The Old Front Line
Walk the battlefields of the First World War with Military Historian, Paul Reed. In these podcasts, Paul brings together over 40 years of studying the Great War, from the stories of veterans he interviewed, to when he spent more than a decade living on the Old Front Line in the heart of the Somme battlefields.
The Old Front Line
The MOD War Detectives
In a Trench Chat special we speak to the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre Commemorations team - otherwise known as 'The MOD War Detectives' - who work to recover and identify the dead on the former battlefields of the Great War. Thanks to the Ministry of Defence for their help in making this possible, and special thanks to Rosie Barron, Nichola Nash and Alexia Clark who all appear in this episode.
The images used are Crown Copyright.
Discover more about the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre Commemorations team and visit their Facebook page.
Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.
To recover the dead from the landscape of the First World War. Welcome to a very special Trench Chat. And I'm absolutely delighted and honored to be joined by the MOD War Detectives. That's the name by which they're known widely through the media and through the work that they do officially. They are the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Center Commemorations Team. And I'm really pleased to be joined by Rosie Barron, Nicola Nash, and Alexia Clark. So thank you all for joining us here. And I know for a fact that the people who listen to this podcast will be absolutely fascinated to discover more about the work that you do. So thanks for joining us. So in terms of kind of what you do, I often say on the podcast that the pages of First World War history never stop turning, that there is always something happening and something that we discover. And I think The kind of work that you do very much typifies that because you are continuing to write those pages of First World War history through what you do.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. I think part of our role is finishing the stories of men whose stories stopped at the point that they went missing. It's nice to be able to bring a conclusion, both for them and for their families. surviving families now.
SPEAKER_03:So it's also nice for us to be able to tell the stories of these men, because a lot of the men that we do discover are sort of private, the everyday kind of men that were volunteered or conscripted. So to be able to tell their stories as well is really important to us.
SPEAKER_02:And it's about drilling down to an individual story. It's not about looking at the sheer numbers of casualties. It's about looking at that one man focusing on him and his story how did he come to be there what's his experience what happened to him as alexia says what it still means to the families even though of course they wouldn't know these men it's still a very strong emotional bond that a lot of the families have with them even some of the families who have never even heard of their relative before they'll still come out to the service and attend the burial service and find it a very emotional experience
SPEAKER_00:And I guess that, you know, with the Great War more than a century ago, we're in the 110th anniversary of 1915 at the moment, it seems it's a very great distance in terms of that being a past, but it's a present too, as you say, through how ordinary people react with the stories of relatives that they never knew, but you discover on these battlefields.
UNKNOWN:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:First World War, it's a huge part of our kind of collective cultural history that almost every family has got some kind of story that they can tell whether their relative was missing or survived and came through. So it's lovely for us as well when we contact a family and they're able to give us pictures and letters sent back from the trenches by these soldiers. And, you know, that's the sort of thing that families use to get to know their relatives. And, you know, families are proud of of their, you know, their great uncles or, you know, cousins, etc. You know, they're proud of their military service. And, you know, for them then to be able to pay tribute to them in this way, I think is really special for them and very emotional as well.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm sure you must take on some of that emotion yourself, because it's not the kind of cold, hard facts of history you're dealing with, it is human lives.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, we do get to know some of the families we work with quite well. Sometimes even almost over a period of years between, say, an initial identification and then the actual burial service. And of course, we do do second war cases as well. So we get much closer relatives, siblings, children of the soldier. Of course, that's increasingly common. dying out now. But yeah, we have done some where we've got really close family involved. That brings a whole new level of emotional connection to the story and to what we're doing. I
SPEAKER_01:think it's really interesting as well, the emotional response that we sometimes get from the serving soldiers that we take out with us now to deliver services. I think a lot of them haven't necessarily engaged with history before. They haven't really, they don't have a great deal of knowledge about the First World War or what the impact of it was. And you see them walking along the roads in the cemeteries, sort of looking at the graves and saying, none of these lads are any older than I am, and feeling some kind of connection for the first time to their... military family from the past, but also when we have a family, a modern day family in a graveyard or a cemetery with us, at the point that a flag is presented to them and they choke up, you can see the soldiers often sort of having a bit of a swallow before they say anything, because it is affecting them as well. There is definitely that emotional response, even from people that you mightn't expect it.
SPEAKER_00:And I guess that, you know, part of what you do is about closure for families by bringing soldiers in from the cold, but also, I think, reminding people of the importance of this history and our wider connection to it, you know, and include, as you say, serving personnel in the military today, yes. I
SPEAKER_02:think what we do is... They are almost as important to the story as the soldier who we might be burying. And what are they going to get out of the experience? How is that going to educate them going forward? And a lot of the time they'll come back to us and they'll say, well, this was the best week of my life. my time in the army. And it's not an intentional thing that, you know, we necessarily set out to do, you know, we do this regularly, but for them, it's a, it's, it's a really special thing to be part of. And yeah, and seeing them engage from, they maybe arrive in France and they have an expectation of, oh, we're in France for a few days and it's a bit of a jolly. And by the end of the week, you know, they'll have really engaged with what we're doing and seeing them looking around, wanting to know about, you know, the bullet holes in the back of the men in gate, where did they come from? And everything, comes alive to them in the course of that week and in sort of almost living through that experience of what the soldier went through and meeting his family and yeah it's amazing what we can do for them as well as the soldiers that we're actually commemorating.
