Amending a Casualty's records held by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission

 

While this blog post does not relate directly to the men or the battalions of the Territorial Force, the problems and solutions to the problems are the same as those encountered when dealing with the records of men of the Territorial force Battalions of the West Yorkshire Regiment, and so I have included it here. It complements the post about Private John Moore, whose story is told in the post entitled 'The Casualty Brought in from the Cold'.

From time to time, while working on other research, I come across information about an individual casualty which might highlight errors or omissions in the commemorative information held by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), and when this happens I use the facility that CWGC has on their website to submit information to the Commission to enable them to make amendments to their records, or even to commemorate a casualty that it was previously unaware of.

As part of an ongoing project of my own, I have been working to establish the ages of casualties who belonged to the West Yorkshire Regiment during the Great War, and while doing this work, one casualty caught my attention. At first this was due to me not being able to find a register entry for his birth and it meant that I would need to consult other documentation for this man to solve the problem of his age.

The man I was looking at was Lieutenant C J Busher who belonged to 11^th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, who died on 30^th January 1916, and is buried at Bailleul Communal Cemetery Extension in Northern France. His commemoration on the CWGC website may be found here; www.cwgc.org

For the purpose of my study, the commemorative page didn’t help me as it contained no information about this officer’s age, and it didn’t include any further information relating to a next of kin to help me to find out who he was. The same was true of the original documents that relate to his burial and are viewable from his commemoration page.

My next step was to find out what his Medal Index Card (MIC) would tell me about his full name, and if it would provide a home address, as many officers’ card do.

The card shows that his full name was Charles Joseph Busher. It also shows that his home address was in Middlesbrough. Unfortunately his next of kin is shown as being Mrs CJ Busher, which as was common at the time, is simply his widow being known as Mrs Charles Joseph Busher, and is of little further help, other than confirming that he was married. Interestingly, the MIC shows that he was the recipient of a Military Cross, and this was not shown on the CWGC page. The MIC also shows other pieces of information which helps to confirm that the MIC relates to the same man as the CWGC. Both men are shown to be in 11^th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, and both men died on 30^th January 1916.

New information on the card shows that he had been a serjeant with the service number of 9807, and he had begun his operational service in France on 25^th August 1915. I knew from previous research I had done on the West Yorkshire Regiment, that 11^th Battalion , West Yorkshire Regiment belonged to 69^th Infantry Brigade, in 23^rd

Division, and that the division had deployed to France at exactly the time shown on the MIC. That information is confirmed in Major Becke’s 'Order of Battle of Divisions' series of books. This information gave me a window of time to search the London Gazette for the award of his Military Cross. Searching shows that his MC was gazetted on 18^th November 1915, in edition 29371, page 11451. His citation reads “For conspicuous gallantry and ability near Rue du Bois on the night of 21st-22nd October 1915. Accompanied by a serjeant of his battalion, he carried out a very difficult reconnaissance at great personal risk and obtained valuable information of the enemy's defences.”

While searching for his MIC, I also found a card that relates to a Mention in Dispatches, this being an award published in the New Year’s Honours for 1916. A further entry in the Gazette, using the Great War filter gives his commissioning date. Interestingly, this date of 15^th April 1915, predates when his battalion was sent to France, and this means that he had no service in France while he was still a serjeant, and strictly speaking, there is no reason why there should be any reference to his non-commissioned service on the MIC.

Returning to search the online archive site, I searched on the details I had for the service number of 9807 to see if anything was shown as a result. While the search doesn’t bring up anything relating to that number, it does show documents relating to a Charles Joseph Busher of the West Yorkshire Regiment. Interestingly, this Charles Joseph Busher was born in Ireland, which might explain why my initial search for his birth register entry couldn’t be found. It also showed that

he was married, and crucially, gives the full name of his wife, and of their children. Might it be possible to confirm or disprove a link between Lt Charles Joseph Busher MC and this man, Colour Serjeant Charles Joseph Busher, even though his service number didn’t match the 9807 number?

 

What I knew so far was that Lt Charles Joseph Busher MC had a widow living in Middlesbrough, and that Colour Serjeant Charles Joseph Busher was married to Isabella MacKinnon, whom he had married in Rangoon in 1894, and they had children named Margarita Susan, born 18/12/1898, Beatrice, born 29/09/1902, Emily Louisa, born 01/01/1904, Francis Charles, born 18/10/1905, and Henry William born in Aldershot on 10/04/1907. My next step would be to try to find a family of similar a similar make-up in the 1911 Census of England, keeping my fingers crossed that if I found one, it might have a connection to Middlesbrough.

What I found was the family living in York in 1911, and it confirmed that the Colour Serjeant Busher was now retired and working as a civilian clerk in Barracks at York.

