257890 Cpl. Reginald Howard Page British Army 4th Field Ambulance Royal Army Medical Corps from:Sheffield One of the Old Contemptibles, my grandfather, Reginald Page, joined up at the very beginning of the war. I suspect he had a yen for the RAMC because his father was a doctor who had fallen on hard times, and Reginald had never had any of the education he would have liked in order to become a medic himself.
As it was, he was a private, I believe a stretcher-bearer, but had been promoted to Corporal by the time he was wounded at the end of October 1917, presumably at Paschendaele. The wound was recorded as gunshot to head, though family history has it as a shrapnel hit, and was severe, causing him to lose a small piece of skull.
He was sent from Etaples to Calais on 1st of November 1917 and travelled home on a Convalescents for England transport. He was entitled to a wound stripe, and never returned to the war, I do not know whether he was honourably discharged or still convalescent when the war ended the following year.
My grandmother Emily, his fiancee at the time, recalled the lengthy trips she had to take to get to the hospital where he was convalescing. However, he survived to marry her, have three sons (two of whom were old enough to fight in WW2) and to live happily till the early 1950s. He always had a pulsing place on his head where he had nearly been killed in 1917.
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