Joseph Hiley

About a 15 minute drive from Thiepval is the town of Albert which played a major part in WW1 and was the main town behind the lines for the Allies on the 1916 Somme battlefields.

Joseph Hiley is buried at the Albert Communal Cemetery Extension in the town.

Joseph was from Yardley, Birmingham, historically in the county of Worcestershire. He had 4 brothers and 2 sisters and in 1911, aged 16, his occupation was a Wire Worker.

He joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, B Company, 10th Battalion. The Battalion was involved in the attacks on High Wood and the Battle of Pozieres Ridge. Joseph died of wounds received in battle on 31st July 1916, aged 21. His effects were sent to his father, also called Joseph.

A visit to Thiepval (4 - Leonard Hiley)

The post today returns to my trip to Thiepval in July and the last of the 4 names on the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme battlefields.

Leonard Hiley was born in Eccles, Lancashire in about 1885. He was educated at the Eccles British Schools. In 1905 he married Ethel May Whitehead in Weaste and they lived at 59 Knight Street, Eccles. Leonard and his father Beaumont Hiley were both Tripe Dressers. Leonard and Ethel May had 4 children - Dora (b 1906), Winston Beaumont (b 1910), Leonard (b 1912) and Gwyneth (b 1916).

Leonard was employed at the Ship Canal Sand Box Works at Weaste and enlisted in Salford in 1915 with the Lancashire Fusiliers 19th Battalion, the 3rd Salford Pals. He attained the rank of Lance Corporal. The Fusiliers' first taste of action was at Thiepval Ridge in the Battle of the Somme on 1st July 1916, the Salford Pals being almost wiped out. Leonard was one of those killed in action on that day.

An online 'Database of the Missing' can be viewed on the computers in the Visitor Centre at Thiepval. Leonard is among the soldiers shown and the images below are taken from this database.

The life of Henry Hiley Part 7 - Starting at School, January 1924

Now it’s time I told you how I started at school. That would be when I was 5 years old in January 1924. I was well aware of what went on at that school because of course I’d had a brother and 3 sisters who had either been there or were still there, and the routine that was drilled into my mind was that the children would be larking round in the playground, chasing each other, playing their games, and making any amount of noise, when the schoolteacher on duty, whether a man or a woman – it could be Mr Beasant, it could be Mr Forrest, it could be Bob Butterworth, it could be Alice Holden, it could be Clara Rubberneck as we called her, Mrs Riley, Mrs Allerby, Miss Wilson - whoever was on duty would come out with a bell, like a town-crier’s bell. And, clang!, whatever was going on in the playground had to stop, and if any child failed to stop what he was doing in whatever attitude, he or she was sent in to receive the cane. At the second ring of the bell the children would line up in their classes and they would be marched in, in the morning to a full assembly where we sang a hymn and said a prayer, or after playtime directly to the classrooms, and in the afternoon of course directly to the classrooms.

The photo below, taken in 1986, shows the playground at Littleborough Central School. Henry wrote:
This is exactly as it was when I first went to school in January 1924, except for the grey looking vestibule. 

Now then, on my very first day I was in the playground and decided that I needed to go across for a pee. The bell went. I was halfway across the yard. If I were to move I would be sent in to get the cane. If I didn’t go sharp I would wet my trousers. So what did I do? I had a pee there and then in the middle of the playground, and what the lady thought of me, if it was a lady, or a man, whatever the teacher thought of me, well that was it. In the first week or so I remember being sent home because I had dirty trousers but as far as I can remember there was no further such incident.

In the same class were, both boys and girls of course, all of us about 5 years old, no more, but in that same class was Barbara Kershaw. I remember one or two of the other girls as well – Alice Harrison, she was a cheeky thing, there was Matty Hacking, she was rough, and of course I remember a lot more of the boys. Especially on the street, we used to go out and play on the street, there was Geoffrey Collins who’s still alive, Edgar Chadwick, he’s dead now, Leslie and Albert Smith, Lesley’s still alive, Albert was killed in a street accident only a few years ago. I’m speaking now in the year 2002. The Smiths’ father was a butcher. Geoffrey Collins's father was a painter.

I liked school. I can remember my first reading lessons – c in cat, d in dog, and so on. I can remember some of the decorations on the classroom walls. They were pretty basic and I was surprised when I went into that school some twenty or more years later to find that some of the classrooms had still the same decoration as they had had in the 1920s.

The photo below shows Henry's class of 42 pupils at Littleborough Central School in the mid 1920s. Henry is 6th from the left on the back row and Barbara Kershaw is 4th from the left on the row in front. Henry and Barbara married in 1944.

Samuel

This is the 200th post in the Hiley Blog.

To celebrate this landmark, here are photos of one of the newest members to join a Hiley family.

Samuel Jonathan Hiley de Jesus Born in Madrid, Spain 20th June 2024

Samuel with his older brother Gabriel

The life of Henry Hiley Part 6 - Henry's Grandparents' house in Walsden

In this post Henry talks about his grandparents' house in Walsden.

Sunny View, that's where the grandparents lived, they had an interesting house. Grandad had bought a property about 1923. The deeds - I'm sorry that we don't have a copy of the deeds – but they went back to the year of Trafalgar, 1805, and in 1805 there had been built into the hillside at Walsden this block of nine rooms, three by three. They just went back the depth of one room into the hillside. The shop had five of the rooms on the low road. There was the bakehouse built into the hillside. In the middle was the living room, very tiny, and then there was the shop. Above that two bedrooms belonging to that complex, over the bakehouse and the shop. They were still into the hillside – there was no way out at the back, quite solid, and then on the room over the shop, that was free-standing. That came out on to a steep back lane and that was the Grandparents' living room and above it they had the bedroom. Theirs was a two-room dwelling. That left two rooms still on the top floor and they were single room dwellings.

