Gosh, you are all so helpful and knowledgable! Thank you for the suggestions and information.

Stan, I am always unsuccesful in driving the National Archives online, but am going to visit in the flesh shortly after the New Year, so I’ll enlist the helpful people there and see what turns up. Dave, you’ve been luckier than me!

Kev, you are quite right and have clearly followed my path! Yes, George was born in Bradford where his mother came from, but the family moved to Lancashire when he was a child and by 1911 were living in Nelson, Lancs. This is where he was when he joined up, and where he went back to after the Great War: he died there in 1972. I am probably guilty of some incorrect arithmetic to give him an age of 19 – except in my defence I’ll say that before I found the aviator’s actual certificate on Ancestry I was working from census data, which implies he was born in 1895, and I think he joined up in 1914, which led me to 19. But by 1915 he was certainly 21, you have it right. I am positive he is the same man, the path I have followed is tortuous (involving tracking the registration of a 1914 motorbike from a photograph!) and everything ties up. His father was Tom Crowther, son of my 2x GGF Joshua, from Halifax. Tom was the one who moved around, everyone else stayed put.

I haven’t been able to find him in any Ancestry military records, either: it may be that a visit to TNA will let me find him in the 1918 RAF transfer rolls. It is aggravating that so many WW1 records didn’t survive. Is there special significance in the fact that he isn’t on the medal rolls? It crosses my mind that maybe he didn’t serve overseas and might therefore not have had a medal? Or are many of these records missing, too?

Baz, thank you for all those interesting leads, especially the images of the badges, which begin to make sense of the ranks in the RFC. I haven’t read the long pdf article yet, but am saving it for when I’ve finished online this morning.

Maggie