BORN HULL 15/02/1885. SON OF LUCY EMMA AND JAMES THICKETT JACKSON, OF HULL. HE HAD FIVE BROTHERS AND TWO SISTERS.
HE MARRIED AT ST JAMES CHURCH, HULL, ON 08/03/1914. HUSBAND OF ELIZABETH COLE JACKSON (1885-1989), OF 4 HERBERTS TERRACE, MARMADUKE STREET, HULL, 21 PULMAN STREET, SPRING BANK, HULL (ARMY ADDRESS) AND 5 PETTINGALE TERRACE, DALTRY STREET, HULL (WAR PENSION ADDRESS). THEY HAD ONE DAUGHTER, EDITH MILLICENT JACKSON, BORN ON 07/05/1914. HE WORKED AS A COLOUR MIXER. DESCRIBED AS 5 FOOT, 3.5 INCHES TALL, 36-38 INCH CHEST SIZE, 153 LBS WEIGHT.
HE ENLISTED IN THE HULL PALS, ON 08/01/1915. SERVED IN EGYPT AND FRANCE. KILLED AT SERRE, ON 13/11/1916, AGED 31.
Hull Pals Memorial Post. PRIVATE JOSEPH WILLIAM JACKSON 1388. Born in 1885, Joseph was the eldest of six children to James and Lucy Jackson. A Colour Mixer by trade he lived with his wife, Elizabeth and their daughter Edith at 4 Herbert’s Terrace, Marmaduke Street, Hull. Edith had only been born on 7th May 1914, just a few short weeks before a bullet in Sarajevo changed the world forever. Joseph enlisted at City Hall on 8th January 1915 joining the 11th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment, ‘The Tradesmen’, 2nd Hull Pals. He served in Egypt and on the Somme, and it was here, at Vauchelles, as the Pals attacked German positions near Serre, that he lost his life on 13th November 1916. Private Surfleet described the front line after dark:
“(It) was no longer a trench but a bloody ditch. From early morning until night, it had been battered and disrupted; a pale sickly moon came out to show us how horrible and terrifying that trench really was. The mud, churned and re-churned during the day, was indescribably sticky and we had great difficulty in moving several bodies to side-trenches where they were less liable to total disintegration and had, from there, at least some chance of a decent burial.”
I wonder if Joseph’s was one of those bodies Surfleet and his comrades did their best to protect from the shelling. He did indeed receive a decent burial, at Euston Road Cemetery; a father who never had time to know his daughter; he was 31 years old.
