Joseph Skillern
Memorial: Thornbury - St Mary's Church
Regiment: Royal Field Artillery
Medals: 1914–15 Star, British War Medal, Next of Kin Memorial Plaque 1914 - 1921, Victory Medal
Rank and number: Gunner 1112
Parents: Thomas and Mary Ann Skillern
Home address: Butt Lane, Morton, Thornbury, Bristol
Date of birth: 1890
Place of birth: Awre, Forest of Dean
Date of death: 12/11/1915
Buried/Commemorated at: Ypres Reservoir Cemetery (Ref. I. A. 44.)
Age: 25
Further information:
Bronze Tablet and Wooden Memorial Board
Joseph Skillern was born about 1890 at Awre, the son of Thomas Skillern, an agricultural labourer, and his wife Mary Ann. Joseph had two older brothers, two older sisters and a younger brother. Their father died in 1895. In 1901 Mary Ann and her children were living with her brother, William Jones, in Charfield. Before the start of the war, Mary Ann lived at Oldbury on Severn, and then moved to Butt Lane, Morton, Thornbury, Bristol
Joseph enlisted in Bristol, as a Gunner with ‘B’ Battery, 79th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 17th (Northern) Division. He disembarked in France on 13th July 1915
The Division moved to the Ypres salient, holding the line and taking part in several actions near Hooge. This sector was already a wilderness of shattered tree stumps and shell holes. ‘In Flanders the winter of 1915 came early, with heavy rain storms and then hard frosts in the night, with a thaw in the early morning. Alternating rain, frost and thaw meant revetments giving way...and breastworks and traverses sliding away into heaps of mud. It was a never-ending task to keep the trench system in existence and to make it even barely habitable... soaked from head to foot, at their posts with the water up to their knees, men began to be incapacitated by a new kind of malady... later known as trench foot. After a few nights in the sodden trenches men found they could hardly walk or even stand. Their feet were swollen and either numbed and dead or acutely painful... November began with incessant rain... the Divisional camps were a sea of mud... The enemy was shelling day and night intermittently, and sometimes putting on a heavy bombardment, with shells screaming overhead and bursting... (Extracts from History of the 17th (Northern) Division by A. Hilliard Atteridge, 1929)
The newspaper reported that, according to his Commanding Officer, Joseph died at about mid-day on Thursday, 11th November. He wrote that Joseph had been in a party of five soldiers who were walking along a road when a shell suddenly burst close by, killing Joseph and another man instantly and wounding a third man. The Officer recalled an occasion when ‘he and half the Battery had gone astray, and Joseph managed to find us and guide us to where we ought to have gone. He was good at his work, and bore an excellent character’
By kind permission, this information is based on the following source(s):
Thornbury Roots Website. Thornbury and District Museum Research Group. Forces War Records and the CWGC