Why I have two birth certificates

I have two birth certificates and as far as I know both are independently legal and valid proof of my birth. The earliest was issued by the British Consulate in Dusseldorf on 22nd November 1954.¹ The later one was issued by the Royal Air Force on 23rd November 1954.² As far as I know the two are independently produced but both from information provided by my father. They are also not included in the main GRO indexes. (If you’ve been having trouble locating me, that is why.) The consular certificate is listed in the “Births, Death and Marriages of British Subjects registered at British Consulates” birth index.³ The R.A.F. certificate is listed in the index to “Births, marriages and deaths of members of the British Army or their families, which took place abroad”.³ So why did it become necessary to set up a special registration system for the armed forces?

Figure 1: Consular Birth Certificate

 

Figure 2: R.A.F. Birth Certificate

There were two types of colonies in the British Empire: plantations and trading.^4,5 Plantation colonies were characterised by mass immigration of British people and culture (the American colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa). Trading colonies were never major targets for migration and only ever had the small British populations needed to control trade (India, Africa, Middle East, S.E. Asia, Hong Kong). In some of these trading colonies internecine warfare and general lawlessness were the cause of major disruption to trade, so the British policed the colonies by setting up military garrisons.⁶ After bad experiences with dedicated garrison regiments (e.g. the Rum Corps in New South Wales) the garrisons were manned by regular units of the British Army who were rotated around the world.^6,7

Traditionally the British Army had allowed a small number of wives to accompany a battalion serving overseas. In return for rations they were expected to wash, sew and cook for the officers and soldiers and accompanied the battalion wherever it went, no matter how remote the location.⁶ For these families the only record of vital events like the birth of their children were the registers kept by the chaplains and the returns they sent in to the government.⁸

Figure 3: Baptismal record for Sarah Jane Rose, 1873⁸

The increasing number of families (particularly in India) led to increasing numbers of children born in remote locations. The decision was made to formalise the registration of children born to army personnel and in 1879 the “Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Army) Act” was passed.⁹ This required the armed forces to maintain official registers of births deaths and marriages for army personnel serving overseas, independent of any consular presence. It also recognised the preexisting chaplains’ registers as legal evidence equivalent to civil registration in the United Kingdom. In 1918 this act was officially extended to cover R.A.F. personnel and their families (“The Air Force (Application of Enactments) (No. 2) Order”).¹⁰ 

When I was born Dad was apparently advised to register my birth with the local consulate in Dusseldorf to ensure I was recognised as British by birth. I don’t know how much it cost in total, the stamp duty alone was 8 shillings, a decent amount of money then. The R.A.F. certificate was automatically generated (and free).

As a final note, when my daughter applied for a British passport on the basis of my British birth, these two certificates by themselves were not adequate (together with proof she was my daughter) for her to be issued with a British Passport. We had to send additional documentation proving that my father was a resident of the United Kingdom while serving in the R.A.F. 

Top Secret

I was born in the 1950s in a Royal Air Force Hospital in Cold War West Germany. I have two legitimate birth certificates, one from the RAF and one from the British Consulate in Dusseldorf. I was (according to my mother) baptised at St Hubertus, the CoE Chapel on the RAF base at which Dad was serving.

Fifty years later my mother started handing over bundles of documents and in 2006 I started sorting them out and extending the collection. Amongst the papers I eventually sorted was a certificate of baptism for my brother. There was no such certificate for me. However in the “Unser Kind” family photo album there were photos of me in the knitted christening gown my mother had made for my brother’s christening labelled to the effect “Susan February 1955".

Cute Sue, photographed February 1955 by the station photographer (who lived in the flat upstairs). Photograph in the possession of the author.

While researching various other aspects of my family I always kept an eye out for British Forces baptisms, after all the British Forces birth register indexes were publicly available. No luck. So in 2011 I started emailing every possible institution I could find on the web. Eventually the Armed Forces Chaplaincy Centre referred me to a lovely gentleman at “DBS-KI-RecordsReview 5", based at HM Naval Base Portsmouth. This lovely gentleman was assessing classified Cold War military-related documents for de-classification. The religious records for the British Armed Forces in Germany were being de-classified in preparation for handing over to the UK National Archives!
The lovely gentleman found my baptism and posted me a photocopy.¹

Baptism entry for Susan Hilary Commons.¹

As you can see, the entries are all military and contain the rank, unit and base of the father. This sort of information could have been used by a hostile intelligence service to build a fairly complete picture of the British Armed Forces deployment across Germany at that time.

Sources

1. Baptism of Susan Hilary Commons, 13 Feb 1954, Trinity House C of E Leadership Centre, “H.Q., 2.T.A.F. Command Register 1948-”, page 4