Herbert Sidney Edgar was born on October 5, 1878 in Preston St . Mary.
His earliest years were lived as the son of a prosperous tenant farmer, but
soon financial disaster struck and his parents (Thomas and Harriet) began a
long series of moves presumably in search of secure employment.
The 1881 Census records the family living in Debenham Road ,
Stonham-Aspall, Bosmere. Thomas is a Farm Steward (Bailiff) and Harriet a Dairy
Woman (categorised as 'Ag. Lab' - Agricultural Labour). This marks a social
fall: Thomas is managing another man's farm not running his own, and his wife
is working for the first time. Herbert Sidney is 2,and he has an older sister
Alice Louise (4) and a younger one - Katie Mary, born on March 11, 1881. The
oldest child - Arthur - had been sent to live with Harriet's parents, the
Worters. Soon the family had to move to another part of Suffolk.
Both Alice Louise and Herbert started at Worlwingworth C. of
E. Primary School on 20 October, 1884. Founded in 1689, the school was free to
all children of inhabitants who rented at rents not exceeding £10 per year,[1]
further indication of the family's humble status.
Herbert's brother Wilfred Henry Edgar was born in Tendring, Essex in May 1888,
so the family were obviously there by that time. Herbert and Katie are known to have attended a school at Clacton-on-Sea , about seven miles away. But it wasn't long before their schooling was disrupted by another move.
Herbert started at Wetherden County
Primary School Stanley is
said to have started on the same date. Herbert and Katie are said to have
attended a school at Clacton-on-Sea, Stanley
none.[2]
Annie Gertrude, who started on 17 March 1890, was also attending for the first
time.[3] Wetherden
is a small village close to Stowmarket. The family lived at Rose Cottage - numbers 1 and 2 Rose Cottage are now Grade 11 Listed Buildings, but I don't know if that's where they were. Then they were off again.
In 1891 the family is living at Great Bealings and Thomas is
now no longer a bailiff but an agricultural labourer. And so is young Herbert,
his schooling over by the age of 12, and the prospect of a life of hard and
badly paid work stretching before him.
In 1901 his parents are living in Stapleford Abbots in the
Ongar district and Thomas is still an agricultural labourer. But where is
Herbert? Well, Census day in 1901 was April 1 and on March 29, at the age of 22
years and 5 months, Herbert had signed up as a soldier. On his Attestation form
he describes himself as a 'labourer' and states that he
hasn't lived 'out of (his) Father's house for three years'. Let's bring in the
testimony of Wilfred 'Bay' Edgar here:
Herbert, my father,
joined the Essex police later the City of London police followed by the Royal
Horse Artillery.
If we assume that both Bay (who was writing about his
father) and the Attestation form (penalty for lying = two years hard labour) then we can reconstruct Herbert's movements in two possible ways: at some point later than March 29, 1898
(three years before he signed the form) he left the family home and worked for
two police forces before returning to farm labour OR he was a policeman in the early
1890s but returned to live with his parents and accept work on a farm towards
the end of the decade. Of course, Bay might be mis-remembering and/or Herbert
might have had reason to risk lying to the army, but I'm inclined to trust both
sources at the moment.
What else can we learn from Herbert's Attestation?
Well, he was, as Bay said, joining the Royal Regiment of
Artillery. This had just been reorganised:
On 1 July 1899, the
Royal Artillery was divided into three groups: the Royal Horse Artillery of 21
batteries and the Royal Field Artillery of 95 batteries comprised one
group, while the coastal defence, mountain, siege and heavy batteries were
split off into another group named the Royal Garrison Artillery of 91
companies.[4]
Herbert's brother Stanley was to be conscripted into the
Royal Garrison Artillery in 1917, while Herbert's service included both the
Horse and Field branches.
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6829236
The job of the RHA was to operate light, mobile guns
that provided firepower in support of the cavalry.[5]
Herbert joined them in the middle of the Boer War (1899-1902), so it's possible
he hoped to see service in South
Africa - if so he was to be disappointed.
