John Ginn of Suffolk and the 20th Foot died 1855

Readers of my other blog will know by now that I am interested in the "lost souls", the people without descendants, with nobody interested in researching them and who died, often for their country, without memorial.  So it is with John here.

About 25 years ago when researching my other blog at the National Archives, I started putting together a series of notes on the Ginn men who joined the army during the Victorian period and died, thus never getting to pension and thus having no discharge papers and not (even now) listed in any index, online or elsewhere.  I had to trawl through a lot of original records.  The list, after Kipling, is entitled "The Soldiers of the Queen".

John here was born in Suffolk in approximately 1836.  He enlisted with the 20th Regiment of Foot (East Devons) at Westminster, London on 5th September 1853 and gave his occupation as Labourer and his age as 17 years 8 months.  he was 5 foot 5 inches tall with fair hair and grey eyes with a brown complexion.

The regiment were first in London, then sent out to the Mediterranean in 1854 as part of the 26,000 strong British Expeditionary Force at the outbreak of the Crimean War.

The regiment was initially at Varna where the troops suffered much from disease, principally cholera, arriving in the Crimea in mid-September.  They had barely landed, when marching inland the army encountered the Russians on 20th September and attacked them, the 20th among them, at the Battle of the Alma (below) which thankfully the British and French won.

John was not wounded at that battle, but like many men of that army on the march he soon contracted cholera, in fact it had not left the army since they had encamped at Varna, being placed on the sick list on 25th September.

He was shipped out to the "dying rooms" (they can scarcely be called anything else) at the famous or infamous hospital at Scutari (which is still there and below)

The British soldiers at the hospital were in desperate straits, with no medical staff to talk of some 88% of them were dying at this time.

Step in Florence Nightingale and her 38 nurses who embarked for Turkey and arrived at Scutari in November of that year.

Very sadly, although she and her ladies obviously did the best that they could, there were 14,000 men in hospital by February 1855 (not all at Scutari) and John died at Scutari on 4th March 1855 - he had just turned 19.

John was posthumously awarded the Crimean War Medal with clasps for both Alma and the Battle of Inkerman.  The latter was an error as, being on the sick list,  he could not have been present at that battle.  His parents were given as being in Needham Market where the medal was sent, and also given as Lionel and Elizabeth, although I have never found mention of them in the records