John here was great, great grandson to Richard in my last post, born in Ware in 1770 to John and Sarah.
John Ginn was a Labourer, who in 1799 joined the army, specifically the 5th Foot ("the Fighting Fifth") as they were known throughout the Napoleonic Wars.
I first researched this guy more than twenty five years ago, in the microfilmed records at the National Archives, before there were any genealogical websites, before there was an online. It is still the case that you cannot know the story of this man's time in the army without going to the original records at Kew and I am delighted to have researched the guy and to give him a memorial. Everybody here has a story, and I see myself as the storyteller.
John Ginn was in the 1st Battalion of the 5th (see series WO12/2296 at the National Archives), and spent the first few years of his time in the army on quiet duties at home and in the Channel Islands. Things changed in 1805.
It was Napoleon's intention to invade Britain from early 1803 to mid 1805, just as in 1940 it was Hitler's, and luckily both came a cropper.
Napoleon had the Grand Armee of over 180,000 men in the vicinity of the French channel ports in mid 1805, waiting to invade. But luckily a combination of events in Eastern Europe and Nelson's huge victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, crushing the French and Spanish naval fleets, changed the man's mind. So the Grand Armee marched away, towards the German states and ultimately their own crushing victory over the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz.
Now until Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) took charge of it in the Peninsular War, in truth the British Army was a sorry thing. It was undermanned, under resourced (most of the money went on the Royal Navy) and was often thrown away in "penny packet" expeditions, where far too few men were expected to achieve far too much. In truth many of these raids were simply so that the Generals could be shown to be doing "something" to irritate Napoleon.
So it was here. Whilst the 180,000 strong French Army was marching across what is now Germany, the British got together an expedition of 15,000 men under General Cathcart (below) to land in
Germany and take Hanover, the British King George III coming from the House of Hanover of course, and rather wanting the ancestral home back. It was all nonsense of course.
The First Battalion of the 5th Foot formed part of this expedition and the British troops loaded on to their transports and sailed across the North Sea. It was December 1805 and the weather was not great.
John Ginn and about 200 of his mates (not all of the Battalion which numbered about a thousand men) were on HMS Helder. It was Christmas Eve 1805, and due to bad weather the ship ran aground (the crew were lucky to bring her in at all apparently) on, ironically, Den Helder (above) the very northern tip (now a Dutch Navy base) on the Dutch mainland north of Amsterdam.
This was not great news. The men scrambled ashore with just their lives. Holland was under French control and though there were French troops there, most military forces were Dutch, and though allied to the French, certainly a lot more kindly to the British than the French would have been. John Ginn was one of 250 men (including the crew) taken prisoner.
Now John Ginn was a strange cove, all 5 foot 6 inches of him (black hair and hazel eyes). He had an uncanny karma to get himself into scrapes, but the most astonishing luck (someone looked after him) to get himself out of them. It is a gift I envy.
He and his mates were prisoners until August 1806. Cathcart had landed in Germany, taken Hanover and (with Russian assistance) won a couple of minor engagements, but his efforts were made null and void by a deal between the French and Prussians (Britain's ally) in early 1806 whereby Hanover was given to Prussia. Cathcart sailed home with his men in the Spring and it would seem to have been the Prussians and the Dutch who allowed John and his mates to be released. They were back in Portsmouth by September 1806 (John marked as "POW" for the previous 8 months in the Muster) .
John was scarcely back in England before he was off once again, this time to South America ! How he must have welcomed going to sea again !
In yet another of these dreamed up pocket book ideas (perhaps the generals also read "The Rover"), it had been a pet idea of the British since the 1790s to invade South America and free it from Spanish influence (we were always at war with Spain) give the citizens independence and set up a load of trade deals with the friendly and grateful locals who had been oppressed by Spain for years. Simple.
In 1806, they believed that that moment had arrived when in that year the British invaded and took the colonies at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa (assisted by another John Ginn - see post of 3rd October 2012). The Navy patrolling off the Cape, extended their naval control as far as South America and a plan was hatched to launch an invasion there, in fact there were two.
The first invasion took place in 1806, and was initially successful, Buenos Aires fell, save that it turned out that the locals were not so friendly or grateful as anticipated - they did not want the Spanish, but they did not want the British either, and local militias and Spanish regulars forced a retreat.
Fearing and forewarned of a second British invasion, the people of Uruguay and Argentina (as they became) started to form further trained regiment of militia and armed themselves. They wanted independence, but they wanted to claim it themselves, which of course they did eventually.
