World War I - commemoration

Posted on Thu 2nd, January 2014

• #1

BigFatAl

With the 100th anniversary of World War I, I did a bit of research on my great-grandad. He died in 1989, so I remember him reasonably well - not least as he put the phone down on me at Christmas one year (he was about 90 at the time) on the basis that he was 'chatting up a bird'.

So I did one of those 14 day trials on Ancestry.co.uk (other sites are available), and found that he joined the army in 1910 and was immediately posted to India. He made a leisurely way back via Sudan and Egypt, before finding himself in Gallipoli as a member of the Army Cycilng Corps. This campaign started on the 25th April (he arrived on the 5 May 1915) and ended on the 9 January 1916 (the day he was evacuated). Having thought he had a lucky escape, he was posted to France and joined the Machine Gun Corps (Heavy Section). This became the Tank Regiment and I think it's likely that he saw action at Cambrai. He was allowed to leave the army in September 1918, having suffered shell-shock when his tank was hit killing 4 and wounding 3 (he was unwounded). He was awarded the Military Medal - the Military Cross for non-commissioned servicemen.

100 years have nearly elapsed since the start of the war, and my great-grandad was just an ordinary working-class man. So I wondered...

1) Any World War 1 history on here?

2) An interest in FGSS participation http://www.ctc-heartofengland.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=471&Itemid=248

Post a reply
- Bold
- Italics
- Link
- Image
- List
- Quote
- code
- Preview
Formatting Help

Don't worry about formatting, just type in the text and we'll take care of making sense of it. We will auto-convert links, and if you put asterisks around words we will make them bold.

Tips:

Create headers by underlining text with ==== or ----

To *italicise* text put one asterisk each side of the word

To **bold** text put two asterisks each side of the word

Embed images by entering:
![](https://www.google.co.uk/images/srpr/logo4w.png)
That's the hard one: exclamation, square brackets and then the URL to the image in brackets.

* Create lists by starting lines with asterisks

1. Create numbered lists by starting lines with a number and a dot

> Quote text by starting lines with >

Mention another user by @username

For syntax highlighting, surround the code block with three backticks:

```
Your code goes here
```
Just like Github, a blank line must precede a code block.

If you upload more than 5 files we will display all attachments as thumbnails.

For a full reference visit the Markdown syntax.

Post a reply

About

World War I - commemoration

Posted by Avatar for BigFatAl @BigFatAl

Actions