SPEAKER_03:And we try and do that with every time we go away I mean I was away in April for a casualty that was killed during the Battle of the Rast and as part of that week we took everybody to to the tunnels to sort of have that experience and to Bimri Ridge and places like that, because for us, it's kind of about building an entire picture. It's not just the kind of roads that we go over there, we perform a ceremony and then we come back and, you know, that's another number ticked off the list. You know, we want everyone to sort of learn and experience and to be able to kind of understand everything that goes behind the work we do. I
SPEAKER_01:think the really important thing with that is, again, bringing it back to that one individual story. It's all very well to say 527,000 missing. To talk about the Battle of Arras in grand terms or on a big scale, but actually when you anchor it all to the story of the one man that you're burying and how his experience differed very little from their own, or how his upbringing differed very little from their own, that's where you make people interested in history, not through facts and figures, but through personal stories. I think that's absolutely Very
SPEAKER_00:much so. I think it kind of very much highlights the kind of personal side of the First World War. And like you say, numbers are really difficult for most people to take in. But through just one story, you can kind of highlight the wider history of it, particularly with the missing, because that is almost a unique aspect of the First World War, isn't it? The scale of it.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, that's what can make our work really difficult because, you know, yes, we do do DNA testing, but when you're looking at, you know, hundreds of potential candidates missing from just one battalion on one day, it does make narrowing it down to a sort of reasonable number an almost impossible task, especially when the only artifacts found with the casualties are general service buttons or something along those lines. So for us, you know, artifacts that they're found with are really important in light of the numbers of missing, because without that sort of thing, you know, it would be really impossible for us to do our job.
SPEAKER_02:Of course, the artefacts. There was the case recently that we did with the burial of Private John Tain. And that was an interesting one where he was found with all sorts of different artefacts, some binoculars, which were marked the Royal Berkshire Regiment signet ring, a watch. And of course, initially, we're starting to think he could be an officer because of the artefacts that were with him, ruled out the officers using DNA testing and then all we had left really was just, we knew he belonged to the Royal Barbershire Regiment. So we knew he must be 2nd Battalion. We knew he had to have died during Battle of Langemarck on the 16th of August, 1917, but there was still 80 odd candidates. So if that's all we'd have had, as Nikki said, we have to be able to narrow it down to a narrow enough pool of candidates. But in that instance, he had been previously wounded and there was damage to the bone on his left shoulder. So we were able to look at, through the casualty records essentially and look at who had previously been wounded and that then narrowed it down to a much smaller pool of candidates and also the anthropology telling us a potential age is also really helpful because by the time you get to 1917 being under 23 is not that unusual at the start of the war that might be a better statistic but yeah it's Drilling it down to using every possible way we can to get it down to a small enough pool of candidates to take DNA tests.
SPEAKER_03:And I mean, going along those same lines, I've got another case that I was working on where the casualty was found within the sort of Long's hospital site. He was Scottish, so we knew that he was killed during the 1915 Battle of Luz. We knew that he was a Cameron Highlander due to the shoulder titles that were found with him. However, there were 212 potential candidates that that person could be, even though it was from literally one day. What this casualty did have on him was a tiny little button from the Newcastle Corporate Corporation Tramways. Believe it or not, there is actually an expert on those exact kind of buttons who I was able to get in contact with. And he confirmed to me that he actually thought it was a chin strap button. So that prompted us to go through all of those potential candidates, 212, looking at the 1911 census to see if we could find any connection between the two. And we actually found one particular family who lived in Newcastle and the soldier's father actually worked for the Newcastle Corporation Tramway. So we then got in contact with him, did the DNA testing, and it came back positive. So that tiny little button that he probably kept in his pocket as a keepsake, you know, ended up being the clue to identifying someone. And so, you know, we take these leads where we can. Of
SPEAKER_02:course, we do get the other ones, the classic engraving your regimental number on your spoon. We still always do DNA testing because we know what soldiers are like in terms of picking up other people's equipment. But more often than not, we do find that those ones tend to be a match. But some of them just take you straight to them and some require almost years' worth of re-looking at the case and drilling down to any little detail that we can find.
SPEAKER_03:And of course, an issue we have is that Britain soldiers are magpies and they pick up anything shiny that they see on the grass. So sometimes that can really confuse us because In the pockets, they'll have one. In the other pocket, they'll have another. On the belt, they'll have six different cat
SPEAKER_02:badges. They'll have Australian rising stars. Yeah, so, yeah, it's basically just looking at everything we possibly can, isn't it? It's like we do end up looking at the case multiple times before we actually finally hit the nail on the head.
SPEAKER_01:You do get the super frustrating ones as well, though, where you've got a very limited pool of candidates. The artefacts are all pointing you in a very specific direction. but the DNA just doesn't come out. Either the ground is contaminated and you can't get DNA from the bones in the first place, or it really, really, really should be this guy, but for some reason it just doesn't match. And that's immensely frustrating. I think we've all been there. And it's just one of those things where you think, I've done everything I can, but this should have been possible. And it's, yeah, sometimes you have to know when enough's enough.
SPEAKER_00:And I guess you've highlighted quite a few interesting kind of aspects of this work. I mean, in the 80s and 90s, when I interviewed First World War veterans, they would often talk about how they went and lifted kit from different locations because they didn't like the stuff that had been issued to them. So one of them, for example, had a set of the leather pattern equipment, which he absolutely hated. And after the first day on the Somme, he went past a dressing station, there was piles of webbing gear, and he just helped himself to a set, which also included the guy's housewife in his spoon and his brush, all of which was marked up to another guy. And he said, well, they were much better than mine, so I just flung mine and used his for the rest of the war. So that's a kind of classic example that the artefacts don't always mean something, do
SPEAKER_03:they? That's where DNA comes in useful, because we can use that to kind of confirm when we're not 100% sure with the artefacts.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I don't know how you'd like to do this, whether you kind of want to talk through some separate elements of what you each individually do, or is that probably the best way, do you think?
SPEAKER_02:It would be useful to tell you a bit more about maybe ourselves and how we came to work as well.
SPEAKER_00:Definitely, because it's not the kind of communal garden job. This is a very unusual job, and you must come from particular backgrounds that are relevant to the work that you do.
