Historic Records Bargain of the week has to be the HMSO “Royal Warrant for the pay, appointment, promotion and non-effective pay of the [British] Army” for 1914, won with a snipe on a well-known online auction site for the bargain price of 99 pence. My copy is the re-printed version of 1919 and, as an added bonus, also includes Army Order 432 for October 1921 which deals with retired pay, pensions, and non-effective gratuities.

The Pay Warrant covers every aspect of army pay that you could possibly wish to find and runs to over 300 pages with a comprehensive index. However, for the purpose of this post I’m going to quote from Army Order 432, issued close to three years after the Armistice had been signed, and with the British government paying a fortune to disabled ex servicemen, widows and orphaned children.

The section headed, “Disabilities attributable to Service” reads:

A soldier, the depot of whose unit is situated in the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands, or the Isle of Man, discharged as unfit for further service in consequence of disability attributable to service, may be granted a pension on the following scale:

The pension may consist of three elements: a) a disability element b) a service element c) a rank element.

(a) The full disability element shall be 32s. 6d. a week for total disablement, and proportionately reduced rates for less disablement, down to 6s. 6d. a week for 20 per cent disablement.

(b) The full service element in the case of a soldier who has 21 years’ service or more shall be 1½d. a day for each year of qualifying service.

In similar fashion, widows’ pensions were also calculated based on the age of the widow, whether or not she had children, and her husband’s rank at the time of his death. For instance, a widow over 40 years of age and without children received a weekly pension of 10s. 6d. A widow with a child or children entitled to a pension, or over 40 years of age, or a widow under 40 years of age without children when there is satisfactory medical evidence that she is unable to earn, received 17s. 6d. per week, and a widow over 60 years of age received a weekly pension of 20s. Supplementing these sums were additional payments according to the rank of the deceased soldier. If the man had been a Warrant Officer, Class I, his widow could expect an additional weekly payment of 7s. 6d. Widows of troopers, privates, gunners, sappers and Royal Engineers pioneers could expect an additonal weekly payment of 1s. 6d.

So much for the NCOs and men, what about the officers? The widow of a Field Marshall could expect an annual pension of £300 and may also have been entitled to a gratuity of £2000. At the other end of the officer scale, the widow of a lieutenant or second lieutenant – for some reason these men were regarded as equals in death, at least for pension purposes – could expect an annual pension of £45. Additional gratuities of £150 for a deceased lieutenant and £100 for a deceased second lieutenant might also be granted to his widow.

I’ve been collecting books for over 40 years and I don’t recall ever coming across this particular volume before. Either it’s uncommon or I’ve had my eyes half shut. The Internet Archive has a copy of the Royal Warrant for 1899 which will give you a flavour of the Army Pay 1914 version, and I may well digitise my copy in future.