Did British soldiers in WWI on the Western Front get paid in foreign currency?
Upvote:12
British Army rates of pay at the beginning of the First World War were set out in War Office Instruction 166 (1914). You can see the figures on the Long, Long Trail website.
Some General Regulations and Orders (GRO's) for the army at that time are informative. GRO 1887 and GRO 2240 which limited the amount of advance pay an officer could withdraw from a field cashier always specify the amount in francs (the limits were 200 francs for officers of Field Grade [colonel, lieutenant colonel, major, and captains holding an adjutant's appointment] and 125 francs for officers below field grade - provided that their agents had enough funds to match the advance).
My Gt-grandfather served as an officer in the Highland Light Infantry (HLI). His Advance pay book for 1915-16 only shows amounts in francs.
I've also seen a number of pay books showing that Privates serving with the 2nd Battalion HLI posted to the front at Guincy in 1916 were being paid in French Francs in 1916.
The Birmingham Pals Living History Association website states that the men were paid in French Francs. I've also come across a number of mentions of men being paid in Francs in memoirs and history from the first world war, for example the letters of Lionel Tennyson mentioned in The Final Over: The Cricketers of Summer 1914.
There are other cultural references from the period that record soldiers being paid in Francs. The following poem was written by Private J.J Jackson, 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards, while convalescing in Haigh Lawn Hospital, Cheshire in December 1916.
"We are but little Coldstreams meek
We only get five francs a week The
more we do the more we may
It makes no difference to our pay
Then to the trenches we do go
And carry sandbags to and fro
Bully and biscuits is the bill of fare
For there is no Hotel Cecil there..."
Any pay advanced to the soldiers in France would be deducted from their pay later. Soldiers also often arranged for a proportion of their pay to be sent home to relatives, which would limit the amount available to be advanced to them while serving in France.
I'll see if I can find copies of the GRO's somewhere online and add a link if I do.
More post
- 📝 How were the British and French armies invited into Belgium in 1914?
- 📝 When and how did steel supplant iron for artillery?
- 📝 What uniform is Alexander Duncan McLennan wearing?
- 📝 What were the key factors to the fall of domestic socialism in the USA?
- 📝 Was throwing hammers as weapons common during European medieval combat?
- 📝 Is every major culture in the same year?
- 📝 Did armored cavalry have an advantage over unarmored cavalry in 18th/19th century?
- 📝 What did Native Americans know, or speculate, about the Old world?
- 📝 Can a country only have one indigenous population?
- 📝 Why did the father of algebra speak Arabic instead of Persian?
- 📝 Was Russia ready for amphibious invasion of Istanbul in 1914?
- 📝 Where can I find more information about this use of Yakuza against a demonstration in 1960?
- 📝 Who is 'Chlodebaudo/Chlodebaud' in the Merovingian-era Clovis I genealogy & Charlemagne ancestry, supposedly mentioned in a Salic Law manuscript?
- 📝 How did the educational curriculum (books) flow from grade to grade in the 1800s?
- 📝 Where did the term "Middle Ages" come from?
- 📝 When did Aurochs (large wild cattle) become extinct in Britain?
- 📝 Is there any research explicitly contradicting facts in Suvorov's "Icebreaker" book series claiming that Stalin intended to attack Hitler in 1941?
- 📝 Why did Theodore Roosevelt send his daughter Alice with Taft on a diplomatic mission to Asia?
- 📝 Typology and the cause of difference between European medieval kingship?
- 📝 Did the local population in North Africa resent the presence of the Germans during the Second World War?
- 📝 How much of the Jonestown money actually got given to the USSR?
- 📝 Why does Western Europe tend to have small 'in between' countries?
- 📝 What is the name of this hat and the function of those wearing them (worn by Nansouty's French Guard cavalry)?
- 📝 Regarding the Columbian exchange, why did the ecological factors surrounding the re-connecting of the continents favor the Old World?
- 📝 Why is the color red associated with communism?
- 📝 What did the ancient Egyptians think of Khufu?
- 📝 What was the population of the Umayyad Caliphate in 750 CE?
- 📝 GULAG vs the US prison system
- 📝 Why did Stalin exile Trotsky instead of killing or imprisoning him?
- 📝 Were there Muslims in 12th century England?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Did British soldiers in WWI on the Western Front get paid in foreign currency?
- 📝 How much did J. Robert Oppenheimer get paid while overseeing the Manhattan Project?
- 📝 How did the British Army unit size and structure in WWI change from 1915 to 1918?
- 📝 How long did Adolf Hitler serve on the front lines as an infantryman in WWI before becoming a courier?
- 📝 What did the end of the western front look like at the Swiss Border?
- 📝 How did melee soldiers in the front rank of a formation fight without getting tired?
- 📝 What capabilities did Southern soldiers in the American Civil War have to get news about the North?
- 📝 How did soldiers in WWI who wore jackboots keep the boots from being sucked off in the mud?
- 📝 Why did the British scuttle the u-boats surrendered after WWII?
- 📝 Did Russian winter seriously contribute to German defeat on the Eastern Front in WWII?
- 📝 Why did the Western Roman Empire collapse but not the Eastern Roman Empire?
- 📝 Where did Hitler get the funds to invest in economic development programs such as the autobahn when the German economy was in a depression?
- 📝 Why did the German army execute so few soldiers in World War I compared to most other armies?
- 📝 Did the end of the British Raj in India create an economic loss for Britain?
- 📝 Did Muslim states hire Western European knights as mercenaries before the Crusades?
- 📝 Did any British working class men have the vote before 1918?
- 📝 Why did the Soviet Union get 3 seats in the UN?
- 📝 Why did Peter the Great name Saint Petersburg, Russia with a foreign styled name?
- 📝 Why did the Dutch, French & British acquire minor colonies in South America?
- 📝 Why did Mozambique join the British Commonwealth?
- 📝 What role did the Eastern Roman Empire play in the fall of the Western Roman Empire?
- 📝 How did the British Navy pass orders to its fleet before radio?
- 📝 Why did the UK allow India to be a republic rather than a democratic parliament under the British Monarch?
- 📝 Why did the British not introduce the sterling in India?
- 📝 Why was the Western Front so static in World War I?
- 📝 How did Alexander III of Macedon get the title "the Great"?
- 📝 Why did some people need to pay a bond in the 1700s in order to get married?
- 📝 How long did it take to get news of the sighting of the Spanish Armada from Land’s End to London?
- 📝 When did the acceptance of diversity become such an important social goal in Western countries?
- 📝 When did the Soviets get the ability to drop a nuclear bomb on the United States?
