PRIVATE 35946 JOSEPH JAGGER, 12th BATTALION KINGS OWN YORKSHIRE LIGHT INFANTRY.


PRIVATE 35946 JOSEPH JAGGER, 12th BATTALION KINGS OWN YORKSHIRE LIGHT INFANTRY. KILLED IN ACTION 15th OCTOBER 1917 AGED 24


On the 10th October 1916 Joe Jagger married Frances Short at the Methodist Chapel on Wells Road in Ilkley. It would be a short marriage for within just 12 months Joe would be dead, killed during the battle of Passchendaele.


Joe was born in the village of Clifford near York in 1893, the son of David and Harriet. His father was a farmer who brought his family to Lee Farm at Priesthorpe near Calverley and Joe followed in his fathers footsteps, working as an agricultural labourer. In early 1916 whilst working in Beverley, Joe, enlisted into the 12th Battalion the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, but before he was posted overseas married Frances Short whom he had probably met whilst she was working as a domestic servant in a large house in Calverley.

The 12th Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry were a pioneer battalion who were regarded as the workhorse of the army. Often engaged in digging trenches they were also expected to be able to operate as infantry when needed. Usually they were recruited from mining areas and most pioneer battalions would come from Yorkshire and the North East. On 15th October 1917 Joe's battalion were near to Wieltje near to Ypres digging new communications trenches near to the front line. It seems that a sudden German artillery barrage caught a number of men in the open killing 3 of them and wounding 4 others. Sadly, Joe was one of those who was killed. Following the death of her husband, Frances Jagger was forced to return to domestic service, working in a house on Westville Road. She would not remarry and would die in 1935 aged just 45 years.

Today Private Joseph Jagger lies in White-House British Military Cemetery and is remembered with pride on our war memorial in Ilkley.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PRIVATE 77570 HUGH McALISTER ALLAN-BLACK 9th BATTALION ROYAL FUSILIERS (LONDON REGIMENT) KILLED IN ACTION 8th AUGUST 1918 AGED 19

Image
PRIVATE 77570 HUGH McALISTER ALLAN-BLACK 9 th BATTALION ROYAL FUSILIERS (LONDON REGIMENT) KILLED IN ACTION 8 th AUGUST 1918 AGED 19 The youngest son of John Allan-Black and his wife Claire, Hugh was born in the hamlet of Stone Gappe near Lothersdale in the Craven District on the 25 th May 1899. His father was a wool merchant whose father Charles Ingham Black was a noted Irish scholar and poet and formally the Vicar of Burley in Wharfedale. His mother Claire nee Delius was the sister of the famous conductor Frederick Delius of Bradford and who in 1935 would write his biography. When Hugh was very young the family moved to Victoria Avenue in Ilkley where he attended the grammar school. However, in 1914 the family left the town and moved to Castletown on the Isle of Man where Hugh attended King Williams College. Hugh left school in 1917 when he achieved the age of 18 and enlisted into the army. His health was not of the strongest and he appears to have suffered from a w
Read more

2nd LIEUTENANT LEONARD FOSTER, 15th BATTALION WEST YORKSHIRE REGIMENT (LEEDS PALS BATTALION) DIED OF WOUNDS 13th AUGUST 1916 AGED 28.

Image
2 nd LIEUTENANT LEONARD FOSTER, 15 th BATTALION WEST YORKSHIRE REGIMENT (LEEDS PALS BATTALION) DIED OF WOUNDS 13 th AUGUST 1916 AGED 28. On the morning of the of the 1 st July 1916, the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, one thousand men of the Leeds Pals awaited the signal to leave the relative safety of their trenches and advance towards the German trenches situated a few hundred yards away in the remains of the village of Serre. Days of heavy British shelling had reduced the landscape to a sea of craters and it was blithely assumed that the enemy wire and trenches had been obliterated. At 7.30am precisely whistles blew and the Pals climbed out of their trenches and began to fan out before starting their deliberate advance towards the German lines. But contrary to their expectations the enemy had not been subdued and instead rushed to man their firing lines and opened up a deadly hail of machine guns bullets. The Leeds men now moving forward in lines walked steadily
Read more

CAPTAIN GEOFFREY SKIRROW 2/4th BATTALION KINGS OWN YORKSHIRE LIGHT INFANTRY (Attached). KILLED IN ACTION 27th AUGUST 1918, AGED 22.

Image
CAPTAIN GEOFFREY SKIRROW 2/4 th BATTALION KINGS OWN YORKSHIRE LIGHT INFANTRY (Attached). KILLED IN ACTION 27 th AUGUST 1918, AGED 22. During the Summer of 1918 as the war on the Western Front progressed towards its conclusion there was no let up in the intensity of the fighting as the Allied armies drove against a faltering but still dangerous enemy. After the successes achieved by the Germans during their Spring Offensive the British slowly and steadily regained the ground that they had lost earlier in the year and were now poised to breach the fearsome defences of the Hindenburg Line. Even though the fighting now took place over the shattered battlefields of 1916 and 1917 fighting  was more mobile and success depended on speedy rather than meticulous planning; it was a type of warfare at which British Divisions seemed to excel. The 62 nd (West Riding) Division had only arrived in France in 1917 and was recruited largely from the old West Riding of Yorkshire. Its effi
Read more