Thanks Tony, Martin and David for your comments.
I did get a photo of his grave after contacting the War Grave
Photographic Project. I got the dates of the medical examination and
enlistment etc. from his service record, which I found on Ancestry.
Some pages looked as if they had been damaged by water and were
illegible or barely legible but fortunately not all were in a bad
state. (Many WWI service records were destroyed by fire in the Second
World War and I suppose some of the surviving records were damaged in
the efforts to put the fire out).
I was interested to hear that my great uncle was probably not the only
person to join that regiment in Tonypandy at that time. That does tend
to support Martin's suggestion, that the Royal Welsh Fusiliers might
have been holding a recruitment drive in the Rhondda then. I thought
that if it had been very unusual for someone from the Rhondda to join
that regiment that would have suggested my great uncle had some sort
of tie to North Wales that I was unaware of. His ancestors were from
Pembrokeshire and those relations that moved away from Pembrokeshire
lived in Merthyr and the Rhondda. I did wonder if there were any
relations, or a girl friend, in North Wales that could have led to him
joining in Llandudno but a recruitment drive in the Rhondda would seem
a more logical explanation, particularly in view of the fact that
North Wales was, and is, much more sparsely populated that the South.
Regards,
Roy
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 8:33 PM, Tony Rees
<tony(a)rhysiau.orangehome.co.uk> wrote:
Roy - I think my Grandfather must have joined in Tonypandy at the
same time.
The Fusiliers depot was up North, so they'd have moved them straight away, I
should think, once they'd actually passed the medical. Where did you get
the date? Tony Rees