Tag: military

No.3 Battalion Overseas Training Brigade At Sandhill Camp, Longbridge Deverill – AIF War Diaries Digitised – Jo Caminiti Research

Wednesday 2nd July 2014

Jo Caminiti writes ~

SANDHILL CAMP, LONGBRIDGE DEVERILL

“Hi Danny,

My name is Jo Caminiti, from Victoria, Australia. I saw you were interested in this subject on your website.  The Australian War Memorial had digitised official AIF war diaries and in doing research on my grandfather’s service in 1918/19 I found the records of the No 3 Battalion, Overseas Training Brigade located at Sandhill Camp, Longbridge Deverill. Records are available from late 1917 to end 1918 at http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/AWM4/23/98/

My grandfather arrived in England on 13 November 1918 and his diary refers to arriving at Tidworth station on 15 November 1918 and marching 2 miles to camp at Parkhouse No. 2.  I am still trying to work out what the official name of the camp was so that I can gather information from the AIF war diaries. He remained there until 5 December when he went on leave to visit London and friends in Edinburgh before returning to No. 6 camp 14 Hurdcott for 6 weeks training before going over to France.  

I am in the research phase for a book based around my grandfather’s diaries and letters about his time in the Graves Registration Detachment exhuming fallen soldiers from the battlefields and smaller cemeteries and re-interring them in the larger concentration cemeteries around Villers Bretonneux on the Western Front.

I hope you find the link to the AIF war diaries of interest and that they fill in some gaps.”

Danny Howell writes ~

Jo didn’t mention grandfather’s name, so I got in touch and asked, and this is Jo’s reply:

“My Grandfather was Private William Frampton McBeath AIF 58th Division who then joined the Australian Graves Registration Detachment from March – August 1919. My Mother, Norma Harrision (nee McBeath) self published his diaries and letters in the 1990s which are now digitised in the State Library of Victoria.  The link is http://cedric.slv.vic.gov.au/R/GM2LAJNNMC2KGD48RBY61UU2MAVKJ1CB1M69BLQS9JPIVJRQD4-03934?func=results-jump-full&set_entry=000006&set_number=000601&base=GEN01.  If the link doesn’t work, go to the State Library of Victoria website and search for World War 1 unit histories and you can find it in the infantry section.  There is a great letter that describes his time over Christmas & New Year on the Salisbury Plains, particularly traipsing around in the snow at night trying to find escaped prisoners from camp. 

I am now researching material to write a book based on my grandfather’s diaries and letters and am finding all sorts of fascinating information in digitised records, photos, diaries and newspaper articles on websites and blogs.  The challenge will be pulling it all into a coherent story.”

Sandhill Camp, Longbridge Deverill

Danny Howell writes:

Among the Longbridge Deverill archives in the Wiltshire And Swindon Record Office, there is a scrap of paper featuring a handwritten list of ‘The Divisions Which Occupied Sandhill Camp During The Great War.’ The list is as follows:

June 1915. 26th Division.

Oct 1915. 34th Division.

March 1916. 60th Division.

Sept 1916. R.A.M.C.

Nov 1916. 58th Division.

June 1917. Training RW Brigade.

Oct 1917 to Aug 1919. Australian Imperial Forces.

This tells us nothing really of the activity and events that must have been witnessed by Longbridge Deverill villagers during the First World War years. We now know that 5,000 men, serving King and Country, were stationed (though not all at the same time), at Sandhill Camp.

Finding out more about the camp and what went on there is not easy. As Terry Crawford says in his book, Wiltshire And The Great War, published by DPF in 1999, “Frustratingly the Warminster Journal, having regularly featured the tented camps established in the Wylye Valley within weeks of the war’s beginning, barely mentions the hutted one at Sand Hill. By the time construction had started, press censorship was restricting references to military works and activities.”

Mrs B. M. White in A History Of Longbridge Deverill, Hill Deverill And Crockerton 914 – 1960, written in 1960, refers to a farmyard called Cowley’s, in Sand Street, Longbridge Deverill, which she could remember seeing when she was a child. She says “It was quite a picturesque farmyard, filled entirely with thatched buildings. In 1914 most of these buildings were pulled down to make room for a big Military Post Office, for the use of the military who had built a large camp to accommodate about 5000 men at Sandhill.”