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Release of Naval and Mercantile Marine Pension Records by Ancestry

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Members of The Western Front Association will be delighted to learn that the first of a series of releases of the WFA's Pension Record Cards and Ledgers archive have been made available through Ancestry. The first two sets of records to be released account for about 0.1% of the records the WFA saved from destruction with a much larger release of …

An analysis of the Mercantile Marine index cards

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Within the millions of documents the WFA have saved was a small metal set of four drawers that - in the scale of the archive - is minute, constituting less than 0.1% of the total archive. The cards in this set of drawers (see photo below) numbered less than 4,300 and were - as can be seen - labelled 'Mercantile Marines in the Great War'. These card…

The Ministry of Pensions during and after the Great War

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The Ministry of Pensions was a truly monolithic organisation, by the end of 1920 it had 19,121 staff, was paying 1,600,000 pensions, and spending more than £23,000,000 per year. Above: The Bromyard Avenue site in Acton that was the Ministry of Pensions offices (built in about 1921) seems now to be a residential complex. What is often lost in t…

Chelsea and the disabled soldier

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At the outbreak of war in 1914 each of the two great military departments, the War Office and the Admiralty, dealt with their own pensions. It was soon clear, however, that this system would be difficult to manage. This was especially so in the case of the War Office who used the Chelsea Hospital to calculate and pay any disability or widows pensio…

Using the RFC to unlock the workings of widow’s pensions

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It was only in early 1915, 6 months in to the war, that the War Office began paying pensions to the widows of those soldiers who had been killed. This wasn’t down to any lack of a pension system, it was down to an inherent 6-month delay between death and a pension being paid to allow time for the man to turn up alive, and any necessary paperwork to…