The
Crystal Palace
Foundation

R.N.D.

ROYAL NAVAL DIVISION.

WW1 ANTWERP, GALLIPOLI & WESTERN FRONT 1914 - 1918 on CD

PDFs of all the issues produced - 1-24 - 2,776 pages and fully indexed

By Len Sellers.

The magazines (of the same title) were produced, printed and published by Leonard Sellers in 24 three monthly parts between June 1997 and March 2003. The issues contained 2,443 pages, 581 photographs, 75 maps and plans and 71 poems. A separate index was produced for every eight issues together with a general contents list.

The index also had a date reference, so that any date referred to in the publication had a corresponding page number.

Articles were compiled by experts in Royal Naval Division (RND) history and included accounts by the Officers and men who took part. There are articles about their formation and training at Crystal Palace, Walmer, Betteshanger & Blandford, action regarding the 1914 defence of Antwerp, the 1915-16 Gallipoli campaign and their extensive battles on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918, when renamed 63rd (RN) Division.

During World War One the Crystal Palace and grounds were closed to the public and designated as the Royal Naval Shore Station HMS Victory but soon became known as ‘HMS Crystal Palace’ and indeed much of the Crystal Palace building itself and many of the 1911 Festival of Empire buildings in the grounds were taken over as offices, billets and for training. There are dozens of articles in these pages about the RND at the Crystal Palace detailing the lives (and sadly deaths) of the 125,000 men and women trained there.

This history took over 6 years to research and produce and was expensive in time, travel and general costs. Articles on RND history abound and there are contemporary items of Naval Orders, minutiae, medical matters, doggerel, tittle-tattle and tit-bits to keep the serious student and casual browser occupied for hours. For the family historian there are hundreds of names in the pages. If you had an ancestor in the RND then this CD is definitely for you.

The magazines were never printed in any great quantity and are now rare to find. To buy the complete set of the 24 magazines produced would have cost £185. You can now own the complete run of the magazine on one CD in PDF format at a fraction of that price.

As the magazines are in PDF format they are fully compatible with any computer with a disk drive and Adobe Reader installed. This can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.adobe.com.