Army Service Corps
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission ‘Debt of Honour’ Register shows Private H Meaden of the Army Service Corps (ASC), who died on 6 July 1916, as being buried in the Cirencester (Chesterton) Cemetery. The entry gives no further details, other than he has a standard CWGC headstone.
A check of the Birth, Marriages and Deaths Register, via Ancestry, confirms the date of death, his first name to be ‘Henry’ and records that he was aged 53 when he died. Assuming this to be correct, he would have been born around 1863. It has not proved possible to identify any Henry Meaden born around that time as being linked to the man buried at Cirencester.
The Long, Long Trail Website states that the ‘F’ pre-fix to his number indicates service with the ASC (Forage – not paid from Army funds). This possibly indicates that although Henry Meaden was subject to military discipline, he was in a unit funded directly by HM Government. Curiously there is no entry for him in the ASC volume of Soldiers Died in the Great War (SD) and he appears not to feature in any of the usual surviving registers of Army service. Inputting his name into SD brings up only ten men with the surname Meaden, none of whom served in the ASC and likewise inputting his service number brings up a ‘no result’. This maybe endorses the fact that he was effectively ‘a civilian in uniform’.
The ‘forage’ activity in the ASC probably related to the harvesting of food for their equine branches. Henry would have been over 50 when war broke out and therefore too old for frontline service but suitable for work of an agricultural nature and possibly he had a farming background.
He does not appear on the Cirencester War Memorial, so was unlikely to be a local man: more likely is that he came from elsewhere and had been assigned to a unit located in the Cirenceste area and that he died due to sickness whilst there. The cause of death can only be established by obtaining a copy of his death certificate. There is no Pension Record card for him, to enlighten us.
Researched by Graham Adams 1 April 2021