TOPIC:

The Red Ink kindly pointed out by Dave F caused me to do another Military Search on Find My Past for Edwin Lewis, Regimental Number 24023 with the following result and a lot more Red Ink on the third page.

Hello Share All

Your Grandfather’s two sets of attestation papers/service records have several interesting features you may not have appreciated (apologies if you have).

The 1896 set:

Page 3:

Against 5.6.98 – “Appointed SS” - SS = Shoeing Smith.

11.6.98 “Granted 1st GC Pay” – GC = Good Conduct, besides the extra pay he would have been given a GC Badge. The date was the second anniversary of his attesting (enlisting) – this was standard unless there had been conduct issues. Likewise a second GC pay rise & badge would have come along on the fourth anniversary but your GF never achieved that during his time with the 3rd Dragoon Guards.

18.6.00 – promoted to Corporal Shoeing Smith.

21.12.00 he is reduced to the ranks by a DCM (= District Court Martial) for reason given. To me this seems a light sentence and the lack of imprisonment indicates they did not want to jeopardise his going to South Africa - i.e he was a valued member of the 3rd Dragoon Guards - shoeing smiths were essential to keeping a cavalry regiment going.

The next month, as shown on page 4 he goes to S Africa.

9 months later he is tried on 5.11.01 by a FGCM (= Field General Court Martial) for the reason given. He is sentenced to 42 days IHL (= Imprisonment with Hard Labour). This is commuted to 28 days which as you can see at the bottom of the page is deleted from his service for the purposes of calculating his pension. If he had been drunk on duty as opposed to only on service he would have received a heavier sentence. On all the other service records I have studied I don’t remember seeing “drunk on service” as opposed to “drunk on duty”. I suspect many soldiers in the ABW were drunk on service but got away with it – presumably your GF was drunk & disorderly.

This behaviour is nothing to be ashamed of as soldiers with perfect conduct records in the ABW were in the minority.

The top of page 4 tells us he returned to England on 11.07.02 and was discharged from the army on 13.10.02. Normally he would have been discharged to the Army Reserve but the bottom of page 3 tells us he was fully discharged “medically” unfit”.

The 1906 set:

When he attests the second time he deviates from the truth more than once. He gives an incorrect place of birth, claims to be a few years younger than he really was and denies previous army service. His fourth deviation was when he said he had told the truth to all the other questions. I presume this was all designed to hide his previous service - as the red ink shows it was not successful.

There don’t seem to have been any problems with his conduct during his 6 years in India and he even seems to have been awarded both sets of GC badges & pay. Presumably he paid to be released in India because it was closer to Australia.

He gave his sister as next of kin when he attested in 1906 and her address as the Welcome Restaurant, Welbeck Road, Leicester. The 1911 found her and family living at 46 Welbeck Road with husband’s occupation = “Café Proprietor”. Doing a newspaper search for the “Welcome Restaurant, Welbeck Road” for the period 1906-1911 proved surprisingly successful as it was used by local organisations for meetings. Even more surprisingly five of these hits appeared in the Suffragette newspaper “Votes for Women” in 1908. Here is an example from the 3rd December 1908 issue:



WPSU = Women's Political & Social Union. I have attached the other four but not inserted them in the text. Mrs Alice Hawkins was a notable suffragette and suffered imprisonment on five occasions for her activities. Today there is a rather becoming statue of her in a square in Leicester and she has a Wikipedia page and appears on several other websites. Below is a photo of her holding a copy of “Votes for Women”.

Thank you so much Smethwick, David and Moranthorse et al for all this amazing information.

It now comes to light that not only did Grandfather lie to his young penpal Lizzie Seech, about the original recipient of her letters becoming deceased, here we now have him wanting to enlist in the British Army again (presumably with a clean slate) and telling pork pies in an effort to become ‘someone else’.

It’s very interesting about Grandfather appearing before the DCM and getting 28 days imprisonment with hard labour for drunkenness on service because no doubt that information was withheld not only from his penpal and later wife Lizziie, but anyone else. My mother told me that Grandfather had come from a “Temperance” background and therefore I suggest he would have found it shamefully hard to ‘fess up’ to anyone.

My mother also shared with me how her mother Lizzie became a Rechabite to join Grandfather and attended services a few miles down the road to William Street Perth the only Rechabite Hall in Western Australia, the year before her birth. Grandfather had come from a Temperance upbringing as a teetotaller, and therefore was ‘not able to handle his liquor’. I noted earlier that there must have been a later reporting of drunkenness while in Quetta, otherwise, why does our family have on record that he had NOT been drunk in the prior 3 years written by Lt H G R Steven’s Army Sobriety Report 1911.

