240327 Pte. Joseph Herrington British Army 12th Btn. Yorkshire Regiment from:37 Scott Street, Redcar My grandfather Joseph Herrington joined up to serve in WW1. I'm not sure when. At the time he was 37 and had four young boys aged from 11 to 3. Therefore he went to war as a volunteer rather than as a conscript.
He was a joiner, the son of a pub landlord in Harrogate, and married my grandmother in 1903 when she was working as a maid of all work in the same town. The couple moved to Redcar around 1906 and Joe obtained work as a council joiner, working on a new batch of streets that adjoined the railway at one end and the stables of Redcar Racecourse at the other. They were named after council Aldermen - Scott, Soppett, Hanson, Herschell, Holder and Elton.
The couple already had two sons when they arrived in Redcar, Joseph Stanley and Arthur Reginald - but soon after my father, Albert Edward was born followed by George Ernest. Unusually, for someone of his class and income level, Joe was able to buy one of the houses he had worked on, number 37 Scott Street, and this house remained in the family for over 50 years.
Joe went to war and returned damaged and unable to work. He was with the Teesside Pioneers in some of the fighting on the Somme and received a stomach wound. He was discharged and to my knowledge - as I only have this information from my father - he never worked again. He kept up his trade union payments, probably knowing this would help funeral bills and he died in 1928, after eleven years of illness.
My grandma kept going. She had four working sons - at least until the depression hit. She put the sons in the outhouse in the back yard in the summer months. They slept there whilst their two bedrooms were given over to bed and breakfast guests. She seems to have been a Trojan and Joe, from what I know, was a quiet, kind man. A man who went to war voluntarily, a bit of a hero in my eyes.
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