 13th and 14th Battalions, inviting them to an Easter service in the field. I believe he must have been posted out of the battalion in May or June 1916, as I believe the Rev Kenneth Best became its chaplain around about them, and before the Somme offensive began.
Do you, or anyone, know anything more about the padres who served with the two Barnsley Pals battalions? Dates, names, etc. To who, and when, did the Rev Huggard hand over that appointment?
Sydney had enlisted in October 1914 as a private 1914 in the RAMC, despite being an Anglican curate and about to marry, but by mid 1915 the authorities prevailed on him to become a padre in the Army Chaplains Department. In 1917 he resigned his chaplaincy and gained a commission in the RGA, and in September 1918 he was back in France in a heavy battery, a month later being severely wounded returning from his OP at Cambrai, and on 1 December 1918 he died at the military hospital in Dulwich, and was buried with full military honours from the church where he had been curate.
Anything that might point us to more information about his military service would be valuable...
Yours
Richard Essberger