 

Colour Serjeant Busher was interesting in his own right, even if I couldn’t connect him to Lt Busher MC. He had long service and had been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal and two Mentions in Despatches for service in the South African War of 1899-1902. He had also forfeited his DCM and campaign medals, as well as losing two years’ reckonable service which would affect his pension. Later in that set of service papers, it is shown that his decorations and medals were restored to him. This meant that if Lt Busher MC and Colour Sergeant Busher DCM was the same man, there were two decorations missing from his CWGC Commemoration, which I thought was too significant to do nothing about, and instead of this case just being of passing interest to come back to later, I decided to investigate it in some detail.

 

Having submitted amendment cases to CWGC previously, I knew there would be no merit in submitting the information as it was because there was still a gap to be bridged to conclusively prove that it all related to the same man. I felt that the crucial information I would need would be contained in his Officers Correspondence File, held by The National Archives at Kew in London. For the foreseeable future, this file would remain inaccessible to me, due to the Coronavirus pandemic. I couldn’t justify the cost of going to London to view the file, and as it hasn’t been digitised, I couldn’t download it from the Discovery website. The TNA file copying service has also been suspended for the time being too.

 

Switching focus from one of my online genealogy subscriptions to another, I repeated the search for a soldier’s file using the service number 9807. In this search I was successful and was presented with a set of enlistment papers for Charles Joseph Busher with the number 9807, who had enlisted in Middlesbrough on 15^th September 1914. This was the same man as Lt Charles Joseph Busher MC, but did this set of papers include anything to link him to 1812 Colour Serjeant Busher DCM?

 

On the first page was a promising piece of information relating previous service in 2^nd Bn West Yorkshire Regiment which ended on 30/11/1908, the reason being ‘TX’ or ‘Time Expired’. It was inching closer and convincing me that the two men were the same, but it was not conclusive enough to satisfy CWGC exacting standards. I needed to look further. The papers stated that 9807 Charles Joseph Busher had very quickly been promoted and appointed as Orderly Room Serjeant for 11^th Battalion. It was another circumstantial link, but only circumstantial. The two men were military clerks. It was promising and compelling evidence, but it was still falling short of being the proof I needed to be absolutely certain. The very next page in the set of papers gave me the confirmation I wanted. A page from a previous set of papers was included in this new enlistment, and it bore the number 1812. I finally had my link to associate 1812 Colour Serjeant Busher DCM, to 9807 Serjeant Busher who was later commissioned and later died as Lt Charles Joseph Busher MC. It was good evidence, but could it have been a misfiled page?

Further pages included in the file ruled that possibility out satisfactorily for me.

 

Another search, this time of the Register of Soldiers’ Effects showed that Lt Busher’s balances and allowances were paid to his widow, named as ‘Bella’, a common contraction of Isabella, and exactly how Mrs Busher is named on the 1911 Census.

A recap of the information gathered so far shows that both men share the same relatively unusual name. Both men were married to a woman known as Bella and headed a family of children who had the same names. Both men were born in Co Wexford in Ireland in 1868. Both men had left the same battalion of the same regiment on the same date.

 

The story of Charles Joseph Busher runs as follows. He was born in Enniscorthy in Co. Wexford in 1868. He enlisted into the West Yorkshire Regiment at Dungannon on 4^th June 1887, and served with the 2^nd Battalion, and served with the battalion in India, Gibraltar, West Africa, South Africa and the United Kingdom over nearly 22 years. He reached the rank of Colour Serjeant and was decorated with the Distinguished Conduct Medal and received two Mentions in Despatches for his service in South Africa. In 1903 he was convicted of fraud when serving as a Company Pay Serjeant, being reduced to Private and forfeiting his decorations and medals, as well as two years’ pensionable service. By the time he left the army in 1908, he had regained the rank of Lance Serjeant, and was successful in applying to have his decorations and medals restored to him.

Following his retirement from the army, he worked as a clerk in barracks in York, but later moved to Middlesbrough to take employment as a commissionaire at a shipyard in the town.

He re-joined the West Yorkshire Regiment after the outbreak of war and was quickly made Orderly Room Serjeant. He did not declare to the army that he held the DCM.

Commissioned before his battalion left for France, he quickly came to the attention of his chain of command by proving to be a brave and tenacious officer when patrolling no man’s land, gaining for himself a third Mention in Despatches and a Military Cross.

He died of wounds on 30^th January 1916 and was buried in Bailleul Communal Cemetery Extension, aged 47.

 

It is probable that Lt Busher’s DCM and Mentions in Despatches was unknown to the Imperial War Graves Commission because he did not declare them on his re-enlistment, despite them being well documented in his original service file, but the reasons why the Commission was unaware of his MC and third Mention in Despatches are less clear.

 

I have (22^nd October 2020) submitted to the CWGC an Amendment Request in relation to Lt CJ Busher. The amendment request asks that the commemorative details the Commission holds on this casualty are altered to include the details of his MC, DCM and three Mentions in Despatches, and that his gravestone is altered to show the MC and DCM post-nominal letters.

I’m very hopeful that the evidence I’ve submitted will be sufficient to enable the CWGC to make the necessary changes to Lt Busher’s Commemorations.

Edit: CWGC made the requested changes on 16th November 2020, however, as expected, his headstone inscription will not be amended until such time as it needs to be replaced.