Pte. Alexander SMITH – Border Regiment (1898-1977)

Sponsored Links
Check out my TOY SALES on eBay!

TRACING THE LIVES OF WORLD WAR I SOLDIERS

The Fragmented Hero: A Research Journey

The story of Alexander Smith is a puzzle pieced together from remarkably few parts. It began with a Victory Medal that bore the scars of a deliberate attempt to obliterate the soldier’s name. Under a magnifying glass, the surviving fragments—27142 . [illegible] . A . [illegible] . Bord . R .—provided a single thread to follow. One soldier alone matched: Private Alexander Smith of the Border Regiment, who had also been awarded the Military Medal in 1919.


In a striking parallel to the defaced medal, Alexander’s official military service records were among those destroyed by German bombing in 1940. With only his Medal Index Cards and Pension Ledgers surviving, his wartime service remained largely unknown. These fragments did, however, yield one vital clue: a previous service with the Lancashire Fusiliers. This led back to the discovery of a sixteen-year-old boy from Goddard Street in Pendleton (near Salford), Lancashire, who had lied about his age in 1914, only to be caught and discharged 86 days later.

For a long time, the trail went cold between his 1915 discharge and his 1919 Military Medal gazette. The gap proved stubbornly resistant to research until a search for his unique service number, 27142, revealed a medical record for a “Private F. Smith” of the 2nd Border Regiment.

Despite the wrong initial, the data were too precise to be a coincidence. “F. Smith” (likely a clerk’s error for A. Smith) had been admitted to hospital on 7 December 1916 with Trench Foot. Crucially, the record noted he had “1 year 5 months” of service and “4 months in the command.” This single, mislabelled document broke the case open. It proved that Alexander hadn’t waited for conscription in 1916; he had re-enlisted in July 1915, while still only 17, and had arrived in the mud of the Somme by August 1916.

Through these fragments—a scarred medal, a burnt archive, surviving index cards and a clerk’s spelling mistake—the life of a young man from Pendleton who became a decorated soldier of the Border Regiment is finally restored to the light.

Alexander SMITH was born on 29 April 1898 in Pendleton, Lancashire. He was the third of eight children born to Isaac SMITH, a copper billet turner, and his wife, Fanny Elizabeth BAILEY, a cotton polisher. Isaac and Fanny, who married on Christmas Eve 1892, tragically lost three of their children at a young age. The commonality of the Smith surname has made it impossible to trace all of the siblings with confidence.

  1. Edwin Smith (1894-1991) – m.1918 to Hannah Pevitt; railway porter (1939); died age 97
  2. Matilda Smith (1896-1896) – died aged 0
  3. Alexander “Sandy” Smith (1898-1977) – m.1920 to Margaret Ryan; printer’s assistant (1939)
  4. Joseph “Joe” Smith (1901) – greaser for the London North Western Railway (1921); alive in Mar 1980
  5. Henry Smith (1904) – died in childhood
  6. Isaac Smith (1906-1907) – died aged under 1
  7. Frances “Fanny” Smith (1908) – alive in Mar 1980
  8. Thomas Smith (1911-1980) – copper tube billet turner in 1939

The Smith family lived at 12 Goddard Street, Pendleton, for a short time before moving to 18 Goddard Street, where Alexander’s parents resided until they died in the early 1940s. The street sat in the heart of an industrial neighbourhood, within walking distance of the railway line, cotton mills, iron works and printing works that employed much of the local population.

The map below highlights 18 Goddard Street, along with 16 Pimlot Street (sometimes spelt “Pimlott”) and 40 Alma Street, where Alexander lived as an adult during the 1920s and early 1930s. These homes sat in the heart of the Hanky Park district — a densely populated, working-class area of narrow two-up, two-down terraced houses, where poverty and high unemployment were facts of daily life. From 1960, the 86-acre area encompassing these streets was progressively cleared as part of a “slum clearance” programme. This involved the demolition of roughly 6,000 homes, 120 shops and dozens of pubs and factories, eventually replacing the tightly knit community with a shopping precinct and modern tower blocks. Nothing remains of the neighbourhood today.


