Cover of the Day 21 May 2020 - RAMC Tweseldown camp

[Peter Harvey]

I have posted this as a 'card of the day as I have never really seem much from this camp, also it has some nice history attached.

So a standard British Army Field Service Post Card, cancelled Field Post Office 144 18 JU 16 - right on the date of the first security exchange period, but likely to be 144 Bde, 48 Div on the Western Front. Card is addressed to a Private C.H. Jones 70780 RAMC, W. Co, C. Lines, No 1 Hut, Haig Hutments, Tweseldown Camp, Farnham.

Tweseldown was build as an Army Camp in late 1914 on the orders of General Haig, to provide a base for RAMC training in a central location, the camp remained in use to late 1918. I think it then returned to its old use as a racecourse. The rows of barrack buildings were named locally as the Haig Hutments, the name given by local men engaged in building them, as part of the war effort.

The card is addressed to a Private C. H. Jones 70780 - FWR suggest he was already in the RAMC on the outbreak of war. He was then returned to the UK in 1916 from the 28th General Hospital (in Salonika) on board the Hospital Ship Valdivia, with a note of 'dysentery', his 1917 records show him discharged from the army as an 'amoebic carrier', clearly he never recovered fully from the dysentery