BORN HULL 1896. ARMY ADDRESS ABOVE, NEWLAND. AN APPRENTICE WATCH MAKER AT BRANTON’S JEWELLERS, CARR LANE. HE RESIDED WITH HIS MOTHER ELLEN JONES ABOVE. HE WAS PREVIOUSLY TWICE WOUNDED. HIS DEATH & PHOTOGRAPH ARE REPORTED IN THE HULL DAILY MAIL ON 10TH OCTOBER 1918.*
Hull Pals Memorial Post. PRIVATE PHILIP GEOFFREY JONES 21970. Born in 1896, Philip was the youngest of four children to Thomas and Eleanor Jones of 15 Vancouver Crescent, Alexandra Road, Hull. A Watch Maker by trade, he enlisted just before the dreaded Conscription Act became law and standing at 6ft 1″ he may have appeared on the surface a fine figure of a man. In truth poor Philip does not seem to have been equipped for what the army was to put him through. Having trained for the first half of 1916, he arrived in France in June only to be shipped home with shell shock a month later. Going by the dates, it seems the army, in all its glorious stupidity, dropped a Watch Maker who lived with his Mum into the middle of the Battle of the Somme and wondered why his mind snapped. He was hospitalised back in England where he developed Bronchitis and spent the following months recuperating. Arriving back in France in 1917, he was wounded in the shoulder and leg once again returning home where he spent time in Ripon. Each time he came out of the line he was reposted with a fresh battalion, never staying long enough to forge the deep bonds of comradeship soldiers share, always the outsider. He joined the Pals on 16th June 1918 and was killed in action on 4th September, less than three months later. Philip Geoffrey Jones, a Watch Maker from Hull, a man whose physical and mental health should have kept him as far away from the Western Front as was humanly possible, is buried at Le Grand Beaumart British Cemetery, Steenwerck; he was 21 years old.
His Death was reported in the Hull Daily Mail, om 10/10/1918. *
