M/317183 PRIVATE JAMES WILLIAM PARKE
1016TH M.T. COMPANY ARMY SERVICE CORPS
DIED OF MALARIAL FEVER
17TH OCTOBER 1918
AGE 34 YEARS
Born during the fourth quarter of 1883 James William Parke was known by his family and friends as Jim. He was the second child of William, a brewer’s engine driver, and Alice (née Barnaby) living in Pound Street (later London Road), Halesworth. From the age of five Jim attended the town’s boys’ school. Like with several other lads in our stories, he had gone on to become a key player in the school’s football team, described as a useful player on the right wing. His schoolwork must have been of a good standard, as on completing his education, he obtained a position as an apprentice printer in the printworks of the Halesworth Times newspaper. One of the possible conditions of his employment was that he would have to attend the town’s night school where, once again, he would mix education with his sporting abilities by turning out regularly for the night school’s football team. Some time after completing his apprenticeship, and now classified as a jobbing printer, he had left his home town and found work with a printing company at Croydon in Surrey, while all the time keeping in contact with his Halesworth sweetheart Sarah, known as Cissie Etheridge. On 21st May 1910 Jim and Cissie were married at Saint Michael’s Church, Waddon, Croydon. Why they did not return to Halesworth for the ceremony is not known, although at the time of the marriage the church documents listed them as both living at the same address in Waddon. On 29th January 1911 their daughter Kathleen was born at Croydon but just a short time later, at the time of the 1911 census, Cissie and baby Kathleen were back living in Halesworth with her parents at 16 Wissett Road, while Jim remained in Croydon. At the beginning of the Great War in August 1914 the family were now living in a small terraced house in Mill Lane, Croydon. With a secure job and a wife and young daughter to fend for, Jim was not one of those who rushed off to enlist in the Armed Forces, waiting until the Government finally had to resort to compulsory conscription. The legislation which became law in January 1916 originally required single men between the ages of eighteen and forty years to be called up to serve, mainly in the army. However, due to the enormous losses in men, from June 1916 the terms of the Act changed to include married men.
On 1st October 1916 Jim was summoned to attend the recruiting office at Croydon Town Hall. Here after a medical examination, he was found to have varicose veins to his left leg and operation scars to his right due to the same condition. The examining doctor had then concluded that he would be unfit for front line service, but able to work in a supporting role. Although having now been officially enlisted he was then sent home to continue in his employment, in which he was now classified as a compositor and to await his call to arms. Jim’s complete military service can be recorded with a high degree of accuracy, due to his army records having survived. They can now be viewed on the National Archives website. They show that his call came six months after, on 30th April 1917, when he received orders to report just two days later to the No.1 Army Service Corps Training Depot situated at Grove Park in south-east London. On his arrival he was issued with the regimental number of M/317183 and the rank of Private. Over the following months he would have received training in the art of becoming a soldier and also, being a member of the Mechanical branch of the A.S.C., how to drive a motor vehicle. At this time a great deal of the army’s transport still consisted of horse-drawn wagons, so Jim must have impressed the recruiting Officer. On 3rd August 1917 he completed his training including passing the test that qualified him as a military driver, for which he received a small amount of additional trade pay. Over the next few months it appears he remained at the Depot, before receiving a brief period of home leave between 8th and 12th November 1917, after which he was detailed to report to join the 1016th Motor Transport Company, then based at Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire. Within days of joining the Company he was on the move once more, travelling to the naval base at Devonport, where, on 27th November 1917, he embarked on a transport ship bound for the Indian port city of Bombay, where they eventually arrived, after six weeks at sea, on 16th January 1918. Within hours of their arrival, they and their equipment had been transferred to His Majesty’s Transport ‘EKHA’ bound for Asha Basra on the coast of Mesopotamia (now Iraq) where they disembarked on 22nd January 1918.
The reason for troops being sent to the Middle East, while the majority of the fighting during the war had been taking place on the Western Front, was because, from late 1914, the Germans had been putting considerable pressure on their Turkish allies to attack British Forces who administered Egypt and the Persian Gulf region, with the aim of capturing and halting the flow of crude oil from the British owned oil fields. By the time Jim and his comrades arrived, the war in that part of the world had slipped from the front pages of the newspapers, with the public’s attention once again focused on the war on the Western Front, even though many thousands of British and Empire troops had been fighting and dying for some three years in conditions that were as bad as those on the battlefields in Europe. From the time of their arrival men of the Army Service Corps had continued in their role of supplying members of the front-line regiments with all their needs. This would involve driving many hundreds of miles across barren landscapes that would prove to be alien to all of them.
Back in England no doubt Cissie and Jim’s parents would have been keeping watch on any developments regarding how the war had been progressing many thousands of miles away. Unbeknown to them, early in the month of October 1918, Jim had been admitted to the 65th Base General Hospital in Baghdad suffering from the effects of malarial fever, from which he would die on 17th October 1918. After eventually hearing of his death Cissie then wrote to William and Alice, who were now living at 16 Wissett Road, to inform them of their loss, which was then announced by them in the Halesworth Times of 12th November 1918, the very day after the signing of the Armistice. This was then followed two weeks later by a further article published in the town’s newspaper on Christmas Eve, which included a passage from a letter sent to Jim’s wife by his Company Sergeant Major, in which he described her husband as a man of great courtesy and willingness to work while serving in the Headquarters section of the 1016th company. He also mentioned that Jim had been buried the day following his death in the Baghdad North Gate cemetery by his friends from the Company. As was the case with another Halesworth war casualty, William Dulieu (see his story), the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who had a number of official cemeteries to care for in that region, where over the following years, have been unable to attend to these burial grounds, due to the many varying political situations and wars. Several fell victim to various attacks and vandalism, so that they no longer remain a place of rest and a tribute to those men who gave their lives over a hundred years ago. Today the names of those men are remembered in two volumes of memorial books held in the Commission’s officers at Maidenhead in Berkshire. On the setting up of these cemeteries in the 1920s each of the fallen was marked with a standard headstone. These did not show favour to any rank or class of the man who laid beneath, but for a small payment each of the serviceman’s next of kin was able to add a few lines of script if they wished to do so. Cissie had the following words included for Jim: –
TO LIVE IN THE HEARTS
WE LEAVE BEHIND
IS NOT TO DIE
FROM HIS LOVED ONES
After Jim’s death Cissie applied for and was granted a weekly pension for her and young Kathleen of £1.0s.5d (£1.2p) which was to be paid up until his daughter’s sixteenth birthday, with a further lump sum that totalled £25.15s.9d (£25.79p) being paid by way of a gratuity for her husband’s life.
As well as the financial awards, his wife would have been able to claim those medal awards that Jim would have been entitled to, being the British War and Victory medal pair, with his named memorial plaque and scroll.
The location of these is unknown.
An early postcard of London Road
that had been previously known at the time of James’s
birth as Pound Street.
Could he be amongst the young lads seen in the photograph?