TOPIC:

Good Morning Gibbins.....

I have checked the published medal roll for the RE's and there is only one Gale who is an officer in the RE a Major Henry Richmond......

Also checked the MID roll and H.R. is the only one listed.....

Mike

Thanks very much for checking, Mike.

I don't think this can be a conflation with his younger cousin Henry Richmond Gale, also in the RE and a QSA recipient. Henry was not promoted to Major until November 1900, and there is no evidence of an earlier Brevet or temporary rank. His medal appears in the rolls for the RE and Intelligence Division and shows that he received many clasps, but not Defence of Ladysmith or any of the associated actions.

I'm always cautious with this type of research until there is enough evidence from primary documentation to say something definitive, and we're not there yet. But by the same token absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and his apparent absence from the surviving medal roll does not prove that he did not receive the QSA or was somehow not in South Africa after all. As an attached officer, part of the Indian Contingent (the least well researched of all the forces in South Africa, as far as I can see), and as he was wounded and presumably left South Africa for good only a week after the siege began, he seems a good candidate for 'falling through the net' in terms of overall documentation. Possibly he applied for and received his medal back in India and the paperwork never made it into the roll. This kind of thing must have happened.

I think my next port of call should be the L/MIL papers in the India Office Collections of the British Library to see whether they contain details of officer deployments in 1899 with the contingent for South Africa. I'll return to this thread with anything new I find.

Phew - all is revealed in another swift search in the Newspaper Archive, saving me a lot of time and dead-end research!

I knew I was right to feel cautious about this, mainly because it was drawn from newspaper accounts with no primary source corroboration, and because it was very odd that there was no reference to it elsewhere in his career documentation or in the medal roll - even allowing for some gaps to exist there.

The Pall Mall Gazette, 13 November 1899:

'We are informed that the initials of Major Gale, R.E., wounded at Ladysmith on November 9 are H.R., and not W.A. (Walter Andrew), as we gave them on Friday. We regret the error, the responsibility for which, however, is not ours. The War Office returned the officer as 'Major Gale, R.E.', and a reference to the Army List gave the officer we described. As a matter of fact, the officer wounded had only the rank of captain in the List, though he is holding the local rank of Major.'

So there it is. Having researched H.R. Gale in the process (also of interest to me genealogically, as a cousin of my ancestor), there is nothing anywhere - including his WO25 service record - to indicate that he held the local rank of Major at this point (his promotion a year later was as Brevet Major), so I think I can be excused for discounting him on that basis.

However, a few days ago I began to feel uncertainty when I saw that H.R. Gale was one of the RE officers who had carried out a map-making survey in the Ladysmith area several years before the outbreak of war; one account said that the officers involved were 'caught up' in Ladysmith at the outbreak of war, so unavailable to General Buller for consultation. It would appear that this was indeed the case. Within a matter of days of his wounding (which cannot have been that severe, happily), H.R. Gale was with Buller's force and at Belmont, as shown by his medal clasp entitlement. He received eight clasps, and another factor which initially turned me against identifying him as 'Major Gale' was that these did not include the Defence or Relief of Ladysmith. It is still a bit difficult to understand, as he would have been entitled to wear another clasp, up to the maximum of nine. (Perhaps if he was trapped in Ladysmith but quickly escaped as a result of being taken out to the field hospital then he did not consider himself to be part of the defence force?)

This has been an interesting exercise. On now to research my other two ABW family veterans, both of whom are definitely there on the QSA rolls, a great-grandfather in the Shropshire Yeomanry and a gr gr uncle who was a Captain in the 9th Lancers. More on those in separate threads as I find out about them and hopefully don't encounter anything like the murky waters I've swum through here!

Many thanks to those who replied for their help in trying to solve this.

Gibbins
I think a few of us favoured the "incorrect initials" answer. Nevertheless, as you say, an interesting exercise.
Best regards
IL.

Bit more than "an interesting exercise" - without the proof Gibbins has just found everything is just speculation.

The quote from the Pall Mall Gazette is a good insight into how imprecise information from the Army gets turned into incorrect information in the media that is copied back then - and today. The wounding of Mjr WA Gale could have been published and become fact.

I would like to know how Lt-Col HR Gale who, apparently had actual experience of the topography around Ladysmith, was sent to another theatre. One of Buller's failings was his lack of real knowledge about the ground he was fighting over.

Regards
Meurig

LinneyI wrote: Gibbins
I think a few of us favoured the "incorrect initials" answer. Nevertheless, as you say, an interesting exercise.
Best regards
IL.

I agree that this is a salutary exercise and a good example of how misinformation could go 'viral' and become embedded in what seem to be reliable sources.

Even before the Pall Mall 'correction' I'd begun to think about how seemingly first-hand information about an officer's career might get into the papers. Those details about WA Gale's background in one of the papers - the dates of his commission, his promotions, his previous war service and appointments - might seem as if they are straight from the man himself, whereas all good newspaper offices of the day must have had copies of the Army Lists precisely in order to compile this kind of detail for their readers - exactly as the Pall Mall correction reveals.

The interesting outcome of all this as SWB suggests is what was going on with HR Gale in Ladysmith. I don't have my file on him to hand, but I do recall an article on RE mapmaking in the area in the years prior to the war and the inadequacies that were identified in their representation of features in the land around Ladysmith. Buller would have wanted intelligence from a man like Gale who had intimate knowledge of the area, and it's striking how quickly Gale seems to have made it out after his 'wound' (is there any other independent record of this wound, in the casualty records?). The wound would presumably have had him evacuated from Ladysmith outside the Boer cordon to the field hospital, from which he could have made his way out.

I wonder whether the absence of the Ladysmith clasp on Gale's QSA medal was because he was not attached to any unit within Ladysmith when he was caught up there, and thus was ineligible for the clasp.