Henry's plan of the property:

The property in Walsden 
(155, 157 & 159 Hollins Road)

The first person I remember living in one of those was Aunt Clara, that was Father's Aunt Clara, and later Grandad went to live in that particular one and later again Mary took the other one, the third on the way up. She lived there for a short time after she’d come out of the convent at Burghwallis.

Mary's apartment
(One room dwelling no. 3 on Henry's map)

The property had been bought by Grandfather round about 1923/4. When he died it was left to his three children, that was Uncle Frank, Father and Aunt Annie. Eventually it came to belong to Father. It was let out. The shop was rented by Bert Hird. He was the uncle of Thora Hird, the actress. He had the five rooms. When Grandad died then of course no member of the family lived in any of the apartments but my father did eventually go back there and lived in the first, going up the hill, of the one-room dwellings. Mark you, my grandfather had moved up there before then, and he lived the rest of his life there after Grandmother died except for a day or two at the very very end when he went to Burnley and died at Aunt Annie's.

Sunny View on Top o' th' Hill Road
(The Grandparents' house)

My father would go there, into the property, after he gave up Glaisby Cottage and Barbara and I took over the tenancy of it. When Father was very ill he came to live with us in Windermere. Agnes took over the ownership of the whole property. She lived in the shop and worked the shop. She didn't do any baking. She just had John Kenneth with her and managed to make both ends meet by looking after the shop. All in good time she took in Mary. Mary lived in the top floor in the last of the one-room dwellings. I think that was it. Eventually Agnes sold the whole property and we, as a family, had no further financial interest in the complex.

I can't remember that any of those houses of Grandfather's had a water supply actually to the house. There would be a supply, a cold water tap, to Bert Hird for his baking and for the shop, but unusually at that time and in that part of Lancashire, or the West Riding of Yorkshire, (we were very close to the boundary between those two counties) in working class homes, Grandfather had a water lavatory. There was a little washhouse outside, very close of course, where there was a cold water tap and where Grandmother used to do her washing, and alongside it was a water lavatory and directly below it was a water lavatory for Bert Hird and his family, for the shopkeepers.

The property's flag roof seen from Top o' th' Hill Road
(Henry mentions this above)

A visit to Thiepval (3 - Joe Hiley)

Today's post is about Joseph (Joe) Hiley, the third of the four names on the Thiepval memorial.

Joe was born in Torworth near Retford in Nottinghamshire in 1892. In 1911 he was listed as a ‘Ram Driver at Pit’ and when he enlisted in September 1914 a ‘Coke Oven Worker’.

Joe joined the York and Lancaster Regiment 8th Battalion where he became a Lance Corporal. He was killed in action on 1st July 1916, attacking Ovillers where his Battalion suffered 635 casualties. It was the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The Battalion suffered very heavy losses and most of the men were either killed or injured. His medals and effects were sent to his mother Hannah Hiley, widowed, of Wickersley in Rotherham.

The life of Henry Hiley Part 5 - Henry's Aunts and Uncles

Henry's father Harold had an older brother Frank and an older sister Annie. Another sister Agnes had died in infancy. Annie married Herbert Jackson and Frank married Martha Hannah Greenwood.

In this post Henry talks about visits as a young boy to his Aunt Annie and Uncle Frank.

Henry's mother Ethel died two months after Henry's 4th birthday.

Now of those four years I hadn't spent all four years at 72 Victoria Street, Littleborough. I take it that when mother was ill I was sent off for a few months, well I don't know for how long, to Burnley to my Aunt Annie and Uncle Herbert. Uncle Herbert was a parkkeeper at Ightenhill Park in Burnley. Annie was Father's older sister, Sarah had started nursing, Annie was still at school, at Burnley Grammar School, Willie - I don't know exactly what he was doing. I know I liked the house. I remember particularly there was a little pigsty quite close and I used to like to go and have a look at the pigs over the pigsty door and I used to love to see them crunching coke. I heard afterwards that for them to crunch coke, that was good for their stomach, almost like people with bad stomachs taking a charcoal pill nowadays.

This photo was taken on the occasion of Willis Jackson's wedding in Cheshire in 1938. From L: (Uncle) Herbert Jackson, Samuel Hiley (Henry's grandfather), Sarah Jackson, Ron Atkinson (who married Annie, Sarah's sister, (Aunt) Annie Jackson (nee Hiley)

Willis Jackson, Henry's cousin, receiving his DSc in Manchester

Whilst I was sent off to Burnley, Mary was sent to Uncle Frank and Aunt Martha Hannah. We all loved their house. It was called Bank Cottage. We always called it The Bonk and there was a big garden going down to the Rochdale Canal. Uncle Frank – I can't remember him growing vegetables, perhaps he might have grown a few peas, but he certainly grew flowers and people came from far away, well, from Walsden, to buy flowers from him. He kept hens as well. He had a greenhouse. He grew tomatoes in the greenhouse and always had one or two plants that produced yellow tomatoes. Those were a speciality. And the chickens – he used to hatch the eggs in his own incubator, then we children used to love to see the baby chicks pecking their way out of the shell looking pretty wet and sticky and bedraggled when they did get loose from the shell but quickly drying off under the lamp of the incubator and showing their fluffy, fluffy feathers.

Uncle Frank and Aunt Martha Hannah. Grace Annie (Henry's stepmother) is in the back

Bankwood Cottage, Walsden