MoD references on medal index cards

I've been meaning to write this blog post for a while. What follows may not be rocket science but because the information scrawled on medal index cards is important, I thought I'd draw attention to two of the particular annotations here.

The medal index card above is 'busy'; lots of information here concerning the regiments that James Murray served with, his medal entitlement, the award of his MM which was gazetted on the 19th November 1917, and the re-issue of these campaign medals in 1934. What I want to draw attention to though is the dates that appear in the remarks section. There are two dates here: 24/1/64 and 14/12/53. These are the dates on which an enquiry about this man's service was received by the MoD at its Hayes office in Middlesex. I don't have any background on the 1953 enquiry but I do have a copy of the response that was returned in 1964. Here it is:

This particular response was returned on the 5th February 1964, quite a quick turnaround considering the enquiry had only been received on the 24th January 1964.

And so the first point to note is that the dates expressed thus, are the dates on which the enquiry was received by the Ministry of Defence (MoD):

The second point to note, ruefully, is that in 1964 this man's records were still extant. The information about his enlistment, transfer and discharge can only have come from an attestation paper (or similar document), whereas the entitlement to medals could conceivably have come from medal rolls. At some point after 1964 therefore, the MoD finished what the Luftwaffe had started in 1940 and destroyed James Murray's records.