In looking for a soldier who died one hundred years ago this month, during the long campaign now referred to as Passchendaele, I came across Private R Hill, a young Barnstaple man.
The snippet above appeared in the North Devon Journal on the 13th September 1917, the article alongside having appeared in the preceding week.
The letter quoted, sent to the family by his commanding officer, shows the formality and jingoistic attitude of the time beside the quite matter of fact but horrific detail of his probable demise.
Private Hill’s other brothers are described too. Private J Hill, having died at Ypres two years earlier, and three others still alive and serving in various places and forces.
The article says that Private Hill had been employed by as a blind maker in the High Street. The shop fronts in Victorian and Edwardian photographs of the High Street are notable for the ubiquitous presence of blinds, which could be drawn out as a canopy to shade the windows. The blind making business of JS Rice had been taken over by SS Abbott in 1911 and by 1917 seems to have diversified into the supply of a variety of useful items – from dark blinds to screen “lights from Zepps” to “ladies’ toilet requisites” and “worm pills for dogs”.
The detail from the newspaper article gives us enough information to be able to find Private Hill in the 1911 Census and here he is below with the brothers as mentioned above – his own occupation as a blind maker, and Alfred’s, as a police constable confirming that this is the right family, and Private Hill’s first name as being Robert.
We can see by the Census form that there had been fourteen children in the family, three of whom had died. The Hills seem to have been a bit confused by the form and its requirements and have listed all of their children, including some who had possibly left home, and then crossing them out. However this is very useful from a family history point of view.
This entry from the North Devon Journal births column of 26th November 1896 includes one of these dead children. Of the ten babies listed in that week two had “since died” and another had been stillborn – a solemn indication of the infant mortality rate at that time.
Robert’s father Alfred has described himself in the Census as a pilot – the Enumerator has added the word River to qualify this, and turning to the cover of the form we can see that the family lived at 9 Olinda Place, Rolle Quay – then in the Pilton East area for official purposes.
Olinda Place was a terrace of eleven properties at the far end of Rolle Quay nearest the confluence of the Yeo and the Taw. Demolished in the late 1950s/early 1960s as particularly prone to flooding, they were home to many who earned their living on the river. Alfred would have guided larger vessels along the estuary, avoiding sandbanks and the treacherous Bar at its entrance.
This photograph, from the Barnstaple Town Council collection held at North Devon Record Office, shows flooding at Western Terrace, Mill Road – the houses which backed on to Olinda Place. If you go to Rolle Quay you can still see the places in the walls where planks would be put across the gaps between the buildings to stop all but the highest tides.
Crossing the Bar has been the downfall of even the most experienced sailors, who may have traversed the world but died within sight of home, as a walk around the churchyard at Northam will testify, a sailing ship being at the mercy of the winds in the days before motive power. Joseph Besly Gribble, in his Memorials of Barnstaple published in 1830, notes “the Lady Rodney Steam Packet, the first steam vessel that ever came over the bar” on July 22nd 1827. However sailing ships continued to be a major part of Barnstaple’s river traffic up until the Second World War as this picture of Rolle Quay in the 1930s shows.
Of the eleven houses in Olinda Place in 1911 three were occupied by river pilots – as well as Alfred Hill, there being Joseph Stribling and father and son John and Claude Roulstone – and another by a sailor, the husband of young mother Winifred Shambrook, himself away from home on Census night.
I have not been able to find any further newspaper items about Robert, only a young man when he died, but have found items which appear to relate to his brothers and their life on the river.
In 1936 the barge on which Edward Hill and Claude Stribling were fetching gravel sank in the estuary – an occupational hazard with the vessel lying low in the water and coming upstream on the tide. Another brother Henry, a telephone engineer, was involved in an incident with a water bailiff in 1943.
Neither have I been able to find any further war records, apart from his medal award, relating to Robert on the Ancestry website, not even an indication of a grave or memorial. However on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s own website Robert’s final resting place is recorded as being in Cement House Cemetery – which seems an unfortunate name given his commanding officer’s account of his death.
This name is explained on the website in this way – “Cement House” was the military name given to a fortified farm building on the Langemark-Boesinghe (now Boezinge) road. The original Cement House Cemetery (now Plot I, an irregular group of 231 graves) was begun here at the end of August 1917 and used by the 4th and 17th Division burial officers, by field ambulances and by units in the line until April 1918.
Perhaps Robert Hill lies literally where he fell.
DG
Sources –
North Devon Journal – British Newspaper Archive (online – available free in the Local Studies Centre, charge for printouts)
1911 Census – Ancestry Library Edition – (free access available in the Local Studies Centre and any Devon library, subject to conditions)
Map – 1:500 scale Ordnance Survey (1889) Local Studies Library
Photograph of Rolle Quay – Len Stevens collection, Local Studies Library
Memorials of Barnstaple John Besly Gribble – 1994 edition, reprint Lazarus Press, Bideford.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission website – http://www.cwgc.org
Barnstaple High Street – Stengel & Co postcard – Local Studies Library collection
Mill Road photograph – North Devon Record Office – Barnstaple Town Council collection