Why would someone not be eligible for British War Medal?

[LizzieW]

Yes his records are in a muddle, I got them from a Canadian government site, have you seen them elsewhere?  I couldn't decide when he was wounded, or whether it was his left or right side - that differs on different pages too - although I thought it was 2nd October.  I suppose I could print the paperwork and put it all in order and the right way round,  but it covers 45 pages - although a few are blank.

I was a bit unsure about his wounds, at one point I thought from the description,  it sounded as though he'd been shot in the head - ?self inflicted - but I guess he wouldn't have got the P & S etc. if that had been the case.

[MaxD]

I've looked at his records on the Library and Archives Canada site.  My initial mis-reading was a result of what also happens on British records.  There is a column for when the thing happened and another column for when it was reported and sometimes different parts of the form use one and not the other.  As far as his wounding is concerned, by far the best forms to look at are the medical ones, where it is referred to elsewhere will have been taken from those with the possibility of mis-transcription.
Gun shot wound face and ear carrying away part of the face seems pretty clear.  Poor man.

MaxD

[LizzieW]

I saw the description of his wounds and also the postmortem and I'm surprised he lived so long, but it would seem that it was the abscess in his head that killed him eventually.  Never having been a soldier, I wonder how common it was to be shot in the head, rather than the body?

It's perhaps not a coincidence, but seems so to me that one of my g.uncles was also killed near Bourlon Wood in November 1917.  His name is on the Cambrai monument.  (He was the brother in law of Herbert Bailey's wife's aunt).  Sounds complicated but in fact Mrs Bailey's aunt was a year younger than her and was my gran, but the girls were brought up together when Mrs Bailey's mother married and left home to live in Leeds.  So in that family dynamic the men may well have known each other.

[Redroger]

Also why was he eligible for the Victory Medal - I thought you only got that if you had the 1914-1915 star?

My father joined the Cambridge Regiment in 1915 he was not eligible to the 1914-15 star as he did not serve abroard until early 1916 after completing training. Straight into the Somme as a first engagement!

[MaxD]

Don't know about the statistics but (as ever) the thing is complicated by the fact that the medics didn't distinguish between gunshot wounds and wounds made by shrapnel from shells/bombs/grenades as the effect was essentially the same.  In addition, and medical records bear this out, although there was a "proper" format in which injuries should be classified, the medicas often did their own thing.  There were separate categories for sword or lance wounds, bayonet wounds and miscellaneous!

MaxD

[MaxD]

Redroger - your father no doubt received the British War Medal and the Victory Medal as he was overseas and in a war theatre.

MaxD

[MaxD]

One of the (perhaps The) seminal work on casualty statistics, part of the Official History of the Great War is here:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b744277;view=1up;seq=1 (takes a little time to load).  I found no distinction between head and body wounding, I doubt that there is any such analysis.

MaxD

[LizzieW]

I couldn't access that site, there is an Application Error

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This type of error is often caused by submitting a corrupted URL string.

So I'll try again tomorrow.

[Redroger]

Redroger - your father no doubt received the British War Medal and the Victory Medal as he was overseas and in a war theatre.

MaxD

Correct, I have them both along with his WW2 HomeGuard medal which he never bothered to collect.