Herbert signed up in Woolwich at a time when his parents
were living in Essex :
this might give some support to the second 'timeline' I suggested above in which Herbert was a
City of London
policeman just before joining the army. His service was to be for seven years with the colours and then five
more years in the First Class Army Reserve.
Other documents in his army Pension Records give us a more
complete picture of Herbert in 1901 and some glimpses of his military service.
His medical form tell us he had a fresh complexion, blue
eyes, brown hair, and no distinctive marks. He was 5' 9" tall and weighed 148
pounds - definitely not overweight, perhaps even on the lean side. His chest
was 38' and he could expand it another two inches. He was examined and considered
fit for the army on March 29 1901, the day he applied. He was or claimed to be
Anglican, which is not surprising given his churchwarden father.
His regimental number was 15747 and he joined the Royal Horse
Artillery (RHA) at Woolwich on April 1
1901, his service reckoned from March 29. He was a Gunner, the equivalent of
Private in the artillery.
What followed was 6 weeks of preparation for army life. On
April 6 he had three vaccinations in his left arm with 'perfect' results. He
stayed at Woolwich for six weeks, probably for basic training. He was posted gunner in the 'Y'
Battery of the Royal Horse Artillery on May 16
1901. His medical records suggest he arrived at Aldershot
on May 14 but I can find no link with the Y Battery there. He had no hospital
admission and no recorded medical interventions at Woolwich but his luck was
about to change. He was being treated at Aldershot
between July 18 and August 3, 1901. The
doctor who made this record had a bad case of 'medical handwriting' but I think
he was suffering from Gout - one of the words
describing the treatment is 'caustics' which were used for this condition
at the time. He was back to the doctor on October 7 and his treatment lasted
until the 15th, this time with a mild case of tonsillitis ('temperature normal').
It seems that neither case necessitated a stay in hospital.
So far Herbert's life had been lived in the eastern and
southern counties of England.
But what happened next was predictable - the Army
at this time was a fundamentally imperialist institution, and insofar as it
also existed to defend Britain from European threats it wasn't yet clear whether
the potential enemy was France or Germany - but it represented a revolution in
Herbert's life.
On January 4, 1902 he was posted to India as a
gunner, landing there on March 13. He was now in battery K (Hondeghem) of the
Royal Horse Artillery which was originally formed by the East India Company in
1809.[6] He arrived at his first base, Sialkot , on 29 March 1902. Sialkot
is in the north eastern part of the Punjab and what is today Pakistan .
Average temperatures during the May-June peak are 38-39 Centigrade (over 100
Fahrenheit) and have been known to reach 48.9C (120F).[7]
Given that the RHA's job was to provide Artillery support
for the cavalry, it seems that both here
and at his next India
posting he was working with the famous 'Bengal Lancers' - a general term for a
number of different regiments.[8]
While in India Herbert's army career progressed slowly - he
remained at the basic rank of Gunner. On 15 December 1902 he successfully
passed through a class of instruction called 'Ambulance'. He was granted 'G. C.
pay' on March 29, 1903. This is Good Conduct pay for the two years he'd served:
I think he was given an extra 1d. (one old penny) a day, but the record isn't
clear. It was awarded because he'd not been punished during his two year
service.[9]
Herbert was receiving treatment for 25 days in the summer of
1903 with 'Soft chancre'. This is a painless sore, most probably on the penis,
and the diagnosis suggests venereal disease not a penile ulcer of another
origin.[10]
Herbert was treated by the application of 'black wash' - Lotio hydrargiri nigra - a mixture of calomel and limewater. This sounds an unpleasant procedure, and it must have been a worrying time, but he made a
good recovery - this might be because the chancre often disappears after a
month or so without any treatment! A hard-to-read note seems to be in
connection with this episode: 'bears satisfactory marks, re-examined 1908'.
Whatever the exact wording, Herbert was medially examined on a number of later
occasions and he was completely healthy. It seems he never needed any more
medical treatment during his time in the army.
