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Posts tagged 'navy'

Fri May

2013

Brothers in arms

Posted by David Langrish in Records and research

Loss and sacrifice on the Home Front, 1914-1918

Today’s blog post, using the Military Service Tribunal papers from MH 47, will look at the emotional impact of the First World War on the Home Front. We will specifically see how the shared experiences of military service, loss and sacrifice affected individual households and the local communities they formed a part of.

97 years ago, on 25 May 1916, compulsory military service into the Army was extended from single men and widowers without children to cover all men – single and married – aged between 18 and 41, and who had been resident in Great Britain since 4 August 1914. This extension of conscription was a result of the continued difficulties of manning the army due to the number of casualties overseas.

The story of John Gordon Shallis is one of the many interesting finds from our MH 47 pre-digitisation work. Mr Shallis appealed for exemption from military service on grounds of domestic hardship, having lost four of his brothers during the war. John’s mother is described as a “cripple” on his appeal form, having broken her leg, and his father was away carrying out Home Defence duties with the Territorial Force. ¹ This left John as the only son left for the family.

The first of John’s brothers to lose his life was George Victor Shallis, a member of the Merchant Navy. George was on board the armed merchant ship HMS Viknor when it went down off the coast of Northern Ireland on 31 January 1915. The Admiralty case file in ADM 116 reveals that the Viknor most likely struck a mine having been blown off course by bad weather. ² George is listed as a Steward, with his wife and their address listed under Next of Kin (see image, below).

Entry for George Shallis found in Admiralty case file for loss of HMS Viknor (ADM 116/1442)

Notes:

1. The National Archives, MH 47/95: Middlesex Appeal Tribunal Case Paper, V.3628, John Gordon Shallis. ^
2. The National Archives, ADM 116/1442: Admiralty: Record Office: Cases, Loss of H.M.S. Viknor. ^

Fri Mar

2013

Impressions of St Helena – the early 19th century

Posted by Daniel Gilfoyle in Records and research

As early as the 17th century, St Helena’s position in the South Atlantic made it important to shipping between Western Europe and the east – a useful place where ships could take on water and supplies. Its cliffs and volcanic outcrops must have presented a fairly bleak view to sailors approaching after a long voyage.

Approaching St Helena, circa 1906 (reference CO 1069/766)

The East India Company controlled the island from the 1650s through to 1815 (with brief Dutch interludes), when Napoleon was exiled to the island and the British government temporarily took direct control.

Mon Aug

2012

A singular name

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

‘A Somerset House clerk once declared that the tedium of his labour on the registry of births and deaths is often relieved by coming across a humorous juxtaposition of names…then the face of the clerk will be covered with a smile.’

A General Register Office clerk at Somerset House

So began an article in Cassell’s New Penny Magazine in 1899. For ‘Somerset house clerk’ you could substitute anyone who works with lists of names on a daily basis. This has been my lot for most of my working life, first in customer accounts for a major department store, then as a professional genealogist and now as part of my job here at The National Archives.

One of the things that we do when we are not on public duty is cataloguing, and I recently joined the team working on the School Admission Records among the papers of the Royal Greenwich Hospital in series ADM 73. These are interesting records in themselves, often containing copies of birth, baptism and marriage certificates, service details and correspondence. But, as in the case of the man at Somerset House, this clerk’s face was covered with a smile on discovering the best name I have seen in a long time – Singular Onion Gallehawk. I had to read it a couple of times to be sure I wasn’t mistaken, but the writing was very clear.

Naturally, I had to find out more. On applying for a place in the school for their child, parents were asked for the names of any other children they had, which told me that John James Gallehawk, a customs officer, and his wife Effield had named their other children Cassandra, Lorenzo, Arthur, Olive and Hamilton. Since the children were born in the 1840s and 1850s I easily found the index entry for the parents’ marriage on FreeBMD which revealed that Effield’s maiden surname was Onion, which at least explains young Singular’s middle name. As forenames go, Singular is extremely rare, but not unique – or, if you prefer, not strictly ‘singular’ at all. According to FreeBMD, which is close to being a complete record of all birth, marriage and death entries in England and Wales from 1837 until about the Second World War, there were six people with Singular as a first or middle name, one of them being Edward Singular Onion. Searches of worldwide databases FamilySearch.org (free) and Ancestry.com (a subscription site) reveal a few more instances of the name, but not many. Within England and Wales, the name appears almost exclusively in Kent, Essex, London and the south coast. People (of both sexes) bearing his mother’s forename, Effield, are a little more numerous, but are still rare. It is more common as a surname, concentrated in the Lincolnshire area.