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Sgt. John Richard Taylor
British Army 337th Brigade, 340th Bty. Royal Field Artillery
from:35 Joseph Streer, Bow, Middlesex
Jack Taylor and Miss Petrie: A Love Recalled
When I began to research my mother's family, the Taylors of Joseph Street, Bow, I was asked by various relatives who was Miss Petrie? The question was always posed with a smile. I learned from them that Miss Petrie, a society lady, had nursed my wounded grandfather, John Richard (Jack) Taylor, during the Great War. For some years after she visited his home and helped his family. Contact had been lost almost ninety years ago, and as the older members of the family had passed, there seemed to be little chance of finding an answer to the question. But in 2013, a chance reading of a family history magazine told me that the National Archives had recently made available records of army nurses from the First World War. I was fortunate that the nurse I was seeking had a less common surname and I soon found a Miss Susie Constance Petrie in the medal card index. Could this be the one? Some cross-checking against census and probate records showed that this Miss Petrie was from a wealthy family. And there was even better news when I found that a descendant was researching the Petrie family. After an exchange of e-mails and contacts with the wider Petrie family, they confirmed that Susie had indeed taken care of my grandfather in 1916, now exactly 100 years ago.
John Richard Taylor had been born on 18 April 1887, the second oldest of the nine known children of John Taylor and Sarah Berry at 15 Crown Place, Mile End Old Town. Over the next decade the family moved to Dunk Street, Whitechapel and then back to Ernest Street, Stepney. Jack was just 17 when he married Mary Ann Maud (Polly) Wright, who was four years older, on 26 February 1905 at St Johns, Halley Street, Limehouse. The marriage was timely as Polly gave birth to Mary Ann Eugenie four months later, the oldest of up to thirteen children born or still born over the next 25 years (nobody is quite sure of the actual number). Sadly daughter Mary only survived for four months before succumbing to tubercular meningitis.
In his civilian life Jack worked as a packer or wholesaler at a glass and china warehouse in Houndsditch. At the outbreak of the Great War he enlisted with the Royal Field Artillery at Canning Town. He was promoted from Driver to Sergeant on 26 August 1915, just before his first overseas assignment. Military records show that he initially served in France, where the family recalls that he had a horse called Polly. According to a recurring family joke, it is not certain if the horse was named after his wife, or his wife was named after the horse.
He fought on the Somme, the largest battle of the First World War, where more than one million were wounded or killed. Jack was one of the casualties. He was hit by gunshot on Sunday 30 July 1916 at a place listed as HiM, although the Royal Artillery Museum could not decipher or find the exact location.
Jack was treated in the field before being evacuated to England on 2nd August 1916 on HM Hospital Ship St David. Jack is recorded as being admitted to the 5th Northern General Hospital in Leicester on 3rd of August 1916 with GSW (gunshot wounds) to the left side of his face and head. He remained at the hospital until 5th of October 1916.
Jack made sufficient recovery to be pictured with his Battery at Canterbury in March 1917. He embarked from Southampton for Alexandria in April 1917, arriving in Egypt in June 1917. He was to spend over a year in the Near East, fighting in Palestine, Gaza and Jerusalem with the 74th Division known as the Broken Spurs. He fought again in France in 1918 before being discharged in 1919.
Jack applied for a disability pension and was examined in November 1919 at the Medical Board, 62 Conduit Street, London W1. Jack complained of headaches and general nervousness. The Doctor considered the wounds, including the gunshot wounds to the head, to be superficial, saying that scars on the back of the left side of head had healed. He said that while Jack had suffered impairment during his service, he had recovered, continuing that there were no bone injuries, no tremors and he had found the heart and lungs to be normal. His application for disability benefit was rejected.
But Jack never did fully recover; his daughter Hetty remembered small pieces of shrapnel emerging from the side of his head for many years after the end of the war. And the family remembers that this was when Jack started drinking heavily; there was no recognition of post-traumatic stress in 1919.
Susie Constance Petrie had been born in Hampstead in 1889, the daughter of an affluent Marine Insurance Broker. When her father retired the Petrie family first moved to Margate in Kent, but by the time he died in 1906 the family had moved to Westbury-on-Trym, where Susie was baptised in 1907, aged 17, shortly after her father's passing. In spite of great wealth within the family, which was confirmed by her father's will, Susie chose to work as a Governess to a private family and this is shown on the 1911 census. Soon after war broke out in 1914, Susie volunteered to be part of the Territorial Force Nursing Service as a Special Military Probationer. Her aim was primarily to care for her serving brothers, although in the end their paths did not cross. She served at the Northern General Hospital and was awarded a medal at the end of her service.
Miss Petrie spent months caring for Jack who might otherwise have died. Both families recall that during this time Susie became very fond of her patient. Her niece thought that she had probably fallen in love with Jack as she spoke about him for decades afterwards. At this point life might have taken quite a different course. Jack could have abandoned his relatively poor family in the East End for a wealthy woman, who was in love with him. Susie, disappointed in love, might simply have walked away and forgotten him. Instead, and after discovering that he was a married man with a family, Susie became determined to help Jack and his children. Miss Petrie married a man twelve years her senior in 1920, but kept in contact with the Taylor family for many years. She made frequent visits to the East End, sometimes with her brother Lionel, who would also call at the family home at Joseph Street.
Soon after the war, Susie was able to get Jacks two oldest boys, John Henry and Albert Edward, into service with families she knew and in 1928 Susie arranged a job for daughter Hetty (Harriet Lilian) at a French couturier in Bond Street, where she was a customer. But Polly, worried about her fourteen year-old daughter travelling up west by herself, found Hetty a less glamorous job locally as a radio assembler. The reasons for the visits to the East End by Susie and Lionel remained a mystery to the Petrie family until our exchange of correspondence in 2013. But they say this would have been typical of Susie; her niece recalls that Susie was one of the kindest and most generous women she knew.
So Jack remained with his family and continued to work as a packer, until retirement after which he picked up occasional work as a night watchman or as a garage attendant. In later life, Jack suffered from chest complaints exacerbated by the Great Smog of December 1952. On the last day of that year he was again taken ill and passed away shortly after on 1 January 1953 at Mile End Hospital, just a few yards from where he had been born. He was 65. Polly was to die two years later in June 1955. And Susie passed away in 1966 at Clevedon in Somerset. All three are fondly remembered by the Taylor family.
.JPG)