 

Map reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. Left photograph thanks to Salford Archives (courtesy of Keith Tanners). Right photograph thanks to the Salford University Library, Archives and Special Collections.


Alexander was 16 when war was declared in Britain on 4 August 1914. Just six days later, his elder brother Edwin Smith (aged 20) enlisted in the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment. Despite being underage, Alexander enlisted in the Lancashire Fusiliers, Salford Battalion, on 16 December 1914, most likely at Pendleton Town Hall. He claimed to be 19 years 9 months old and was employed as a printer’s assistant. He had a ruddy complexion, grey-blue eyes, dark brown hair and a scar on his left shin. He was only 5ft 3 ½ inches, but still slightly taller than Edwin, who stood at just 5ft 2 ¾ inches. Alexander served 86 days before his true age was discovered and was subsequently discharged on 12 March 1915, “having made a misstatement as to age on enlistment.”

Alexander’s discharge in March 1915 proved only a temporary setback. By July 1915, still only 17 years old, he had re-enlisted in the Border Regiment, now carrying the service number 27142. His earlier Lancashire Fusiliers number, 3841, was retained in the pension records, linking the two enlistments in the official record.

After several months of training, Alexander arrived in France in August 1916, joining D Company of the 2nd Battalion during the latter stages of the Battle of the Somme — by then the bloodiest campaign in British military history, having opened on 1 July with nearly 60,000 casualties in a single day. By the time Alexander reached the front, the fighting had shifted north to the Ancre valley, where both sides were locked in attritional combat through the autumn mud.

The conditions took their toll. Trench Foot — a painful and debilitating condition caused by prolonged exposure to cold, wet and unsanitary conditions — had become so prevalent by late 1916 that the army held officers personally responsible for prevention in their men. Despite these measures, on 7 December Alexander was evacuated from the line and transported back to the Metropolitan Hospital, St Andrew’s in London. The ward designation on his admission record — 23 1/17 R. — places him still under treatment into the new year. He was discharged on 9 February 1917, having spent just over two months in hospital, and sent to a Command Depot — a retraining and reinforcement centre — before returning to active service.

What followed — when he returned to active service, and when he transferred to the 1st Battalion — the surviving record does not say. His Service Medal and Award Rolls confirm only that he served with both battalions. Between his discharge from the Metropolitan Hospital in February 1917 and his gazette for the Military Medal in May 1919, Alexander Smith left almost no trace. The records are silent on which engagements he survived — but the war diary of the 1st Battalion offers a probable context for the act of bravery that earned him his decoration.

Between 12 and 16 October 1918, the battalion was engaged in an intense advance before Courtrai, pushing toward the Ingoyghem-Courtrai Railway as part of the 87th Brigade’s breakout from the Ypres salient. Zero hour was set for 05:35 on 14 October, with the battalion attacking from the Dadizeele-Slypskappelle Road under heavy machine-gun fire from fortified farms and hedgerows. In four days of fighting, the battalion suffered 14 killed and 79 wounded. The advance slowed near Gulleghem on 15–16 October, where the diary records “intense shelling and sniping.” It was here that “small parties of men under NCOs worked forward through the gardens and outflanked the MG positions.”

A surviving citation for Thomas Parnell of Bolton — awarded the MM in the same gazette as Alexander — offers a glimpse of what such moments demanded: when troops on both flanks were forced back, Parnell held his position, then organised and led a successful counter-attack. Though the original source of this citation has not been independently verified, it is consistent with the diary’s account of the fighting near Gulleghem. On 17 October the battalion was withdrawn to billets at Salines for refitting — the point at which medal recommendations would typically have been processed. The six-month gap between this engagement and the gazette of 14 May 1919 is consistent with standard practice, and the concentration of thirty Military Medals from the 1st Battalion in a single gazette strongly suggests they were recognised for actions during this specific period. It is as close as the surviving record allows us to place Alexander Smith on a battlefield.