In any case, Herbert's infection was not uncommon - in fact,
you could even say he got off luckily. Records from 1888 show that 30% of a
strength of 101,695 to be infected with venereal diseases (including syphilis,
gonorrhoea and soft chancre). Of these, 41% were constantly sick and 6%
invalids.[11]
Later in the year Herbert received a new posting, although
it was still in British India . He arrived at Meerut in Uttar Pradesh on
November 23, 1903. The city is 70km. north east of (New) Delhi and was one of the most important sites
of the Indian Uprising/Mutiny of 1857.
St. John's Church, Meerut, c. 1905: By India Illustrated - http://digital.lib.uh.edu/u?/p15195coll29,137, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19544961
More important to Herbert was probably
the fact that it's even hotter than Sialkot ,
the recorded high being 46.1C (115F). In
1901 the population was 118, 539 people - today it's heading towards
1.5 million.[12] The crowds, liveliness and colour of Indian streets must have been as big a contrast as can be imagined with the sparse populations of the East Anglian villages in which Herbert had lived as a young man, and even the City of London wouldn't have been much of a preparation. Sadly I know nothing about Herbert's reactions to his experiences in the East. It does seem though that he was not engaged in active service during his time in India, as this was a relatively peaceful time in the history of the Raj.
His service in India ended on 7 March 1904 after 2
years 77 days.
He obviously liked army life because on returning to Britain he made
provisions to extend his service. On April 1,1904, while still in 'K' battery,
he elected to come under the provisions of service pay A.O. 66 of 1902 and he
was granted Service Pay Class 1 at the rate of 6d. per day. I'm not sure what
this means. A number of online sources state that army privates got one
shilling a day basic pay at around this time, although 'stoppages' for food and
rent took up about half of that. Herbert's 6d. went up to 7d. in 1906 when he
got his second Good Conduct badge for another two years without punishment, so
my guess is that the 6d. a day was in addition to his basic pay of about one
shilling (12 d.).
Three days later, on April 4,1904 Herbert agreed to extend
his period of full-time regimental service ('with the colours') to eight years from the seven
he'd signed up for. He was at the Christchurch Station (Hampshire) and his form
tells us he was 'a very sturdy clean soldier' and his character was 'V. G.'
(very good). His active service was due to expire on March 29 1909.
On June 14, 1904 he was granted the army's Third Class
Certificate of Education. The Certificate system was set up in 1861 to help
soldiers achieve educational standards suitable for rising through the ranks:
The third-class
certificate specified the standard for promotion to the rank of corporal: the
candidate was to read aloud and to write from dictation passages from an easy
narrative, and to work examples in the four compound rules of arithmetic and
the reduction of money.[13]
Herbert had been a Gunner for three years now, and it seems
he was preparing for promotion.
[1] The Victoria History of the County of
Suffolk, edited by William Page, F.S.A., Vol. 2, (Archibald Constable,
London, 1907),353.
[2]http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbor%2fschool%2fsuffolk%2fa2703_3%2f0073&parentid=gbor%2fschool%2fa27033%2f692015&highlights=%22%22;
http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbor%2fschool%2fsuffolk%2fa2703_3%2f0076&parentid=gbor%2fschool%2fa27033%2f692123
[3]http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbor%2fschool%2fsuffolk%2fa2703_3%2f0073&parentid=gbor%2fschool%2fa27033%2f692015&highlights=%22%22
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Artillery#History
[5] http://www.1914-1918.net/rha.htm
[6]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H_Battery_(Ramsay%27s_Troop)_Royal_Horse_Artillerys://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(Hondeghem)_Battery_Royal_Artillery
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sialkot
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_Lancers
[9] http://www.reubique.com/gcpay.htm
[10] http://jramc.bmj.com/content/90/6/282.full.pdf
[11] file:///C:/Users/brian/Downloads/ibms-syphilis-posters-congress.pdf
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meerut
[13] http://www.reubique.com/educatn.htm
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