I’m not at all surprised by the information that Grandfather’s sister and brother-in-law made their commercial premises available to an arm of the Suffragette movement.
I add here a quote from en.Wikipedia about the temperance movement in Britain ( which by the way surfaced in Perth in the 1920s at The Rechabite Hall…now heritage listed) by way of linking the two: Suffragette-Temperance:-

I quote : “ a follower of Livesey, in Preston in 1833.
In 1838, the mass working class movement for universal suffrage, Chartism, included a current called "temperance chartism". Faced with the refusal of the parliament of the time to give the right to vote to working people, the temperance chartists saw the campaign against alcohol as a way of proving to the elites that working-class people were responsible enough to be granted the vote.In short, the 1830s was mostly characterised by moral persuasion of workers.”

So Grandfather was a working class lad, whose parents seem to have been deceased and one surmises living with his sister, when he first applied to be a recruit in the British Army in 1896. Having no trade but some skills as a labourer, he was appointed SS. This is the first time I have even heard of a shoeing smith. Utterly fascinating.

I believe our family can be very grateful that Grandfather survived The Anglo Boer War ( when 55,000 did not) due to his not necessarily being in the line of fire with his line of work being ‘out the back’ so to speak, plus it appears that the 3rd Dragoon Guards had less ‘battle time’ than many other regiments. Correct me if I am wrong.

I add as a post script that mum told me many stories about Grandfather’s bouts of epilepsy, supposedly stemming from a concussion when he also incurred a broken shoulder and was deemed medically unfit in South Africa. Sadly epileptics were treated at a mental asylum here in Perth and mum spoke often about visiting her dad in both Graylands and Swanbourne institutions .On more than one occasion, Grandfather was picked up by police for seeming to be…you guessed it… drunk and disorderly. When it proved to be wrong and that Grandfather had been on the ground having an epileptic seizure the police took him to either Graylands or Swanbourne, depending on which one had an available bed.

On one of the last visits my mum lied ( whoops there we go again family trait) when Grandfather implored his two youngest children now in their teens, to never take up smoking. When challenged by Grandfather mum lied with, “ No Dad I don’t do smoking!” He could probably smell it on her breath/clothes because she was already a heavy smoker. I so wish my mum had obeyed her dad because she was the last one of the 9 siblings to be born and the first one who died - prematurely at age 57 of smoking induced lung cancer. I still miss my mum.

Once again a true blue Aussie, can’t thank you Brits enough for all this information.

Hi Share All

Your thanks are most welcomed. However, forum member Smethwick ( David) should be congratulated more so, as it is his hard work and research which has helped bring your Grandfather's back story to life.

Best wishes

Dave F.

Edwin Lewis' epilepsy raises another possibility - namely, that he was never in fact drunk & disorderly. His injury in South Africa may have been sustained during a seizure - it's unusual for a head injury to lead to subsequent epilepsy. Most epilepsy is of no known cause and often starts in young adult life for no reason. As you'll know, seizures were regarded with superstition, fear and ignorance in those days, and confused with madness or even possession by spirits. Once identified with epilepsy, he would have been immediately and permanently discharged from military service. It's unlikely he could have found employment in civilian life, either. So it may well be that he volunteered a false history of alcoholic excess to account for his being drowsy after a seizure, or for behaving oddly during a complex partial seizure. The punishment was something he could handle, perhaps better than the alternative? In addition, alcohol excess can induce seizures in people who do not have "epilepsy", and so can alcohol withdrawal in habitual drinkers. So, a spurious link between alcohol and his problems could have been a plausible explanation, especially if no doctors were asked to assess him. Those pals of his who suspected otherwise may have covered up for him.

Share All – thank you for the fascinating and thought provoking information. My first thought on reading it was to put in a request to have the verdict of your GF’s December 1900 DCM quashed but, as Rob has quite rightly pointed out, perhaps the verdict was a “good” outcome for him at the time. Even so IHL and committal to the institutions you mention does make me grind my teeth. Thankfully, the condition is now better understood and accepted and can be controlled by medication.

You wrote “So Grandfather was a working class lad, whose parents seem to have been deceased and one surmises living with his sister, when he first applied to be a recruit in the British Army in 1896.” I now wonder if you noticed his 1896 papers which are on the first page of the post and you have not “acknowledged” as opposed to his 1906 papers which are on the second page and you have “acknowledged”. The screenshot below of part of a public family tree to be found on Ancestry indicates that both his parents were still alive in 1896 and page 4 of his 1896 papers confirm this by listing his father, mother & 4 siblings as his next of kin. His mother had indeed died by 1906 and the fact his father was still alive but not given as NoK could have been part of the subterfuge especially as his sister in 1896 was Fanny Lewis but by 1906 was Mrs Francis Russell (btw she & family emigrated to Canada in 1912).



I had assumed one of the several well researched public family trees had been created by your goodself but now you have identified your mother as Dulcie Lewis it is obvious they have been created by someone else and the most comprehensive is down to somebody called “ChefJules”, who appears to be distantly related to you and to have coloured in the photo of your GF. Another skeleton FT has been created by somebody who claims to be a granddaughter of your GF making her your cousin – her name is Betty Anne Bastock and she lives in Sydney, NSW.

Also an example of the QSA your GF would have received.