Alexander and his brother Edwin were both still serving abroad in early 1919, recorded as absent in that year’s voters’ lists. Alexander was demobilised in mid-1919 and returned to Pendleton. The following year, on 16 October 1920, he married Margaret RYAN  at St Paul’s church, just around the corner from his family home. Margaret (known as Maggie) was born on 1 October 1898 in Salford and was the fifth of nine children born to dock labourer John Thomas RYAN and his wife Mary Ellen FLYNN. Three of Margaret’s younger siblings died in infancy.

Margaret’s family was equally touched by the war, with one brother killed aged just 19, one wounded and discharged, and one serving overseas in Egypt. Her mother did not live long enough to suffer this loss, having died in early 1914 when Margaret was 16.

The newlyweds set up home at 40 Alma Street, near his family home on Goddard Street, where the 1921 census found Alexander working as a railway goods porter for the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway at Windsor Bridge, Salford, whilst Margaret was employed as a fig dyer at Woralls Dye Works in Manchester. The following year, on 3 January 1922, their son John was born. It is perhaps no coincidence that Alexander was working for the railway in 1921 — his elder brother Edwin was working as a railway carriage shunter at Patricroft Station, and his younger brother Joseph at the Salford branch of the London North Western Railway. Whether Alexander and Edwin found their footing together after returning from service, the records do not say. Edwin had been discharged from the army on 9 August 1920 and was living at 38 Pimlot Street with his wife Hannah, whom he had married in August 1918 while home on leave. The couple suffered the loss of both their daughters in early childhood and had no further children. Edwin remained in Pendleton area for the rest of his long life, dying on 17 January 1991, aged 97. By 1928, Alexander and his family had moved to 16 Pimlot Street. They remained there until sometime between 1935 and 1939, when they moved to 26 Venesta Avenue, Salford, the address that would remain Alexander’s home for the rest of his life.

By the time the 1939 Register was taken, Alexander had returned to the printing trade he had known before the war, working as a printer’s assistant. Their son John, then 17, was working as a milk roundsman. The register records no wartime civil defence activity for either Alexander or Margaret, and it is unknown if John served. The family’s move to Venesta Avenue — a semi-detached house in a quiet cul-de-sac beside the cricket ground — marked a considerable change from the cramped terraces of Hanky Park and the rooms of Alma Street.

Alexander’s parents did not live to see the end of the Second World War. His father died in December 1941, aged 71, and his mother the following year, aged 70. Margaret’s father died towards the end of 1945, aged 78.

One small glimpse into Alexander’s later life comes from a Salford Football Club programme of 1966, where he was listed as a bingo ticket agent — a detail that places him, at 68, still active in the community he had returned to nearly fifty years earlier.

Alexander died suddenly on 14 December 1977, aged 79, at the Venesta Avenue home he and Margaret had made their own for nearly four decades. He left no will, and administration of his estate — valued at £17,100 — was granted to Margaret. Their son John predeceased his mother by only months in March 1991, aged 69. He left a wife (Mary) but no children. Margaret eventually moved into a care home run by Henshaws Society for Blind People in Salford, where she died on 27 April 1992, aged 93, also intestate. Her estate was valued at not exceeding £125,000 — a figure that speaks quietly to how much the world had changed since the terraced streets of Hanky Park.

There is a quiet symmetry to Alexander Smith’s story. His name was deliberately scrubbed from his Victory Medal; his service records were consumed by fire; and the streets on which he was born, married and raised his family were razed to the ground. In each case, the intention — whether deliberate or incidental — was the same: erasure. Yet the fragments survived. A magnifying glass recovered what the defacement could not quite destroy. Index cards and a mislabelled medical record filled the void left by the flames. And photographs, maps and the memories of a community preserved what the demolition crews could not take away. Piece by piece, the man behind the medal has been restored.

The whereabouts of Alexander’s Military Medal and British War Medal remain unknown, as does the reason for attempting to erase his name from his Victory Medal. One possibility has never been ruled out: that Alexander erased it himself.

RESOURCES & REFERENCES

I use a wide range of resources for my research, most of which are online. For this project, I used:

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

I regularly consult the Essex Record Office and other local repositories. I am available for hire to trace family trees, research the history of buildings or assist with local heritage projects. If you have any questions about this research or would like to suggest any additions or amendments, please get in touch with me.

(Visited 22 times, 2 visits today)