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 to labourer Jonathan Skipper Snr and his wife Harriet. Jonathan Jnr went on to work as a postman, and 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, which formed the 1st Battalion London Regiment (service number 372371). He was killed in action on 7 October 1916 during the Battle of the Somme, which raged on both sides of the river of the same name in northern France from July to November of that year. Specifically, he was one of many men who took part in the attack known as the Battle of the Butte de Warlencourt on 7 October 1916. This was the battalion’s first engagement since the Battle of Flers on 18 September, a successful assault on the German lines which was followed by a period of reinforcement and reorganisation.
The butte was an ancient burial mound that lay near the village of Le Sars, an excellent observation post for the Germans. They had reinforced it extensively with machine gun posts, dug-outs, barbed wire and other defences but allied commanders were determined to take it, setting a series of targets to capture on the way including a number of German-held trenches. British forces faced waves of machine gun fire and the history of the Post Office Rifles noted that two companies were wiped out as they advanced on the trenches, only seven men returning. This history called it a “somewhat disastrous” attack. Jonathan was one of many casualties of war that day and during the rest of the Battle of the Somme, when the Butte never was captured despite obsessive allied attempts to do so.
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, bringing up her children alone. For many years she 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, her death registered in Yarmouth, having also lost a son in the Second World War.
The couple had five children:
- George Edward Skipper (1902-1981) was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, in 1902 and married Lilian May Brackenbury in 1929. She’d been born in Burgh Castle, Suffolk, in 1901. At the time of the 1939 Register, George was working as a Post Office sorting clerk. They remained in the town, George dying in 1981 and Lilian in 1984.
- Gertrude Winifred Skipper (1905-1987) was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, in 1905 and married pharmacist Sidney Samuel Pollard there in 1929. They lived in a number of places after their marriage including Ewell, Surrey, and Twickenham and Feltham in Middlesex, with electoral rolls the 1939 Register and phone books recording him working at a number of pharmacies but also as a sub-postmaster. Sidney died in Bournemouth in 1973 and Gertrude married former soldier Cyril Edwin Burr in in 1978. They settled in his home city of Bristol, where his death was registered in 1985, Gertrude’s in 1987.
- Arthur Frederick William Skipper (1907-1943) was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, in 1907. He worked for the postal service as a sorter and telegraphist. Arthur married Lily May Ham in Berkshire in 1933 and they settled in the county town of Reading, where she’d been born in 1912. He joined the Royal Navy as an able seaman 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 escort destroyer had been launched in 1941 and saw most service in the Mediterranean. It had left Alexandria in Egypt the day before the disaster as part of a supply force for the Dodecanese Islands. On 22 October it went to investigate after a Greek vessel hit a mine, and in turn hit one too. The ship split in two and had sunk within 15 minutes. More than 130 people lost their lives. Lily remained in Reading and died in 1989.
- Doris Beatrice Skipper (1909-1998) was born in Great Yarmouth in 1909 and, like other members of her family, worked for the General Post Office. She married fellow Post Office worker Ernest William Henry Wesley in Yarmouth in 1933. He’d been born in Finchley, Middlesex, in 1906 but had later settled in Buckinghamshire and Reading, Berkshire. They were recorded in Norwich in 1939 with their children. Ernest died in 1977, his address given as Lowestoft in Suffolk. Her death was registered in Wiltshire in 1998.
- Valentine Clifford Skipper (1915-1992) was born in Great Yarmouth in 1915 and would’ve been too young to remember his father. A tailor’s salesman in Ipswich, Suffolk, at the time of the 1939 Register, he married Katherine Isabel Betts in Edmonton, Middlesex, in 1942. She’d been born in Canning Town, Essex, in 1921 and her death was registered in Norwich, Norfolk, in 1979. The same year, Valentine married Laura Gilder. He died in Norwich in 1992, two years after his second wife.
Sources. Birth, marriage, death and burial records including civil registrations from the General Register Office, census returns, electoral rolls, military and other records at Ancestry.co.uk, Findmypast.co.uk and Norfolk Family History Society.
The London Gazette of 14 May 1901.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Great Yarmouth Mercury, 14 July 2021 and the British Newspaper Archive.
A History of the Post Office Rifles, published by the Naval & Military Press, and a history of the Battle of the Butte de Warlencourt.
HMS Hurworth info.