SPEAKER_01:It's not one specific route, because what we do is so... uh wide ranging you would think actually it's just about military history oh no there's so much more and so we've all got actually really quite different backgrounds
SPEAKER_03:yeah you've got to be a professional you know genealogist you've got to be a huge event planner you've got to be um you know i mean family liaison
SPEAKER_02:family yeah people in country it's it's all sorts of different hats that we ended
SPEAKER_03:up wearing. Folding flags, renting coffins, these are all the sorts of things that we've learned over the years.
SPEAKER_01:None of us have had to play bugle yet, no, but that time might come.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you never know. So where did your collective path to this begin then, to come to this job?
SPEAKER_02:For me personally, I studied French and history in Aberystwyth and graduated. And if you know Aberystwyth, there's nothing to do there. So I came home and actually just signed up to lots of agencies, and one of them found me a job working in the MOD Medal Office, which is next door to JCCC. So my first job out of uni was assessing army second war medal entitlements, and then I had various other jobs in the Medal Office for 10 years, including I was working on the project when the Elizabeth Cross was introduced, which is an award for the next of kin of service personnel who've been killed on duty. and then knew these jobs were next door in JLC. I have a particular interest in military history. People say to me on busman's holiday if I go to EAP for the weekend, but actually the reality is that's what I did, but now somebody pays me to do it. So, yeah, just had my eyes on these jobs and just waited for the opportunity to come up. But, yeah, had that sort of, I suppose, grounding in the MOD and being around the military throughout the whole of my working life. So,
SPEAKER_03:yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And how about you, Nicola?
SPEAKER_03:I did my degree in archaeology at Bristol. Left university, worked as an archaeologist, decided that I wanted something that focused more on kind of research and my own interests, which was military history. Started searching for a job, saw the description for this one. I thought, no, that can't be a real job. Surely that's too good to be true. Went for the interview and got it. Obviously, you know, I've been doing this job for 10 years now. Absolutely love it. I'm just finishing up my master's in First World War Studies with the University of Birmingham. And one of my big interests is genealogy. So, you know, that's been a real big part of the role as well is obviously tracing other families and doing that sort of thing. Yeah. So, yeah, so I was just a civilian, came into the MOD completely fresh. But, you know, I've loved the job. And 10 years later, I'm not planning on going anywhere. I think anyone who wants to replace me will have to sort of cart me out. And
SPEAKER_00:how about you, Alexia?
SPEAKER_01:I read history and archaeology at university, so a sort of neat match between the other two. I went to the University of Wales as well at Bangor University. And I've spent the last 20 years or so actually in the museum sector. So communicating history, organising historically themed events, that kind of thing. So within the museum sector, I had a range of roles from editorial work, caring for artefacts, working with researchers, conducting my own research, but also front of house, organising private views, organising let's dig in a sandpit and find metal artifacts with a metal detector, hair days for children, all of that kind of thing. And I found out about the team when they made a television program during the World War I commemoration period. And at the time thought, well, that's the best job ever. How do you do that? I essentially have been stalking them ever since. Refreshing the civil service jobs website relentlessly until two years ago. the job came up and here I am. So again, fresh to the civil service, fresh to the MOD, but with a sort of passion for communicating history to people and trying to engage people in their own history, I suppose.
SPEAKER_03:I think the one theme you will always find running through all of us is our passion for this job and our passion for Military history and just history in general.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And sharing that with people. It's a sort of infectious passion that we can't help but... I mean, shutting us up is the task, really. I think most of us could go on for days until people have a glazed expression.
SPEAKER_00:But I think people are fascinated by this, though, because it's kind of a job that the average person in the street probably would think is something that ended... with the first world war but here we are you know a century later and it's a very current job an important job and you're all deeply engrossed in it which is quite quite obvious which is a really good thing because i don't think you could do it unless you had the approach that you've got
SPEAKER_02:no i think that it would say there's so many different tasks that we have and we're all always so busy as you say if you didn't have that passion it could quickly become overwhelming almost so yeah it's that enthusiasm that keeps us going and drives us to to keep pushing forward um so yeah it's it's we're very lucky but yeah as Nikki said we wouldn't do anything else
SPEAKER_01:there's a level of tenacity in all of us as well where we're just not going to let it go until we've done absolutely everything but the stubbornness perhaps if you will
SPEAKER_00:And I guess that's all kind of part of the debt we owe to the men and women who served in these two great conflicts, that if we have a chance to put something in the past that wasn't right for them, you know, make that wrong right, it must be very satisfying in its own right as well.
SPEAKER_01:I do wonder sometimes what, you know, you've got, you know, an ordinary soldier, a private who was brought up by a railway worker dad and one of 17 siblings. What you'd make of the British Embassy being at his funeral?
SPEAKER_03:Well, he came in somewhat baffled, but...
