| Description | Work completed by volunteer includes the following information:
Joseph Winslow Hancock was born in Beverley in Oct 1890, the eldest son of Giles Hancock and his wife Jane Ann (nee Hudson), both of Beverley. Giles worked as a general labourer but was latterly a stoker at the Beverley Gas Works and a labourer for Beverley Corporation. Joseph’s grandfather, also Joseph Winslow Hancock was a coal merchant and many of the family lived in the vicinity of Beckside. Joseph was brought up on Trinity Grove, then Beckside and later lived on Beaver Road. He attended the Minster Boys Primary School. In the 1911 census he was recorded as a labourer on Beckside loading and unloading keels.
Joseph served as a private in the 1st/5th Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment, the Beverley Terriers. On 24 Dec 1917 he was badly gassed. The 1st/5th War Diary indicate that they were on the front line in the Ypres Salient in Belgium on that day, having arrived to relieve the 6th Durham Light Infantry. Three members of the battalion were gassed, including Joseph. He returned to frontline duties in 1918 with the 10th Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment. The 1st/5th was disbanded in Jul 1918 having suffered a severe mauling on the Aisne in May 1918 (Operation Blucher). It is likely that Joseph returned to service after this time and suggests that he was a long time convalescing from the gas attack.
On 18 May 1919, at St Peter’s Church in Islington, London, Joseph married Kate Ray, daughter of a pianoforte maker from Stoke Newington in London. They had two children: William born in Lambeth in 1924 and Jessie, born in 1926, in Southwark. The marriage entry notes that Joseph was a “biscuit maker”. He died aged 38 at Dorking, Surrey in early 1929.
Includes photograph, information taken from census, military records, Commonwealth War Graves, newspapers |