Hello - any help with the following will be greatly appreciated! GEORGE HENRY ANDREWS was a Marston man and much of his wretched life there was addled with court convictions, mostly for drunken & riotous behaviour. An exception was when he was 27 years old and charged with the theft of a purse & 8 sovereigns from my husband's 3xGt-Grandma. I have more than a passing interest in Geo Hry as he's in the same bloodline as 3xGt-Granddad. In his initial plea of innocence, Geo Hry claimed the sovereigns were his pension which he'd collected from the Barracks. It is this pension I would like to know more about. If he'd collected it from Cowley Barracks, can it be assumed that he'd served with an Oxfordshire regiment? Or, could he have served in any regiment or even have been a sailor and, so, would have gone to Cowley Barracks as that was his nearest pension-payment office? I can't, though, see when Geo Hry could have served in the military or completed enough years to qualify for a pension. What seems certain is that he was born in 1854, orphaned from the age of 12 and lodging with our 3xGt-Grandparents from the age of 17/18 through the next 10 years to his court appearance. He was entered in the 1871 census as a Farm Labourer; and in the 1881 as a Labourer. Could a man enlist and accrue service towards a pension and yet live (and work?!) in civvy street in the 1860s to 1880s? There is another curious thing - Geo Hry stated that, should he be convicted, he would lose his pension. Were military pensions withheld or withdrawn for bad behaviour or was it the case that, should a man be in prison and therefore unable to collect it, he would forfeit his payments for the duration? Or, could this have been some entirely different pension which he could go and collect, say, from a Salvation Army Barracks? No scorn or surpise was expressed at Geo Hry's claim to being a pensioner - or to a supposed entitlement of 8 gold sovereigns - but do you think this is really just a (particularly well-pickled) red herring? With best wishes, Carole (in Devon, UK)