SPEAKER_02:We had a lady who's French at a service a couple of weeks ago. She was there with the new colleague. They get
SPEAKER_01:something rather special that they wouldn't at all have expected. But I think it is fitting and right, whether we've identified them or not, they deserve the dignity of a proper funeral.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think that dignity is so important because war robs so many people of dignity, doesn't it? So if we can give a bit back to someone, then that must be a fantastically rewarding thing to be able to do. So in terms of your kind of individual kind of stuff that you do, Rosie, I know you've been working on Private Tame. You mentioned him earlier. I don't know if you want to kind of say a little bit more about that to kind of illustrate how you go from discovery through to an identification.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so as I say, in that instance, there were lots of artefacts, which as it turned out, when I read the original Belgian report, made it a bit clearer that most of them were just sort of almost dumped. So I say once we ruled out the officers and we knew he was going to be Royal Barch Regiment, we sort of, I say, we had a list of about 11 or 12 previously wounded soldiers of that battalion. And I was working my way through them. And we were almost at the end of the list, all negative results when we looked at the case once again and spotted private team date of death listed as the 19th of August 1917. So as I say there's another thing that we have to watch out for is that while CWC records are very good there are sometimes errors. So when I looked into Private Tame a bit more actually he'd been reported missing between the 16th and the 19th but for some reason although his battalion had taken part in a large attack on the 16th it was the 19th was the date of death that got taken forward. So even when We'd done the DNA test and I'd given the results to the family. They said, but he was killed on the 19th. No, no, he wasn't. He wasn't. He was definitely killed on the 16th. So that's all been corrected now. But it was a particularly interesting case, actually, because he was a 2nd Battalion Royal Barks Regiment and he had two older brothers who had served as regulars pre-war and they'd been out in India at the time when the First World War broke out and come back to the UK and been sent out to the Western Front. And they'd actually both been killed while serving with the same battalion on the 15th of, sorry, 9th of May 1915 during the Battle of Ober's Ridge. So they were actually still missing. So we had all three of those brothers killed while serving with the same battalion. By coincidence, we held the burial service on the 8th of May this year, which meant we were still in Belgium on the 9th of May, which was the 110th anniversary of the brothers' death. So having had the burial service for John Tame the day before, we went down to the Plough Street Memorial and the Padre did a little service for soldiers and JCCC and the family for William George and Albert Tame, his two older brothers. So that was just a really nice way of linking it together. And as we say, it's all about that individual story and how we can bring that alive for the soldiers and also the experience for the family as well. And knowing that somebody really does care about the story and remembering what that mother must have gone through losing her three eldest children. So yeah, it's, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And doing that kind of work, I mean, people listening to this may not appreciate just how long the process would be for you to compile casualty lists and then start looking at all the individual soldiers within that. This is not like a five-minute job, even despite the internet and everything else.
SPEAKER_02:The case for Private Tame I worked on for five years. That's slightly artificially long because of COVID because, of course, we did have a period of two years or so where our DNA contractor couldn't travel to Arras to go around to the CWC mortuary there to take the DNA samples But again, we worked through that list one by one, got a result, moved on to the next candidate. So, yeah, they do take a long time. Sometimes you can, by chance or good educated guess, almost go straight to somebody. But it's partly chance. If you have a list of 12 people, you might get a match the first time. You might get a match on the 12th person you test. But, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And you're constantly cross-referencing with, I guess, war diaries and unit histories and just about anything else that's out there, including your button experts, as you mentioned.
SPEAKER_02:Sometimes there might be... we go to a regimental museum and you might find somebody who has a really specific information about that regiment and the quirks of how they went about doing things, which might help. But yeah, say other experts like Nicky's button expert. And it's just really any sort of information we can use, war diaries, battalion histories that maybe expand on the detail of the war diaries just occasionally sometimes when you contact the family it's them who maybe have the final clue that you need we worked on a rededication case a few years ago now he was a sapper who was killed in 1914 and the only casualty from that day was a with a particular soldier, Sapper Barnden, and a dugout had collapsed. So we're making the assumption, therefore, it's got to be him who it's referring to at the war diary. He's not mentioned by name. Contacted the family, said, good news, we've discovered his grave. And they said, oh yeah, we've got this letter that his mate wrote to his mum. So they were together building a dugout and it collapsed on the two of them. And unfortunately, one of the wooden beams hit him on the head. And that's how, it's like the family literally has the description of how you die which just tied the whole story together yeah
SPEAKER_00:absolutely fascinating and Nicola I know you've been working on the project at Lens with the recovery of a lot of soldiers from that battlefield and DNA is a big part of that
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so I mean, I think that the Longs Hospital site is a really good illustration as to how difficult our job can be. I mean, not only is it a site where, you know, you have huge loss of life in 1915, you then subsequently had another battle on the same site in 1917. It's complex with lots of layers. And if you don't have artifacts to kind of help you along with that, you don't know what battle you're looking at, what year you're looking at. And not only that, but what we found is when we started extracting DNA from the casualties, we were just not getting back any profiles, any usable profiles. And that was really frustrating for us because there were some candidates that we thought we would be able to identify. But if we don't have the DNA, then there's just no way for us to narrow it down, especially from the sort of Scottish soldiers from the 1915 battle, because there was over a thousand that still had no known grave. And I mean, one particular set, so there was six sets of remains that were recovered. They were all sort of recovered from the same shell holes, so their artefacts were fairly mixed up. But just within that shell hole, those six casualties, there was Cameron Highlanders, Gordon Highlanders, Black Watch, All those different artifacts all mixed in together. So actually being able to kind of unpick that is really difficult. And then when you throw in the fact that you're not getting a decent DNA profile out of that as well, it just makes it extremely frustrating. I mean, out of those six, we were able to get three fairly decent DNA. DNA profiles out. And we knew due to the boots and a collar badge that we had at least one officer within that group. So what we did was go out to the families of all the 14 officers that were still missing, because that gave me a much better kind of chance of getting a match. Because if I was to put together all of those different regiments who had missing from that particular day, it was nearly over 400.
SPEAKER_00:Wow.