The Second Invasion commenced in early 1807 and the British after a fierce action by the 40th, 95th and 87th Foot took Montevideo. In May, General Whitelocke (below) arrived to take command together with reinforcements, these included the "Fighting Fifth"
Whitelocke had two weaknesses, the first was he was slow to make a decision, the second that he underestimated the nature of the fight he was up against.
The plan was to move on Buenos Aires, but he hesitated, a delay that gave the defenders time to prepare. And thinking that he had little to fear from the local militias, he divided his forces into no less than 16 columns.
The problem was that the British infantry were equipped with muskets, not rifles, they did not know the terrain and were trained to fight in line in open combat, not skirmish in the streets of a city.
So when the British entered the streets of Buenos Aires things did not go well for them. Militia men had set up mobile barricades all over - they trapped them in front, they trapped them behind, they fired at them from above and below and locals threw cooking pots of boiling water and oil down upon them. There was even a militia unit of 600 african slaves. Men got seperated from each other, had no idea where they were, nor the location of their mates. The confusion (over about five days) was so great that not a few men deserted and stayed in South America, as many as 1,500 later forming a regiment that joined the locals and later fought for their independence.
The fighting lasted for several days as I say, the most intense being on 4th and 5th July when the British took 1000 casualties, one of them being John Ginn who was wounded on the 5th. He was badly wounded in the right hand, rendering it useless.
The British lost the battle for Buenos Aires and the campaign. The men retreated to Montevideo and the Royal Navy. Whitlocke was later court martialled and dismissed from the army.
Now John, were he here to tell you, would agree that he and ships never got on. If the extremely superstitious Royal Navy men had know his history, they would likely have considered him more of a "Jonah" than a John and never let him on board.
John was put on board the HMHS (His Majesty's Hospital Ship) "Alexander" at Montevideo, along with quite a few others of the wounded and the ship sailed for home.
It is pretty obvious that the ship was carrying back some munitions of the homeward bound army, because on 22nd November 1807, somewhere in the mid Atlantic, the ship blew up !
John was below decks and the explosion did not touch him. But the ship was on fire, listing and sinking. John could not use his right hand and the ship was now at an angle and in trying to get up the steps to the top deck, we know that he fell some distance. He broke his right thigh bone and so damaged his right ankle that the foot was splayed out at an angle for the rest of his life.
There were some unrecorded heroes there that day (and John's "Guardian Angel") because men from another ship came to the burning and sinking vessel in Atlantic seas to see if they could get anybody off. Only 21 men were saved - John being one of them. The Muster record is so cool as to be chilling "which he was removed before she was lost".
John came home on another hospital ship, never rejoined his regiment and was obviously still sick in early 1808 when the army granted him an out pension as a disabled veteran. He obviously was in no condition to work and must have had a hard time of it for a few years, living on a pittance in some lodging or other.
In 1812 he returned to the army, obviously disabled and only fit for garrison duty. He was in the 5th Royal Veteran Battalion for two years until 1814 which was disbanded when Napoleon went to Elba. When Napoleon escaped, John was back to the fray again, being enlisted in the 8th Royal Veteran Battalion and finally discharged from the army in 1816 when he was 46. By the time he was discharged his old regiment the 5th Foot (with whom he served for nine years) had another nickname in the army "The Old and Bold", a name which might be applied to John.
I knew pretty much all of the above by 1995, but there was no trace of what happened to John after 1816. You hear so many stories of disabled old soldiers begging in the streets, that I hoped that had not been his fate - but this story has a happy ending.
Years ago, I discovered that there a namesake of this chap in a renowned British military institution - but the age given was totally wrong. A fellow researcher said "it cannot possibly be him" but it was.
The records of Royal Hospital Chelsea for old soldiers (where the "Chelsea Pensioners" reside) are not online, but in 2015 I turned them up at the National Archives in Kew. John Ginn, formerly of the 5th Foot was only 50 (so they may have fiddled his age to get him in) but in 1820, obviously too disabled to look after himself, John petitioned the Chelsea Board to let him in, and they accepted him.
The Hospital was built in 1692 to the designs of Sir Christopher Wren, and remained unaltered for 300 years, only recently having some internal alterations. The men lived then and do now, in Long Wards (John was in Long Ward 10) where each man had a room in a long corridor, not very spacious and known as a "berth" with their uniform on a peg outside the door where also sat each man's military chest with their belongings etc (below). They obviously all messed together for food etc and recreation.
John lived at Chelsea for twenty five years. The stories that he and his mates must have recounted to each other would have filled a million weekly editions of the "Rover". It is my loss that I will never get to hear them. John Ginn died in Chelsea in 1846, he was 76.
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