Picked this up at the coin show to go with my ww1 themed cabinet. First war medal I’ve owned.
Did some research and it’s a very interesting story based on his service record.
This guy Alfred David Michael, 26 in 1914, was the 127th volunteer to sign up out of Bristol, meaning he walked into the recruiting office at the absolute beginning of the war. He was a fisherman and signed up for the navy, but they didn’t have enough ships to put these guys on so they handed them a rifle and throw them into the trenches as the RNVR/RND.
Alfred likely fought as a shock trooper at Antwerp and Gallipoli, before the unit was transferred to the Western Front to fight at The Somme / Ancre. His unit was used as “over the top” tip of the spear shock troops in these campaigns, incurring horrific casualties in brutal trench warfare full of industrialized violence and rampant disease. The turnover for his unit was 300% over the full course of the war.
Somehow he physically survived all this before having a psychological break in October 1916, where he did something unknown that caused him to be sentenced to 90 days imprisonment. Somebody tried to intervene and petition for him, but the Navy did not relent.
This causes him to get discharged as essentially used up psychologically for combat (Politely termed services no longer required), sparing him from the catastrophic engagements of Arras, Ypres/Passchendaele, The German Spring Offensive at Ancre, and the Battle for The Hindenburg Line, which collectively wiped out virtually every remaining early volunteer from that regiment.
Despite the discharge, Alfred later gets the medals awarded to him, after the military begins to recognize what shell shock is, and apparently he wears them based on the wear points and rim ding.
The record of his postwar life gets spotty from there. I found a possible death record in the 50s that aligns with some of his details, but not others. No records of marriages or children in public records, but many of those have not been digitized, and being an itinerate fisherman, they were poorly recorded at the time to begin with. I’m continuing to dig more obscure sources.
Just wanted to take a moment to appreciate the incredible raw period story of an early volunteer in one of the highest casualty British units of WWI that I was able to reconstruct from an ounce of silver and the associated service records.