SPEAKER_03:So there was sort of over 400 other ranks or there was 14 officers. So, you know, I went for the 14 officers and we did actually manage to get a match. And it was a rather fantastic story, actually, because bearing in mind, these are all Scottish soldiers, this particular officer, Lieutenant Allen, his name was, I was looking for his next of kin and I came across an address, which is just down the road from our office. And I knew that it was somewhere that actually my colleague Alexia here lived quite near. So I said to her, oh, Alexia, do you know this address? And Alexia said, yeah, that's my next door neighbour. So I then handed Alexia the letter asking them for their DNA and Alexia was able to go in person and actually post it through the letterbox. So it was such a fantastic coincidence. And then it turned out to be positive. So it was great to have that connection. But the entire Long's Hospital site has been very frustrated for all of us due to the DNA. And I think it's sometimes a lot of people expect that DNA is kind of foolproof. You get a DNA sample, and I think films and TV make it look like you can get a DNA sample from the very tiniest bit of material that we have found over and over again. That is not true. And that also... translates into the family we go after so we don't you know we don't have a DNA database it's not something we hold it's not something that's possible due to the sheer numbers of missing and GDPR and that sort of thing so when we're looking for an ex of kin we're retargeted because just because you're related doesn't mean you're going to be a DNA match so you know that's why again genealogy can be really complex because you know the ages of the soldiers mean generally they weren't married so we're looking at their siblings and if their siblings didn't have any disability then we go up further to their parents, to their grandparents. So sometimes the time to actually build a tree to find the next king can take us weeks, weeks and weeks. And it might get to the point where one of us says, look, can you please look at this tree? I've just gone blind and I can't see it anymore. But then other times you might be really lucky and you just type the name in and up pops a tree already created in Ancestry and there you go, the next day you've got in contact.
SPEAKER_02:But of course, that's another thing is not being misled by a tree already on Ancestry sometimes. Because of course, we have to be really precise. We really do need to have a biological relative. So if we go anywhere, I'm sure we must do it from time to time. But obviously, if we go wrong on a family tree, that could potentially lead to a false, if might throw us off the centre getting a match on somebody because we think we've ruled them out. So we have to be really careful. We are looking definitely at the actual relative.
SPEAKER_03:And that's usually what happens if we get a negative on a casualty that we've really convinced ourself is the one. We immediately look back at our own genealogy to see if we could have gone wrong.
SPEAKER_01:Or if there's a possibility of a break somewhere in the tree that maybe the family aren't aware of. That does happen sometimes. Sometimes you get a family who will say, well, you know, I'm very happy to do a test for you, but I'm not entirely sure that granddad was in fact granddad. Yeah. And that's fine because you go into it knowing that that's a possibility. But sometimes you might identify a break that they're not aware of either. That obviously then raises a whole range of moral and ethical considerations as well.
SPEAKER_00:I mean I'm sure that must be common because I've you know looking through kind of service records over the years the number of soldiers that were bigamists and had families left right and center and somebody who thought that this guy was their father wasn't necessarily their father and I remember a case in Flanders with a Canadian soldier where they found in full kit, all his badges, shoulder titles, collar badges. The only thing that was missing was an identity disc, but he had three gold teeth that matched the dental records in the Canadian archives. But when they did DNA, it wasn't a match, and subsequently the family discovered that the father of all this, of his children, inverted commas, was the milkman or something like that. So it opened up a schism in the family.
SPEAKER_03:That's another thing I will quickly mention. when you brought it up there about Australian records is generally we don't have the service records. And if we do have the service records, the dental chart isn't filled out. It's very frustrating, but it does mean that a lot of the time, even having... full set of remains and knowing the height and the age, you know, that doesn't help us because we don't have a service record to compare it against.
SPEAKER_00:And the DNA, going back to the kind of DNA side of it, I mean, I'm sure there are some people listening who think you can just kind of pop that into a computer database and it says, oh, it's Private Clark or, you know, whatever it is. And you mentioned about the kind of, I guess, the condition of the DNA. Is that an issue at Lons with the degradation of it? We do
SPEAKER_02:get it at various sites occasionally, don't we? But Lons has been a particular frustration in terms of the DNA. I think probably, broadly speaking, it was mostly the 1917 casualties from Lons that we had the best chance of naming. But several of those we haven't been able to get DNA from. You've had some, haven't you? there's only a very small handful of candidates, but we've got nothing to compare it against. So there's no... There's no way of taking those forward.
SPEAKER_01:We're not really sure exactly what the reasoning is there either, because we plotted, we took the time to plot all of the casualties onto a map and sort of colour coding by whether we'd got DNA or not to see whether potentially there was ground contamination in a certain area of the battlefield or something to that effect. But no, it seems to be pretty random. So, I mean, it might still be ground contamination or it might be, not contamination, but soil conditions in certain areas. There are so many things that can affect DNA. DNA is way more fragile than people think that it might be. I think, as Nikki said earlier, the television has a lot to answer for in that respect. They make it seem very easy. Oh, yes, we'll get DNA and straight away we'll know who it is. It's really not like that.
SPEAKER_00:No, and I guess, I mean, during the war, they put quicklime over bodies, you know, when they were burying them. I guess that must have an effect on the quality you can recover.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and I mean, the group of six I was just talking about, you know, three of them, we got four profiles, three of them, we got nothing. So, you know, and they were all in the same shell hole.
SPEAKER_00:So Lons is a really big project, isn't it, with a substantial number of casualties, which I guess... Going back to how long it takes you to put these cases together, that must be a fair few years' worth of work even still ahead.
SPEAKER_02:A lot of the casualties were found in 2018, 2019, 2020. Obviously, again, COVID slowed things down. Also, the fact that we had to wait for CWDC to construct the new extension. And so there's that moral dilemma of how far do we work on the cases, inform the families of a positive match, and then say, but we've got to wait two or three years till we can actually bury your relative. So there's one of them we did actually do just prior to COVID, obviously not knowing that. In November 2019, he was one of the early casualties that was found, Private Lance Corporal Frederick Thomas Perkins. And he had a granddaughter who was still alive, but wasn't very well. So we were able to actually bury him in the old cemetery, very close to the wall of the new extension. So he was buried. pre-covid and I think I
SPEAKER_03:think we I'm burying nine um two of them named on the 25th of September 2025 so that's really nice um and I think they're probably the last
SPEAKER_02:there's some some that will go to April next
SPEAKER_03:year yeah
SPEAKER_02:That should be the end.
