The National Archives holds an invaluable record in its WO338 collection.
It lists in alphabetical order the officers who served with the regular army or Special Reserve, but does not in general cover those who served with the Territorial Force. The “service records” of these officers can, in most cases, be found in the WO339 collection. At time of writing they have not been digitised and to see them requires a trip to the archives in Kew. In truth, they are not “service records” but a miscellaneous and highly variable collection of documents for each man, but even so they can provide excellent details that are not available elsewhere.
What is WO338?
WO338 consists of journals in which were written details of officers: surname, forenames, regiment/unit, their “long number”, and rank.
As such, WO338 can be most useful in providing the man’s full name.
Regimental names
The regiments are sometimes written in full, but more often they are given numerically: the 63 and 3/44 seen in Figure 1 are good examples. They refer to the name of the regiments by their pre-1881 army reforms titles. The 63rd Foot became the Manchester Regiment; the 44th Foot became the Essex Regiment. It is almost as if designed to confuse the non-military specialist! To prove how it works, Second Lieutenant William Reginald Abbati died while serving with the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion of the Essex Regiment in 1916, and Archibald Clifford Abba was commissioned into the Manchester Regiment in 1917. Frank Warner Abbatt was commissioned into the former 7th Foot, the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment).
The larger corps (RA, RE, etc) tend to be referred to by their common acronyms.
“Long number”
Figure 1 shows the number 232707 against the name of Andrew Aagaard. This was known as a “long number”. Before the production of the digital catalogue now in use by the National Archives it was a valuable means of determining the full reference for his service record held in the WO339 collection.
Brackets and letters in the “long number”
You may have noted from Figure 1 that the entry for Alexander Aaronsohn has a different format in the “long number”, which is given as AA/626.
I have highlighted two examples.
Frank Alexander Abbey has a “long number” 119847 which is shown in brackets but also the “P-number” 133072/1. The latter refers to the “Personal number” that was allotted to him at some point after the army introduced a new numbering system in 1922. This was the first time that officers were issued with numbers in the way that had previously only applied to the other ranks. He served with the former 5th Foot, the Northumberland Fusiliers. Presence of a “P-number” is often an indicator that the officers record is not yet in the public domain but can be obtained from the Ministry of Defence.
George Albert Abbey has a “long number” 210157 in brackets, which does not come up in a Discovery search. He also has the number AE/2023, and Discovery shows he has a record with reference WO374/4. The WO374 collection is usually of officers of the Territorial Force and the Discovery catalogue has him as having served with the Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent Regiment). WO338 however shows service with the former 51st Foot, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. In fact he had been commissioned into its 3rd (Reserve) Battalion in 1919 and relinquished this commission in 1920.
The meaning and importance of the letter prefixes is not always clear until details emerge from the man’s service record. In addition to AE I have seen AO, BA, BO, DF (for the 1921 Defence Force), IA, IO, and more. In many cases they match to the man’s surname, but in Abbey’s case and many others this is not so.
How to see the WO338 index
The content has been digitised and can be downloaded from the National Archives at this link