The Museum of the Manchester Regiment is currently closed due to building works required to Ashton Town Hall. We are seeking funding to create a new museum and have drawn up plans with museum designers. In the meantime, projects like 'Men Behind the Medals'  give us a way to keep the collections accessible to the public as we continue to work hard behind the scenes to care for the collection.

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Fred Finucane was born 1899 in Bardsley, Ashton-under-Lyne. He followed the family tradition of joining the army and in March 1914 his father gave him permission to enlist in the 9th Battalion of the Manchester Regiment. This was part of the Territorial Force so Fred would have had a job and trained to be a soldier at the weekend.

Shortly after the First World War began Fred was called into service. The 9th Battalion sailed to Egypt on the 9 September 1914 arriving on the 25 September. According to a local newspaper, Fred was probably “the youngest in the battalion”.

Disease was a constant danger to men living in cramped conditions, in a new environment and with limited sanitation.  Fred caught dysentery and despite the best efforts of his doctors, he died on the 27th of November 1914. He was just 15 years old. He is buried in Cairo War Memorial Cemetery, Egypt.  For his army service he was awarded the 1914-15 Star, British War Medal and Allied Victory Medal. These medals are in the Manchester Regiment collections.

This is just one of hundreds of soldiers’ stories that can be found on Tameside Museum’s The Men Behind the Medals website. Described by one web visitor as “an outstanding resource”, the idea was first mooted over a decade ago. At the time there were nearly 800 medal sets in the Manchester Regiment collection but with patchy information about who was awarded them and why. Thanks to funding from the Esme Fairbairn Fund a researcher spend two years delving into military records, looking through medal indexes and trawling through regimental diaries to piece together the stories behind every medal. Where possible, families of the medals’ donors were contacted which enabled more family background to be added to the biographies. The website originally launched in 2013 and has proved to be an invaluable resource.

Medals continue to be donated to Tameside Museums all the time and by 2020 we felt it was time to update the website with these new acquisitions. The Army Museums Ogilby Trust kindly gave us a grant and once again we embarked on the research. This time around the pandemic lockdowns meant our research was somewhat restricted; no trips to the National Archive at Kew and it difficult to access other records. Despite this, the stories of a further 80 soldiers have now been added to the website, along with professional photographs of each medal. For a small museum team, this has been a big project with lots of proof reading and cross checking of facts, with more information coming to light all the time. The project has given us a new understanding of other objects in the regimental collection, as most of them relate to soldiers who we also have medals, and now stories, for.

Discover the stories of the men behind the medals for yourselves at www.menbehindthemedals.org.uk