SPEAKER_03:That should be the end after that of the casualties. And obviously, you know, anything more that may be discovered. But I mean, the sheer numbers missing from that particular action has meant that it's just taken a lot of research.
SPEAKER_01:I think there was something in the region of about 100 casualties recovered from that site in total. Not all ours, some Canadians as well. The
SPEAKER_02:only thing the Canadians I don't think have even started. Our part of the hospital project will be finished. the actual project that cwc will be working on with them will be going on i'd imagine for another few years yeah um
SPEAKER_00:yeah so that works done by the canadian equivalent of you guys is there a canadian equivalent
SPEAKER_02:yeah yeah there is and australian um as well some of the other commonwealth nations in theory the commonwealth nations are responsible for their own casualties but of course there's different levels of commitment and um ability to do this work um so hopefully in um September, for example, I will be burying a South African who was left from the DQ80 project that you may recall from Simon Verdigan was working on in 2018, 2019. We buried all of the other casualties and the German casualties were buried the day after in October 2019. There's just this one South African still remaining. So in theory... It was kept out so they could do that, but we'll now take it on and make sure he's buried and make sure they're involved. But as I say, different countries have different abilities to commit resources and funding to this work. If they tend to be generically unknown Commonwealth soldiers, then we usually take them on and bury them. alongside our soldiers or in conjunction with other services that we're
SPEAKER_00:doing. And Alexia, I believe you do quite a lot of work with the rededication cases, which is not where you're recovering a soldier, but where they're in an existing grave. And evidence now suggests that an unknown is actually an identified casualty. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01:We all manage both burials and rededications. But yes, a rededication case usually will be submitted in the first instance actually by a member of the public. So these are... quite different to the majority of our recovery work. And the member of the public will lay out what evidence they have to believe that this person who was buried as an unknown soldier in said cemetery why they believe it to be a certain individual. And then that case is passed to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in the first instance, and they sort of do a sort of triage process, I suppose. They look at their own records, which aren't necessarily publicly available, and they'll add anything that they have within their own archive to it, and they'll sort of say whether the case has merit or not. If they believe the case does have merit, it gets passed forward to us, and then we will undertake our own research to try to establish whether it is indeed that person or not. We have a standard that we have to reach for identification, which is clear and convincing. So obviously, we don't have DNA to rely on in this instance. When somebody has received a dignified, peaceful burial, we would never exhume them just for the purposes of taking DNA. So it has to be proven on paper. And we work in collaboration, depending on the sort of case it is, either with the National Army Museum or the Naval Historical Branch or the Air Historic Branch to conduct this research. And often we have access to bits and pieces that the general public may not have. And so sometimes we can either prove or disprove a case. So we've had cases recently, for example, where on paper everything looks great. You know, it's an unknown soldier of a specific regiment at a certain cemetery and there are a very limited pool of candidates and you can put, you know, three of the four of them 20 miles away. So it's definitely not them. You've just got this one name left. And then for a second world war case, we might have a service record with a physical description and the casualty in the grave on the exclamation report is described as being six foot four and dark. And you look at the service record and it was five foot three and blonde. Okay. That's not the same guy then. So Second World War service records are mostly still inaccessible to the general public at the moment but we're able to access them via either our own resources or at the National Archives and so that's something I think that goes missed, the fact that there are resources that aren't necessarily fully available to other people at the moment and it's I think very frustrating to a researcher who's put an awful lot of time and effort into a case when we turn it around in five minutes and say no it's not him sorry but you know at the end of the day we have to go by a clear and convincing standard and sometimes the physical descriptions just don't tally um but yes it's after the case as well that um when a rededication comes to us um and it's a it's initial format we get very varying levels of information provided to us so we'll find that some researchers will have gone through to the nth degree they will have identified every possible person it could have been and then literally work through very methodically ruling everybody out except their preferred candidate and then you get other researchers who are fixated on it being their preferred candidate and have sort of just said well it can't possibly be anybody else because and those two very different approaches um and require us to unpick them in different ways um clear is a difficult standard to communicate to people I think because at the end of the day it does have a certain level of personal interpretation with it which is why we do also work alongside like I said the National Army Museum Historic and Naval Historic so that we have that rounded approach and we do also have the facility to to go back to Commonwealth War Graves Commission and discuss further with them and to discuss amongst ourselves where we're not sure if we're meeting a standard or not.
SPEAKER_00:And I guess some cases to some people might look simple. I remember seeing a grave of an unknown lieutenant in the Fourth Cesar's in a cemetery west of Mons. And I thought, well, it can't be too many of them. But actually there was three on the Laferte-Sous-Jouard Memorial. So immediately you've got, you know, three possibilities.
SPEAKER_02:You can narrow it down to two or three, but you can't then... choose between them. Yeah, that's a particularly frustrating. Of course, sometimes we do also find people ourselves in the process of our work, or the Commonwealth War Commission do as well. So sometimes the cases are generated from within as well. So yeah, I know I've submitted several of these, or one thing we did during COVID, for example, was going back to old cases where we'd taken DNA, not had a match at the time and used our better knowledge now, better links with Belgian archaeologists, et cetera, to piece that together again. And actually doing that work, we got some new matches that effectively then created rededication cases where CWC ended up changing the headstones. And so, yeah, it's one of those things we do. If we find something, we do flag it up and pursue it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, it's not First World War, but I recently... did four rededications for the Korean War. Wow. You know, we brought, you know, I brought up myself and researched and then, and with the Korean War, obviously you've got much closer relatives still living. So it was quite nice to be able to actually tell the children that sort of thing. But yeah, the trouble is though, I think there's something like over 250,000 unknown graves around. So it's not something that we could ever be proactive with. Yeah. But every now and again, you come across one that you think, wow, I haven't
SPEAKER_02:seen in a century. I was in a cemetery in Belgium, photographing headstones, thinking we could name him. But again, it's on top of doing this work, it's having the time to go back and actually in my own time, look at that. But yeah, there was one I found literally days ago. And probably in a few months time, I'll dig that photo off my camera and maybe actually look at it, hopefully.
