Returned application.

Can't believe they didn't originally check either side of his date of birth. Just two days out!

You might want to ask the moderators to change the name of your thread now to draw more attention to the regiment your Dad was in.

Good luck now you have all his details. Looking forward to seeing his story unfold.

 

Au contraire, Maria, I'm not in the least surprised when dealing with infamously so-called 'military intelligence' expecting Glasgow staff, armed only with a 'Mickey Mouse' back-of-envelope-type excuse for a database, to know what's stored darn sarf in Derbys. Either the office & warehouse need to be brought together or the former given the proper database they need to do their job and you can bet the reason neither of these gets done boils down to cutbacks allied to a lack of common sense.

And I'd suggest not materially changing the name of this thread since it stands as a very useful object lesson in what can go wrong. If attention needs drawing to the regiment, it would have been better to start a new (interpretation) thread and edit post 61 not to invite discussion of that here. I see Owen's beaten me to it so just to say, now, best not to discuss content here lest we get out of bonk with the new thread he's split off just for that.

Finally, John, just to add my very relieved woo hoo !!!

Cheers,
Steve

PS: As Owen has since deleted this thread's original post 61, in favour of the new thread's post 1, I'll quote the DoB-confusion bit here as really part of this troubleshooting discussion:

I'm not so sure that 2-day discrepancy wasn't James' own invention - 2 also being the adjustment he made to the year. It would have been atypical, granted, but I can see a grain of logic in there ...
Attestation as yet unseen, brothers claiming to be born either 20/18 days apart so far tends to debunk the family story about John & James having enlisted together.

 

Hi steve and thanks for the big WOO HOO!!!. it's a bit of a relief to at long last see what part my dad played in ww2. i was starting to doubt if he played any part when his file couldn't be found. when you say "2 also being the adjustment he made to the year" isn't correct as 1921 is his birth year,i applied for records previously giving his birth year as 1919 to see had he enlisted under age. your right about the family story telling how dad and john enlisted together being a bit fanciful,it did throw a bit of a spanner into the works. hopefully i can get some info re dad's regiment and their role in the war from the good folk on this site.

regards,john.

 

Whoops, by Jove, you're right John - it just goes to prove how easily I'm muddled whilst distracted by other things !

FWIW, I'm still wondering about my post 57 speculation about your dad initially falsifying his DoB (so the Army may have had no correct version properly written by him) and being found out (so correction perhaps only made by a 3rd party with scope for error). There's also the fact that some handwritten 6s can be misread as 8s and vice versa. Hoping you have his attestation and similarly plan to share it 2nd, as you did for your uncle, I'd be interested to see it over on the new thread. Or perhaps the Army managed to 'lose' it as incriminating evidence of their having been hoodwinked ? We'll see ...

Best,
Steve

 

steve,the images i posted is all i received from brown street.

 

I'm sorry you seem peeved at another of my technically-accurate well-intended observations but, FYI, a 'move' is not the same in computing terms as one in the physical world - for belt & braces safety (not least lest something like a power cut should interrupt the process whilst, to mix my metaphors, 'between stools with its pants down'), any reliable computerised filing system breaks the action down into roughly these steps:
1 - copy original data to new location
2 - check/verify new copy
3 - delete either the original (if copy OK) or the copy (if abortive)
4 - maybe circumstantially retry steps 1-3 a few times if abortive
5 - report success/failure
All that usually happens in the blink of an eye, without Joe/Jane Doe ever realising it thus acting in their best interest, but John's original post 61 remained available here for quite some time (10s of minutes IIRC having not timed it) after its duplicate appeared as a new thread - certainly long enough to plainly separate visible steps 1 & 3 for all witnesses to see ... not least including you in the driving seat.

In your shoes, FWIW now you've raised the issue, I'd have at least left a cross-referential link exactly where John's post 61 used to be - if only for continuity not to undermine/destroy the context of Maria's direct reply to it.

@ John - In that case I'd suggest double-checking you've not been short-changed. RA records can be appallingly brief with little inter-officer consistency as to level of detail but, unless there's been something like the dodgy cover-up I earlier theorised, the attestation really ought to be included as a fundamental core document regardless of a recruit's later history. The only exceptions I know to that rule of thumb, since the RAF consciously transcribed all their personnel records onto A3 cards back in the '60s, may therefore be rare cases of misfits transferred from the RAF to the Army - apparently not the case here so merely remarked upon for completeness.

Steve

 

It's given me a headache :wink:

 

And there's me thinking I'd a one glass to many

 

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men", eh ? Thanks for that, Owen. Like too many things these days, this new forum system seems to have been a retrograde step in more ways than one and you have my full sympathy in having to work around some of the designers' sadly all-too-common lack of comprehension & foresight - a failure of which I'm only too aware as a retired software engineer. Sorry if I laid it on a bit thick but, having once been labelled as 'pathologically honest', I tend to view any accusation of having told a porkie in a very dim light.

I don't know if, BTW, you were recently instrumental in getting the e-mail alert system apparently working properly at long last - or whether the result of a routine system update - but I'm very grateful for that breakthrough after so many years out of mind. Only getting PM alerts, I'd long given up trying to 'follow' threads so imagine my surprise when I suddenly received an alert for a thread I'd been following on the old system ! There's still too much functionality & personal data been lost but there's no use crying over spilt moloko ...

 

I just love reading things in PLAIN english. Doh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :ewink:

 

Just to wrap it up re the attestation question, having just gotten around to browsing the posted record, I see images 19 & 23 give different dates for that - albeit with the latter struck through but the important thing is they're both in May/Jun 1941and more than 2 years later than John's in Feb 1939. Thus the family story of them enlisting together typically bites the dust - would that we'd known that up front !

 

hi steve,re the family story it must have grown arms and legs over the years with different branches of the family adding their own tuppence worth. i suppose if we'd known the correct details it wouldn't have been so frustrating,but if we had known all the details i wouldn't have gone looking for either dad's or uncle john's files,so we wouldn't have had all this"fun" trying to find them.