WW1 - questions!

[giddlesticks]

Can anyone help…

if you went into (in this case) the queens battalion west Surrey regiment… were you living in west Surrey at the time of enlistment? Or are the regional names meaningless?

This ancestor later went in to the ‘land army’ does this mean the territorial army?

I can only find refs online to ‘womens land army’ not a men’s land army..

finally - any idea what the Land army men might have done?

thank you!

I don't know the answer fully but my granny's first husband died at the end of the war in the Lancashire Fusiliers- they lived in Northumberland. I couldn't understand it but it turned out that by the first few days on November 1918 (he died on 4th November) so many army regiments were decimated that they had amalgamating the the men left from those regiments to maintain fighting batallions. So he started off somewhere totally different and ended up in the Lancashire Fusiliers- he had no link to Lancashire at all ( he was actually Scottish).

@LuluBlakey1 oh I can see how that would happen, thank you.

Depends on the date, pre 1916 lots of Pal’s battalions made up of local lads. After the Somme lots were drafted to fill the gaps. My G grandad was Lancashire but was conscripted .into the warwickshires in 1917

My Great grandad was in the Hussars regiment. Mounted cavalry. He's listed in several other units dependent on where he was needed. Not one of them relevant to the county he came from.

My Grandad was in a west country regiment despite coming from the home counties.

My Dad the same. Wanted to join the tank regiment. However, the recruiting sergeant, with his eye on his bounty (not chocolate bar) advised him to join the guards regiment. Again, totally unrelated to where he was born.

Super thanks.

has anyone heard of the (men’s) land army?? Does that mean Home Guard, maybe?

AFAIK and this is not my area of expertise - people were drafted into a local-ish regiment. The thinking was that if you put people with common ground together they'd bond and form a tighter group.

But someone from Glasgow could have been put in the Black Watch, Royal Scots, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders or any number of another regiments. So if you know that someone was put into X regiment, it might be a clue as to where they're from but no more than that.

Hi OP, as far as I know there wasn't a Home Guard in the way there was in WW2. I found this about the Women's Land Army - women being recruited to work on the land in the place of men who were fighting.

www.womenslandarmy.co.uk/world-war-one/

A lot of men who enlisted were effectively not issued with a gun but instead a shovel.

www.longlongtrail.co.uk/army/regiments-and-corps/the-labour-corps-of-1917-1918/

I've looked into this a bit as I know from my great grandfathers records he was assigned to the Labour Corp.

He was older, had children and crucially had a career working with horses. We think - but don't know for sure - that he looked after the horses near the front line.

The Labour Corp aren't talked about much and there are few surviving records relating to them and what they did. But they fulfilled an essential job. They were formed later in the war as a logistic and support group. The sheer scale of the war was crazy and to supply the front lines huge amounts of rail line was laid that went right to the front in places. There were also the miles and miles of trenches to maintain which were frequently bombed and needed repair.

The Labour Corps were employed to carry out these type of tasks. Whilst they didn't go over the top, it was still an extremely dangerous job, often working in exposed parts of the front under fire. And they didn't have guns.