SPEAKER_03:As far as I'm concerned, we want to name as many as possible. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:that
SPEAKER_03:is the aim of what we do. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:There are interesting parallels to be made as well between the recovery cases or the burial cases and the rededications. So I've got a chap at the moment who is a recovery. He was found in Belgium a few years ago and the artifacts that were found with him, the position in which he was found, the casualty list all point to him being one very specific individual. But we've not yet managed to get any DNA from the remains. We are having another attempt at a different kind of DNA to see if that's a better option. But it's the sort of case where you're sitting there thinking, if this was presented to me as a rededication, I'd probably accept it. So where do I go now? What do I do? Do I construct something on the basis of it being a rededication? Because if somebody in five years' time goes, this unknown member of this regiment who died on this day in this place... that could come through as a rededication in five years time and we would accept it. So yeah, we've got an interesting dilemma on our hands with that one.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm sure you must have lots of dilemmas with this because it's not always clear cut, I guess, the outcome of what you find. No,
SPEAKER_02:it's been a similar case to what Lexi was talking about. I've got a group of Durham Light Infantry soldiers found down near the SARS and we got a good DNA profile out of the first casualty and a match. There's only three missing from the same battalion on the same day. we've got a partial profile out of the second soldier. So we've had to go back to get a mito DNA profile, hopefully from that soldier. And we cannot get DNA out of the third soldier. So again, if the second soldier comes back as a match, it almost certainly has to be that final soldier. But again, it's what weight do we put on evidence beyond DNA? But that'll be a big debate I suspect we'll be having later on in
SPEAKER_03:the end. Experience from our past has shown us that, you know, when we then have said, oh, well, it must actually be that person it can be no one else and then the DNA comes back next. It's really frustrating so you know it's It's very difficult. And obviously, like Alexis said, with rededications, we have to be as sure as we can be without actually having DNA tested them. And I mean, I recently looked at one where, you know, the case was very compelling, very compelling. And yes, there was kind of, you know, it was this rank, this regiment died on this day. There was kind of only one potential candidate. However, when I got the service record, there was actually a dental record. And comparing that against the exhumation record showed that it couldn't have been him. So again, it's just kind of really frustrating. And again, like you said, if that dental record hadn't been available, we probably would have accepted the case. So that's why it's so important to us to sort of look at, you know, even though we get presented with a rededication case that's been very well researched, we think it's very important for us to do that initial additional research on top, especially because we've not got the security net of DNA.
SPEAKER_02:It's a question of not marking our own homework as well, isn't it? Having multiple checks that go through the process before it's accepted. Because the absolute last thing we want to be having to do is undedicate a grave at some point in the future. That's not a good circumstance for us or the families involved.
SPEAKER_00:No, going back to, I guess, the personal nature of it, the outcome is so important and the right outcome with the right person, the right family, it's kind of all got to come together. It must put a lot of stress on you all with this because it's not nothing, is it? It's a really important part of our history and for these families, perhaps the most important part of their story.
SPEAKER_02:What we were saying earlier, it's having that passion, isn't it? If you didn't have that and this was just work, as you say, you could get... stressed overwhelmed um but I think it's that having that drive that just keeps us going and working through that and that as you say just having that bit between your teeth to get that result um but also knowing when to stop yeah you have to sometimes you have to know when to stop as well
SPEAKER_03:I mean it can be so difficult when we contact family and say that you know we found a eight potential candidates and we think he might be your relative and the family gets heavily emotionally involved. They think
SPEAKER_02:we're saying
SPEAKER_03:it is their relative, which is not what we're saying. You know, then we have to call them back sort of several months later and tell them it's negative. That can be really difficult for us because we raise their hopes and then we've kind of had to dash them and we've kind of awoken something in that family that had obviously lain dormant for, you know, over a hundred years. So it You know, that sort of thing can be really hard for us. And of course, you know, when we really connect with the family, we really desperately want it to be their relative. I mean, we'd like it. We'd like to be able to find everybody's relatives that we get in contact with. But, you know, there is some really difficult emotional parts
SPEAKER_01:of our job. I think on that sort of basis, we will find sometimes that families are committed to a case, even when it turns out to not be. their relative to such an extent that they will still want to come to the funeral so I buried two chaps last year in France and there were only four possibilities for who it could be I managed to identify the two and I DNA tested one other chap along the way and it wasn't his great uncle but he had been sort of actively looking for his uncle since the 70s and obviously making that call to send him I'm so sorry but it's not your great uncle, Fred, was really, really upsetting. And he sort of phoned me back about a month later and said, well,
SPEAKER_04:do you think I
SPEAKER_01:could come to the funeral anyway? Because it's the closest I'm probably ever going to get to being able to bury you. Great Uncle Fred. And so he did. And it was really lovely. It was lovely for the families of the soldiers we were burying as well. And they very much made him part of it, which was really nice. But yeah, people do. It's the strangest thing because obviously we share an office with people who are dealing with modern day casualties. And that's the sort of conversations nobody wants to be having. Whereas our relatives are desperately keen to be involved and for it to be their family member. It's
SPEAKER_02:also going back to the Second World War. we were talking earlier, where you got close to relative or career, for example, when the different spectrum of emotion, that much more intense emotion, and occasionally boils over into anger, if we're not doing things fast enough, or that, you know, it's that heightened emotion and trying to manage that extra level of what's going on. And a case a couple of years ago in Normandy, we were really fortunate in the end, we did get a really good positive result. But the son of a soldier was still alive, and all we had was a few small pieces of of bone found in a Sherman. And we knew they probably belonged to one or two or three of these three missing Coldstream guardsmen who'd been hit in a tank there at that location. And what that meant to his son, who'd been trying to find answers to where his father's body had been for the last 50 years. That was, you know, a far more significant if you like, process than a first world war case where we're dealing with a cousin or a distant cousin or something. But really pleased we got results on that in the end. We were able to give Guardsman Blythe a headstone and his son was able to join us in Normandy and it all came together in the end. But it was, yeah, that's one of those cases that will always stick in my mind. Yeah, Mr. Blythe and having that result for him, finally having his father having a headstone.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, you've done a lot of work in the last few years on this and you've had this big project at Lons and Wim Farms have gone up across the Somme and the Hindenburg Line, which has resulted in the recovery of soldiers. And there's this Canal du Nord project coming up, the Super Canal, which I'm sure will uncover kind of all kinds of stuff, really. Your work kind of never ends, does it? I mean, it's not something that you're going to get to a point where you've found everyone because that's not the nature of this, really.
