War Diaries Talk

Private Diary Within The Regimental Diary

  • peterr1006 by peterr1006

    18th Brigade. 6th Division ;1st Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment. Pages 33-34.
    These pages immediately follow the last page of the Regimental Diary for December 1914. There then follows the first page (P35) of what I assume will be a lengthy descriptive account of events including the deaths of 2 officers which are recorded on P30 of the Regimental Diary. This page is close typed whereas,up to this point , the War Diary has been hand written on small sheets of squared paper. Interestingly, the author is shown in the war diary as having joined the Battalion on 24th November 1914 as a Captain (This may be an error or else he achieved rapid promotion) together with a Lieutenant and 99 ORs. I do not think this document lends itself to being classified in the same way as the Regimental Diary. can you advise me on the best way to proceed?

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  • David_Underdown by David_Underdown moderator

    There are a few other examples, it may in this case have been added as a supplement while the Official History was being written later, in other cases private diaries were used to rebuild the war diary when the official one had been destroyed or captured in action. I'd suspect that Colonel was his final rank - the cover indicates he was with the regiment until 1916, and perhaps then joined the staff (there does not appear a CWGC entry for him). If it's not possible to apply dates etc, it be best to just record the pages as "other" and maybe put a hashtag on them to allow them to be more easily identified.

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  • angiehart by angiehart

    i have a similar case for the 5 DIVISION: 2 Battalion Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment). The official diary pages are very sparse, and there is a comment in the War Diary for August 1914 that the pages were rewritten using the private diary of Lt C W G Ince. I'm not sure whether to classify this as a Diary or a Report page.
    http://talk.operationwardiary.org/#/subjects/AWD00018qa
    Any help appreciated.

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  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    I had something a bit like this for 1 Glos where a lot of the official war diary for Nov and Dec 1914 was lost and they had attached a report of their actions at 1st Ypres to the end of Dec 1914 as an appendix. In my case it was a fascinating narrative report full of names but not strictly a diary, so I tagged it as a report (which I think best described what it was) and that allowed me to tag all the names.

    With your example, I'm not sure if you are saying the page you show an example of is there instead of the diary pages or if it is there as well as some very sparse diary entries (it was the latter in my case and so easier to decide what to do). I think probably it's best to classify as report and tag accordingly.

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  • angiehart by angiehart

    The war diary up to the 17th August goes in to plenty of detail, but after the 17th August up to the end of the month there is very little detail, and the war diary pages were completed at a later date using information from the private diary, I will tag the pages as a report, but will use the hashtag #privatediary so that it can be found and used at a later date if needed. Unfortunately in the report he refers to everyone by their surname but not rank, so I can only record their surnames.

    It has been very moving reading these pages, starting in Dublin before they were mobilised up until the end of the first month of the war, they definitely weren't ready for what they saw. They started with cheers and excitement at being on their way to the horror of the Battle of Mons.

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  • SarahPowell by SarahPowell

    Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry has the same as in the first comment above - i.e. regimental diary for Aug-Dec 1914 followed by 'Extracts from the war diaries of commanding officer and company officers' of the regiment (p. 92 onwards). The previous diary pages have also been handwritten on squared notebook paper (not the official printed diary pages) and the extracts are typed, suggesting they've been copied up at a later date. Will tag as a report and also use the #privatediary hashtag.

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  • cyngast by cyngast moderator

    I also did the 1st. Gloucestershires and it's no wonder their diary went missing. They were slammed very hard at Ypres and lost nearly all their officers in two different battles.

    I also seem to remember reading somewhere on this site--in the tutorial maybe?--that many battalions didn't necessarily have the pre-printed official diaries at the beginning of the war. And I don't imagine they had a lot of spare paper lying about. I was working last night on a different regiment where many men and even officers lost their packs during that long retreat from Mons to the Marne. They were traveling at night in the dark and things got lost. So I can see how they would end up being reliant on whatever records anyone in the battalion might have managed to keep.

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  • SarahPowell by SarahPowell

    Another interesting thing about the Ox & Bucks diary is that, following extracts from the commanding officer's personal diary, there are several pages of original letters and reports written well after the event (1923). These all discuss in detail what key people remember from 31st Oct/1st Nov 1914 (First Battle of Ypres). It makes me wonder if there was some (formal or informal) investigation into the events of those two days, trying to establish whose account was correct.

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  • stoat11 by stoat11

    I have also been looking at the 5 DIVISION: 2 Battalion Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) and bumped into the same issue as angiehart. After finding this post I have been using Report for tagging dates and people but am wondering if that is what I should be doing and whether it's of any use as I guess angiehart has already tagged them? I'll continue but would like to know. Many thanks.

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  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator in response to stoat11's comment.

    Please DO tag the dates and people as the way it works is that after 5 people have tagged the page, the tags from all 5 are compared to make a "master set" of tags. It's not worth hashtagging it again if someone has already done so though as hashtags aren't compared in that way.

    The issue of private diaries (some written much later) being used to fill in gaps in the WDs is an interesting one that I had not really known about before this project. I'm not sure how best we can capture them but certainly what you are already doing will work fine.

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  • eatyourgreens by eatyourgreens moderator, admin

    If the private diaries are written as a series of dated entries, I'd suggest classifying them as diary pages, then using the diaries date tool to divide the page into dated entries. That would make it easier to add the tags to an overall timeline of the unit's activities. Otherwise, I'll have to figure out how to distinguish these pages from other reports (eg. after action reports), when analysing the data.

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  • bootnecksbs by bootnecksbs

    That's exactly how I've been treating private diaries from day one so's not to loose the valuable data in them as they usually contain a lot more details than the one compiled by an under pressure Adjutant.

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  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    Some are like that and some are more of a narrative. I can see why this would be easier for data analysis but quite a few of us have now categorised them as reports (after being told originally not to categorise appendices as diary pages! 😛 ), so if others now do them as diary pages is that going to give a problem when analysing the data? If not then we can just from now on ask everyone to use the diary page tags, which does open up more data of course.

    The ones categorised as reports have mostly been hashtagged as #privatediary I think, if that helps at all with distinguishing them?

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  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    So it seems that tagging these private diaries as diary pages is going to be the best option. @eatyourgreens is the expert on this and apparently the date tag in the diary format is much better designed to capture the data chronologically than the date tag in the report format. This ONLY applies to those private diaries or other diary-style documents which are written in a clear chronological format that allows the diary date tag (the one that puts a line across the page) to be used and which have been inserted to supplement parts of the War Diary that were incomplete or lacking in detail and NOTt to all Appendices or reports.

    So please from here forward do classify private diaries or similar documents that are being used to supplement the diary itself as diary pages and not as reports.

    Do not worry about those already done as reports - they will be gathered up separately and the useful data will not be lost.

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  • stoat11 by stoat11

    Ah OK. That's fine. Many thanks!

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