William James Crothers

William James Crothers was born on November 7, 1888, in Belfast, Antrim, Northern Ireland, his father, James, was 20 and his mother, Elizabeth Darragh, was 21.

He had one sister and one brother, Nellie, 1892 – 1905 and John 1894 – 1977.

He married Elizabeth Owens (Avens) on October 31, 1909. They were married in Trinity Church, Belfast, Ireland. They resided at 58 North Boundary St, Raynarts.

They had five children in 16 years. Elizabeth, Annie, Dora, Georgina and Norman,

William James entered the Service on 16 Apr 1915.

William James Crothers was assigned to the Army Service Corp. In 1915 it became the Royal Army Service Corp. The Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) was a corps of the British Army responsible for land, coastal and lake transport, air despatch, barracks administration, the Army Fire Service, staffing headquarters’ units, supply of food, water, fuel and domestic materials such as clothing, furniture and stationery and the supply of technical and military equipment.

William James Crothers was assigned to the historic Woolwich Dockyard

Woolwich Dockyard established in 1512 as the best shipbuilding facility in Europe. It finally closed in 1869. After closure, much of the land was retained by the War office as storage space for the Ordnance Stores Department, based at the nearby Royal Arsenal. Warehouses were built across much of the site and existing buildings were converted to provide storage space. A narrow-gauge railway system served the complex, linked by way of a tunnel under Woolwich Church Street to the North Kent Line (which itself was linked into the Royal Arsenal Railway); the tunnel remains in situ for use by pedestrians.

Royal Artillery Baccacks at Woolwich.

In 1905 an Army Service Corps depot was established on the old Dockyard site (the Corps headquarters was nearby in Connaught Barracks).During the First World War the site accommodated the country’s largest Army Pay Office alongside the ordnance depot, as well as units of the Army Service Corps and the Army Ordnance Corps.

William James received the U.K. Silver War Badge

The Silver War Badge was issued in the United Kingdom and the British Empire to service personnel who had been honourably discharged due to wounds or sickness from military service in World War I. The badge, sometimes known as the “Discharge Badge”, the “Wound Badge” or “Services Rendered Badge”, was first issued in September 1916, along with an official certificate of entitlement.

The large sterling silver lapel badge was intended to be worn on civilian clothes. The decoration was introduced as an award of “King’s silver” for having received wounds or injury during loyal war service to the Crown’s authority. A secondary causation for its introduction was that a practice had developed in the early years of the war in the United Kingdom where some women took it upon themselves to confront and publicly embarrass men of fighting age they saw in public places who were not in military uniform, by ostentatiously presenting them with white feathers, as a suggestion of cowardice. As the war had developed substantial numbers of servicemen who had been discharged from His Majesty’s Forces with wounds that rendered them unfit for war service, but which were not obvious from their outward appearance, found themselves being harassed in such a manner and the badge, to be worn on the right breast while in civilian dress, was a means of discouraging such incidents being directed at ex-forces’ personnel. It was forbidden to wear the badge on a military uniform.

The badge bears the royal cipher of “GRI” (for Georgius Rex Imperator; George, King and Emperor) and around the rim “For King and Empire – Services Rendered”.

Each badge was uniquely numbered on the reverse. The War Office maintained a register recording which serviceman each one had been issued to in United Kingdom, and the governments of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Rhodesia maintained their own registers of issue (which were copied to the War Office in London to provide it with an Imperial master-record). Silver War Badges issued by the Empire’s dominion nations had their identification numbers on the reverse prefixed with the first letter of the issuing nation: Australia with the letter ‘A’, Canada ‘C’, etc. In the United Kingdom the War Office made it known that it would not replace Silver War Badges if they were lost, however if one was handed into a police station then it would be returned to the War Office, which would seek to return it using its records to its recipient.