Distracted Researching Results in a New Look at a WWI Record

The book that sent me off on a tangent

My intentions were good. I planned to read the souvenir guidebook Portsmouth Historic Dockyard for this week's blog post. But, as so often happens when doing research, I got distracted when I got to the write up about the WWI ship that is currently on display in Portsmouth Harbour. Was that the ship that my grandfather was on during WW1, or at at least similar to it?

I knew that my grandfather had been in the Royal Navy in WWI because I had found his military record in the Royal Navy Registers of Seaman's Services on the National Archives Discovery website. At one point my father had told me that his father had been on Lemnos and Mykonos, or maybe he said Mudros, during his time in the Mediterranean in WWI. I imagined my grandfather cruising around the Greek Islands on a battleship or maybe something a bit smaller. Well, maybe cruising isn't quite the word since they had to look out for the enemy - there was a war on.

Picturing my grandad as a young man in a naval uniform I was brought up short by the words "ENGT TO RAF" stamped at the bottom of his naval record. A bit odd that especially as another thing my grandad had said to my dad was that dad's elder brother Harry would give him a hard time for enlisting in the RAF for WWII as that was "Harry's" branch of the service. I thought that grandad would have stayed clear of the RAF if that was the case.

So, my initial thoughts had resulted in a two-pronged quest:

• to find out more about my grandad's seaman's record
• to find out the background behind grandad's remark to my dad about Harry's nose being put out of joint by my dad joining "his" branch of the military 

The information gleaned from the seaman's record follows below. How I found out more about grandad's remark will be covered next week.

Partial transcription of my grandad's seaman's service record:

Research into the record

President II, I took to be his first ship when I first looked at the record but, according to information from the Great War Forum https://www.greatwarforum.org/topic/30418-hms-president-ii/, the President II was the Royal Navy's accounting base. A location related to a sailor's pay not a ship that he would be assigned to. The second bracketed word under President II was Chingford. A Google search for that name brought up Chingford Aerodome which was used by the Royal Navy for their flying arm before the Royal Air Force (RAF) was founded in 1918. Another search into the rank of ac1 found in the rating column came up with a Wikipedia article on aircraftmen  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraftman which told me that AC1 was used for an aircraftman first class.

While I had been picturing my grandad as a sailor, he was actually an airman, at least during the time that the navy had their own air arm. I found an RAF record for him on FindMyPast which added more information about his WWI service. What I uncovered, leaves me with further questions to research. I have seen information about the flyers over France during WWI but what kind of flying was done in the Eastern Mediterranean, which was where my grandfather was sent, according to his record.

I wonder what I will find when I look into that question? But I mustn't get distracted from my research for next week's post about the background to grandad's remark about "Harry's" branch of the service.

Salmson 2 WWI recon aircraft*

Images:


*By Unknown - Original publication: 1918Immediate source: http://riseofflight.com/forum/topic/27999-gift-registry-list-enter-your-na#e/page-46, Public Domain, 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42385321