SPEAKER_02:And even at the moment, as we're out there for services, because we're having conversations with the Commonwealth Law Grades Commission, they'll be saying, well, we've just found somebody today, or Belgian archaeologists. I was out in Belgium a few weeks ago, went to see Simon Verdegen. He found Casualty the day before. And so, you know, so it is literally... going on every day and I don't know if you've been out to eat recently but they seem to have dug up every single road north of the Menin Road and the Menin Road itself so I suspect there'll be quite a lot coming out of those roadworks.
SPEAKER_03:I think this is the thing with like the population expanding infrastructures needed to kind of you know accommodate all of that so I just can't see it ever getting you know any quieter for us really and really the way that records have all become available online like they have has made our job easier and and it's it's caused a huge influx of rededication cases because obviously you know 20 years ago if you wanted any of this information you had to physically go to this archive this museum you know and actually trawl through the records but you know nowadays it's so simple you can go online you can have French you know Trench maps, war diaries, everything at the tips of your fingers. And we have had a huge increase of rededication cases over the last... Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:I'd imagine as well with the Second World War records going off the official archives and in the process of being digitised, there may be a spike of Second World War cases that come through. I certainly walk around cemeteries in Normandy and places like that. And I think compared to Tyne Cot or somewhere like that, they haven't been searched through by researchers in the same way. There's a lot of people there, which in conjunction with CWC's exhumation reports, I suspect could be named. So that would be an interesting thing. service records are fully available to the
SPEAKER_01:public. I feel like maybe you guys do the same as well, but when we're driving around Northern Bronx and Belgium on our way to services or, you know, transporting soldiers or whatever it is we're doing, and you come across a set of roadworks or a building going up, you just think, you do, you sort of think, that'll be the next project.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, we're going to be busy for, yeah, a very long time to come, I think. Hopefully.
SPEAKER_00:Hopefully. I mean, there's the idea that the landscape of the First World War is itself the last witness of the war because it kind of still reveals its secrets all the time, of which the dead of that war is one of it. And you're the kind of people that are now the contact to that last voice. You're the ones that are listening to that last voice and turning these new pages of First World War history. So it's incredible, really.
SPEAKER_02:I think there is something special as well about being part of the MOD doing this work. It's like being part of the official work which is still going on to recover these men and identify them. And so we are such a small team. It is a privilege to be part of that and to be able to do this work. And yeah, I wouldn't want to be doing
SPEAKER_01:it. On a slightly different tack, when we are out in country with serving soldiers in the world we're currently inhabiting, there's something slightly reassuring for them about the fact that the MOD is still committed to identifying men who died 110 years ago who have no close relatives left. We're still out there. We're still identifying those men. We're still giving them dignity. We're still paying respect. And in a world that looks like this one does right now, I think that serving soldiers find that a reassuring thing. Should the absolute worst happen to them, somebody will care. Somebody will give them respect and dignity. Worst case scenario, somebody will look for them.
SPEAKER_00:I think that's definitely a kind of the way that this resonates with the present. And I think you feel now, particularly with the war on the other side of Europe, the ever presence of that being relevant to what we study in the past and vice versa.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And from conversations I've had fairly recently, the war in Ukraine is more akin in the way it's being fought to the First World War than perhaps anything else that's gone in between, just in the nature of sort of trench warfare. and that kind of thing. So there are some really interesting parallels.
SPEAKER_02:Of course, that's another part of our, we are civil servants and we are part of the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre. So, yeah, should the worst happen, of course, that would take priority over what we are actually doing, of course. But hopefully that is not a scenario we do find ourselves in. But it's one of those reminders that we are civil servants at the end of the day. We are here to serve the military.
SPEAKER_00:But I think all of you have made your own, you're part of this history now. You've made your own part of this history. And I think that's really important for that to be recognised. And I'm sure I'm speaking on behalf of everyone listening to this by thanking you for the work that you do, because it is so important. It's not something that's lost in the past or irrelevant now. It's perhaps more relevant than it's ever been. And the work that you do is so important and you deserve recognition and thanks for it, I think.
SPEAKER_03:It's been a privilege to do. Yeah, it is definitely.
SPEAKER_00:So thank you, Rosie. Thank you, Nicola. Thank you, Alexia, for this rare opportunity to talk to you about what you do, to shed some light on it. And I'm sure considering what lays ahead with the landscape of the Western Front alone, I'm sure this won't be the last time we discuss this aspect of the Great War. So thanks to you all.
SPEAKER_03:Thank you, Alexia. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:You've been listening to an episode of The Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reid. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor. You can follow the podcast at oldfrontlinepod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page at patreon.com slash old front line or support us on buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash old front line links to all of these are on our website thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon
