Seeking further info on an OBE

Q I have found my ancestor’s entries in The Gazette and going by the information in those, he must have received his OBE between November 1919 and September 1921. I have not been able to find his Unit War Diary as he was in the Royal Engineers Inland Water Transport division. The only IWT War Diary I have found was for a unit in France, and I don’t know where to look to find any others. I have tried The National Archives in Kew, but they don’t have them online, so any help there would be appreciated. Sandra Digirolami

AThe Most Excellent Order of the British Empire was established in 1917 to award men and women who had contributed to the war effort but who had not been directly engaged in the fighting. There are five classes of awards of which the most common are Officers of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). Two divisions were set up – civilian and military. Recipients in the civilian division might have been managers of factories or hospital matrons. Members of the armed forces who had worked behind the front line, perhaps organising supplies, became members of the military division.

No records of the award of individual members survive for this period, although brief biographical details for many of the original recipients were published in a Handbook of the Order of the British Empire, which published in 1921 (and reprinted by the Naval and Military Press). There is no entry for H J Starkey.

Names of recipients are printed in the government’s official newspaper The London Gazette. However, the indexing is pretty poor and I have been unable to find when details of the award were published.

However, Major Herbert James Starkey’s service record is at The National Archives (reference WO 339/57540) and this may well contain papers about the award of the OBE. It is not online however, so you will have to go to Kew to read it yourself or find a professional researcher to copy it for you. SF