FIRST WORLD WAR 3: From the Railway Police to the RAF

 

 An RAF Sopwith Dolphin 1918.  This was one of the aircraft flown by 13 Sqn (Picture:  RAF Museum)

The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the oldest independent air force in the world.  It was founded on 1^st April 1918 on the merger of the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) and the Royal Flying Corps (RFC).  One of the officers that transferred from the RFC was temporary second lieutenant James Seymour STRINGER, he was 25 years of age (1) (2).

STRINGER was no stranger to life in uniform.  At the outbreak of the war he was a constable in the Hull and Barnsley Railway Police.  We know very little of his time with the force except that it was very short.

At the age of 14 STRINGER joined the East Yorkshire Regiment at Beverley giving his previous occupation as clerk.  He was 5 feet 2 and "a quarter" inches tall and weighed about 7 stone.  In 1910 he became a Drummer and served in India.  His service record tells us that he contracted malaria, injured his ankle playing football and generally enjoyed the leisure activities one associates with soldiers in peacetime.  After returning to the UK he decided to buy himself out of the army.  It cost him £18 which he paid himself  (3).  His timing was not good.  He bought himself out of the army on 30^th June 1914 and joined the H & B Railway Police.  He was stationed at Hull.  In August 1914, like most reservists, he re-joined his old regiment.  After some discussion the army refunded him £9.

In 1918 STRINGER qualified as a pilot, flying aeroplanes that, from a modern perspective, seem rather fragile. (see picture above).  It must have felt like a different world to that of a railway policeman in Hull and even further from being a Drummer Boy in India.  The Hull Daily Mail on Wednesday 25^th September 1918 reports that he was officially missing following a ‘flight in action’ on 3^rd September 1918.  The newspaper report reads like an obituary.  Most serviceman posted as missing did not return:

“Lieut James Seymour Stringer, RAF, second son of Mr and Mrs Fred Stringer, Asenby House, Newstead Street Hull, is officially reported as missing following a “flight in action” on September 3^rd.  He had served in Gallipoli, Egypt and France in the Pioneers’ Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment, and obtained a commission in September last year.  When the war broke out he was a policeman in the Hull and Barnsley Railway Co.” (4)

The piece does not mention his wife, Marie, who he married in the Autumn of 1914.

In fact he was captured by German forces on 30^th August 1918.  The Red Cross advised Mrs STRINGER in October 1918 that he was a prisoner at Rastatt Camp near Baden (5).  The Imperial Museum holds a fine drawing of the officers' quarters at Rastatt (https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/26536) 

STRINGER had a short stay as a Prisoner of War being repatriated in December 1919.  He was de-mobbed a few months later.  By 1921 he was working in a confectionary factory in west London and in 1939 he was living with his family in High Wycombe and working as a Bakery Manager.  He lived a long life dying in 1980 in Suffolk.

Given the length of his military service, the theatres in which he served and the mode of his capture James Seymour STRINGER was lucky to have survived the war.  He appears on the very first RAF list of officers (under the heading ‘aeroplane officers’) in 1918.  We don’t know how he adjusted to civilian life or much about him in later years.  Among all the memories that he must have carried with him I wonder if he ever thought about his brief spell as a railway policeman at Hull (6)?

 

Philip Trendall

Feb 2024

 

NOTES

(1)    https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/30347/supplement/10886 

(2)    The National Archives; Kew, Surrey, England; AIR 76: Air Ministry Department of the Master-General of Personnel: Officers' Service Records; Series Number: AIR 76; Piece Number: 488

(3)    The National Archives of the UK (TNA); Kew, Surrey, England; War Office: Soldiers' Documents from Pension Claims, First World War (Microfilm Copies and Medical Cards); Reference: WO364; Piece: 4003

(4)    Hull Daily Mail Wed 25 Sep 1918 p4

(5)    https://grandeguerre.icrc.org/en/File/Search/#/3/2/224/0/British%20and%20Commonwealth/Military/stringer%20james  accessed 14 February 2024

(6)    The Hull and Barnsley Railway became part of the North Eastern Railway in 1921 and thereafter part of the London North Eastern Railway in 1923.