MEMORIES 681 told how after 106 years of lying in an unmarked grave, Pte Joseph Humble of Witton Park was to get an official headstone, and that was duly unveiled at the start of the month in Escomb cemetery.
Joseph, 23, served twice in the army during the First World War, but on both occasions he was invalided out. On the second occasion, he came home with TB and died just a month before Armistice Day. His medical report noted that he was suffering “tuberculosis of the lungs aggravated by military service”.
READ MORE: HUMBLE SERVANT IS TO GET HEADSTONE AT LAST
His family always felt he hadn’t been treated fairly but now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has agreed with his great-nephew, Dale Daniel, that he was due an official headstone.
Memories’s tame genealogist, Billy Mollon, has also delved into Joseph’s family tree and discovered a very curious connection.
Joseph was born in Cockfield in 1895 and his brother, James, was born down the road in Woodland in 1898. James married Polly Swinbank, of West Auckland, who was a cousin of George Henry Sproates, born at West Auckland in 1887.
George turns out to have been the grandfather of Alan Sproates, who was born in 1944 at Hetton-le-Hole. Alan joined Darlington FC in 1965 and stayed for nearly a decade, making 315 league appearances and scoring 17 goals. He is regarded as one of the Quakers best ever players.
In 1973, he moved from Darlington to play for the Miami Toros in the North American Soccer League. He died in California in 2015, and he was, although he probably never knew it, a distant relation of Pte Humble!
MEMORIES 682, our supersize D-Day edition, wasn’t the only publication to extol the memory of Company Sergeant Major Stan Hollis, from Middlesbrough and serving with the Green Howards, who was the only person on D-Day to win the Victoria Cross for supreme acts of bravery.
READ MORE: FOLLOWING THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE ONLY MAN TO WIN THE VC ON D-DAY
We are grateful to several readers for pointing out that the distinguished military historian Max Hastings also mentioned him in his D-Day diary in The Times. He wrote: “A namesake of mine, though no relation, Lt Col Robin Hastings, once talked to me about his sergeant-major, Stan Hollis, who won a VC for a series of suicidally brave actions on and just after D-Day. “You know,” said Hastings, “Hollis was the only man I met in the entire war who felt that winning it was his personal responsibility. Everybody else, if there was some bloody awful job to be done, prayed that some other poor bugger would get it.””
LAST week, Rishi Sunak was rubbing shoulders with world leaders at the G7 conference in Italy, and Anne Gibbon in Darlington was fascinated by the report on our reproduction front page in Memories 680 from May 18, 1959, when The Northern Echo reported on events at the world Foreign Ministers’ conference in Geneva 65 years ago.
The star of the show was the Russian spokesman, Mikhail Kharlamov. “Despite a toneless voice and retiring manner, he has inherited a flair for dramatics,” said the Echo grudgingly, and he would hold impromptu press conferences causing the world’s 1,300 journalists to empty out of the other foreign ministers’ press conferences to attend, leaving them talking to no one.
The US was trying to win the journalists back with a show of strength whereas the lone fellow representing Briton was showing an admirable stiff upper lip and a surprising skill for languages. “America’s 57-year-old Andrew Berding has 14 officers and a Voice of America radio team to assist him,” said the Echo. “Britain’s Peter Hope, tall, bespectacled and ebullient, can cope fluently with questions in English, French and German.”
“Do I detect a slight note of quiet triumph in that last sentence?” asks Anne.
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