Gertrude Emma Stolliday (1881-1964) – widowed by war

Gertrude Emma Stolliday (1881-1964) and Jonathan George Skipper (1879-1916).
My great-grand aunt and uncle.

Gertrude was born in Great Yarmouth on 2 January 1881 to parents Edward Stoliday and Harriet Goulty and baptised on 26 June of that year at St Nicholas’s Church. The census for 1881 showed the family living in the town’s row houses – number 123 to be precise – but, as would have been the case for much of her young life, her father wasn’t at home. As a fisherman, he was often at sea.

Just before her marriage Gertrude was with the family at 46 Admiralty Road and apparently working as a domestic, although the 1901 census record is maddeningly difficult to read.

She married Jonathan George Skipper on 25 May 1902 at St Nicholas’s and raised a family with him. He was a local, born in Yarmouth on 9 November 1879, who went on to work as a postman. The London Gazette of 14 May 1901 recorded that he’d been certified by the Civil Service Commissioners as qualified for his appointment.

By 1911 the family were living at 23 Stafford Road, Yarmouth, but Jonathan then served in the First World War as a rifleman with the Post Office Rifles in the London Regiment (service number 372371). He was killed in action on 7 October 1916 during the Battle of the Somme, when he and his fellow men attacked the Diagonal Trench near the Butte de Warlencourt, an ancient burial mound in northern France. The mission was a failure resulting in large casualties.

Two weeks before his death Jonathan had written home to his family, and the poignant, moving letter was reproduced in the Great Yarmouth Mercury in 2021:

My dear little children, just a few lines to you all hoping you are all well and getting on fine at school. Of course, I know our little Clifford don’t go to school yet, he’s stopping at home and keeping mother company. Well dada is please to say thank God that I am feeling well once more.
I am with all the dear soldiers that came back safe after the terrible battle. Some are like me and got little children at home, so they are glad that God have spared them once more.
Well, I reckon you have all learnt some fine little pieces at your school since I left home, don’t see any children where I am now, only soldiers. Give the gran mams and gran dads my love when you go around to see them.
Suppose you go to Sunday school and sit with mother on Sunday evening, if she doesn’t take you out, the worst part is the winter nights as gets dark so soon after tea so you cannot get far.
It’s so nice and sunny today, after having so much rain which makes so much mud afterwards.
You must all write me a short little letter and put it in Mothers letter when she writes just tell me how you are keeping. Well this little letter is for you all from your loving Dada with fondest love. God bless you all and keep you from all danger. Two kisses each XX XX XX XX XX.

Tragically, Private Skipper’s body was never found and his name is one of thousands on the Thiepval Memorial (Ref: Pier and Face 9C and 9D) – a memorial to 72,191 missing British and South African men who died at the Somme and who have no known grave. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the memorial was built between 1928 and 1932 and is the largest British battle memorial in the world. An inscription on it reads: “Here are recorded names of officers and men of the British Armies who fell on the Somme battlefields between July 1915 and March 1918 but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death.”

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission recorded him as the son of the late Jonathan Skipper; husband of Gertrude Emma Skipper, of 200 Stafford Road, Southtown, Great Yarmouth.

Jonathan was posthumously awarded the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. 

Gertrude didn’t remarry after her husband’s death and for many years continued to live in Stafford Road, Great Yarmouth, but in the 1939 Register she was listed at 276 Earlham Road, Norwich, Norfolk, with daughter Doris and her family.

Gertrude died in 1964, having also lost a son in the Second World War.

The couple had five children:

  • George Edward Skipper (1902-1981), who married Lilian Anderson in 1929 and at the time of the 1939 Register was a Post Office sorting clerk. He was born and died in Great Yarmouth.
  • Gertrude Winifred Skipper (1905-1987), who married pharmacist Sidney Samuel Pollard in 1929. They lived in Surrey and South London after their marriage, where Sidney also worked as a sub-postmaster. After his death, Gertrude married Cyril Burr in Avon in 1978. Her death was registered in the county.
  • Arthur Frederick William Skipper (1907-1943), who worked for the postal service and married Lily May Ham in Berkshire in 1933. He joined the Royal Navy in the Second World War and died on the HMS Hurworth on 22 October 1943 when it struck a mine in the Aegean Sea. The total death toll was 113.
  • Doris Beatrice Skipper (1909-1998), who married a Post Office worker named Ernest William Henry Wesley in Norwich in 1933. Her death was registered in Wiltshire.
  • Valentine Clifford Skipper (1915-1992), a tailor’s salesman in Ipswich, Suffolk, at the time of the 1939 Register. He married Katherine Isabel Betts in north London in 1944 and Laura Gilder after his first wife’s death in 1979. He died in Norwich, Norfolk.

Sources. BMD, military and census records (including UK Army Registers of Soldiers’ Effects 1901-1929) at Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.co.uk. The London Gazette of 14 May 1901. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Great Yarmouth Mercury, 14 July 2021.

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