While the major acts of remembrance occur on the second Sunday of November here in the UK, there is a wider remembrance of the sacrifices of the Great War throughout Europe and in other nations on Armistice Day, 11th November.
For many, these solemn acts of remembrance allow us to reach across time and connect with family and non-family members who we know gave their all in conflicts more brutal and violent than any of us have – and hopefully ever will – experience.
Such a connection exists between myself and Sgt Joseph Hurley, 147 of the 1/4th Batallion of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, who served in the Great War.
My connection to Sgt Hurley reaches back to the beginning of the last century and although there is no blood relationship between us, his son – also called Joseph, though we only ever called him Joe – was married to my grand aunt Mona, the older sister of my paternal grandmother.
Researching my own family history brought me in touch with Joseph senior’s story and, remarkably enough, his military photograph, probably taken in the late summer of 1914 after he signed up.
There is a wide-eyed innocence in this photograph, an air of optimism and an ever so slight hint at pride. It speaks to that determination and certainty that marked the beginning of the war but belies reality of the war itself, unaware of the carnage that was coming down the tracks for this 24 year old soldier and so many millions of others who left families and children behind to go and fight in a foreign country.
Joseph was born in Chorley in Lancashire, probably at 264 Lyons Lane1, where the family were living at the time of the 1891 census. His father Edward was from Canarvon in Wales and is listed in the census as a 25 year old general labourer. Joseph’s mother was Margaret and she worked as a frame tenter in a nearby cotton mill. She was 25 years old.
Lyons Lane at the time was a long road of terraced housing in Chorley, broken by further streets of terraced, back to back housing. There are corner stores, and the occasional public house – the Seven Sisters Hotel was on Eaves Street opposite where they lived at the time and the Brooke Street Inn was not too far away. Even in the modern era, you can glimpse the past staring down at you from the red brick walls, for the whole area is typical of the late Victorian housing found all over the cotton mill town of Lancashire at the time.2
Joseph is listed on the 1891 census return as nine months old, which would put his date of birth sometime around June or July 1890. This checks out with his military record which lists his age as 24 years and 2 months when he signed up.
Later records have him living in and around Chorley, and at one time in Leeds, as a hawker of pots and pans. By the time of the war though he had taken a job as an insurance agent for what appears to read “Brittanic Insurance Co” on his war record.3
What is clear from the record is that they were living in Coppull and the only street-name beginning with a “K” in Coppull is Kimberley Street. This is not too far away from St Oswald’s Roman Catholic Church in Coppull too and his memorial indicates that he worshipped there as well as being a Scout Master to Chorley Boy Scouts one time.
Joseph signed up on 3rd August 1914 and joined the 1/4th Battalion of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment.4 He was part of the British Expeditionary Force that went to France in May of 1915 and he remained there throughout the war, taking part in the Battle of Festubert between the 15 and 25 May 1915.
This attack by the British army in the Artois region of France on the western front formed part of a series of attacks by the French Tenth Army and the British First Army in the Second Battle of Artois (3 May – 18 June 1915) and was the first attempt at attrition by the British Army. The consequences were horrific with the British suffering 16,648 casualties in just ten days.
Joseph’s war record gives a clue to the rapid turnover in men at this point in the war. By early September he was promoted to Lance Corporal due to the wounding of his predecessor in the role, Lance Corporal Moore. Five days later he was promoted again – to Corporal – when Corporal Bleakledge was killed. A month later, on 7th October 1915, he was promoted to Sergeant.
He must have had some time away from the front in 1915, as his son Joseph Garfield Hurley was born in February 1916, but by that point he was back in France. The 1/4th Loyal North Lancashire regiment had been absorbed into the 164th Brigade in 55th (West Lancashire) Division in January that year and in early August the division moved south to participate in the Battle of the Somme.
The division was given the objective of capturing the village of Guillemont and the nearby German trenches. The German defenders were dug in at the village and surrounding areas and in early August the division made three unsuccessful assaults on the Germans from the British positions at Arrow Head Copse
There are field reports of these attacks, just to the south west of Guillemont. Second Leiutenant Gabriel Coury, who was attached to the same division as Joseph, won the Victoria Cross for his actions here on 8th August 1916 and the citation for his award, published in October that year, gives some idea as to what happened.
For most conspicuous bravery. During an advance he was in command of two platoons ordered to dig a communication trench from the firing line to the position won. By his fine example and utter contempt of danger he kept up the spirits of his men and completed his task under intense fire. Later, after his battalion had suffered severe casualties and the Commanding Officer had been wounded, he went out in front of the advanced position in broad daylight and in full view of the enemy found his Commanding Officer, and brought him back to the new advanced trench over ground swept by machine-gun fire. He not only carried out his original tasks and saved his Commanding Officer, but also assisted in rallying the attacking troops when they were shaken and in leading them forward.
– London Gazette (Supplement), 26th October 1916, p10394
Sgt Joseph Hurley was reported missing presumed dead on the 8th August 1916, most probably killed during the attack reported above, along with 4 146 other soldiers.
His remains were never found and whatever is left of them after the shelling of Guillemont and the intervening 108 years must still lie somewhere beneath a field marked La Garenne on modern satellite mapping. There is no white stone war grave for him, as there is for the few who were found at Arrow Head Copse and are buried in the British War Cemetery the field from where he died.
He is, however, commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme along with 72 336 other men from Britain and South Africa.5
I only discovered Joseph’s story in 1919 while researching my own family history. But he has now become familiar to me through the detail of his life revealed in war records and census returns and old photographs of the places he lived. To see his face looking back across a century from his war photograph is to know him on another level for over 101 years he gradually disappeared into history, fading in memories, unspoken, a name on a pier of a memorial in France enduring that “second death” that Ernest Hemingway wrote of.6
Revisiting his life and his sacrifice and writing it here brings him back to the collective memory, makes him that real person once more and reminds us that for every one of the millions who die in conflict there is a life story…
“…a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.“7
Footnotes
- The house numbers must have been redistributed in the 134 years since as the highest house number on the street now is 202. I’m given to assuming the house they lived in was towards the eastern end of Lyons Lane, towards the junction with Eaves Lane. ↩︎
- Joe’s son and wife – my grand aunt – moved to Lyons Lane in the late 1970s, living at number 219. Whether Joseph Jnr moved back there deliberately knowing the family connection with the street, I do not know. ↩︎
- Joseph’s war record was one of the thousands damaged by bombing raids on the archives in the second world war and the company name is partly burnt out, as is the street-name where he lived with his wife, May, and their five month old daughter ↩︎
- His original service number was 147 but this changed during the war to 200063 as the regiment was absorbed into other divisions. ↩︎
- Pier and Face 11 A. ↩︎
- Hemingway wrote “Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.” ↩︎
- Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” in just a few lines captures the reality, individuality and human experience of the lives lost in war. ↩︎
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