Gertrude Wetherall (1878-1964) and George Albert Harvey (1882-1937).
My 2nd great-aunt and uncle.
Gertrude Wetherall was born on 5 December 1878 and baptised on 23 December that year at St Nicholas’s Church in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk (above). Her husband, who fought in The Great War, killed himself on the railways.
After growing up in Admiralty Road, Great Yarmouth, with her parents, Gertrude went to stay with her sister Emmeline and her family in Winifred Road, Gorleston, Norfolk. The 1901 census shows here there while working as a draper’s assistant. She married Saffron Walden native George Albert Harvey at St Nicholas’, Great Yarmouth on 17 October 1910 but they went on to live in Willesden in north London, where he worked as a counter clerk and telegraphist for the Post Office. They had two children, Reginald Albert Harvey and George Leonard Harvey.
The family was living at 19 Sussex Road in Harrow when George Snr enlisted in the British Army in 1915. He served in the Royal Engineers Signal Service, which would go on to become the Royal Corps of Signals and was responsible for battlefield communications aided by wireless and motorbikes among other modern developments of the time. George was an ordinary sapper to begin with but was promoted first to corporal and then to sergeant during his time in France, earning a Meritorious Service Medal. This was instituted in 1845 for the British Army to recognise meritorious service by non-commissioned officers, who were also granted an annuity. However, I’ve yet to discover what action George took to earn himself such an award.
After the war electoral roll records show the couple continued to live in the Harrow area, the 1921 census listing the family at 19 Sussex Road. George had returned to work at the Post Office as a counter clerk and telegraphist but he killed himself by jumping in front of a train on 28 December 1937.
Train driver Richard Birch, from Liverpool, told the inquest (reported in many papers including the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail of 1 January 1938) how his train was travelling at up to 50mph, approaching Harrow and Wealdstone Station in north London, when he saw George jump down from the platform on to the rails and stand with his hands clasped in front of him. Birch sounded his whistle to no avail. Described as a Post Office overseer of Warrington Road, Harrow, George had been depressed over the Christmas holidays and had complained of dizziness, according to his son Reginald. A verdict of suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed was returned. There is no indication from the records what caused George’s depression but there’s a possibility that what he saw and experienced during his war service may have contributed to it.
Gertrude went to live in Leigh on Sea after her husband’s death, possibly to be with her sister Elizabeth. Addresses in Highcliffe Drive and Sunningdale Avenue are given in her sons’ military records and my father remembered visiting them in the area. Gertrude died on 8 March 1964 in the hospital at Southend on Sea in Essex.
George Leonard Harvey (1917-1982)
George (or Len as he was often known) was born on 1 January 1917 and would go on to work as an insurance clerk. In 1938 he signed on to serve with the Territorial Army, and specifically as a gunner with the Royal Artillery and the City of London Yeomanry Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment. He was called up on the outbreak of war in September 1939, when the regiment was given responsibility for protecting a number of positions in London. His battery, the 43rd, defended the docks at Tilbury and Enfield Power Station among other potential German targets. On 17 May 1940 he disembarked with the newly formed composite unit the 101st Light Anti-Aircraft and Anti-Tank Regiment in France, to reinforce allied forces that were being pushed back towards Dunkirk in the Battle of France. Evacuation was already being planned when George landed and a full-scale effort to bring the military back to Britain would begin in earnest later in the month. 43 Battery fought in the Battle of Abbeville, an operation designed to relieve the surrounded British Expeditionary Force. Some in the regiment were evacuated in the initial Dunkirk operation but others would remain until mid-June.
At some point George was captured. He was originally noted as missing in action but on 1 July 1940 it was reported that he was a prisoner of war. He was released by allied forces for return to the UK on 26 April 1945. German records showed him at Stalag XX-A in the Polish city of Thorn in the early months of 1940, when he was being treated for lymphadenitis and oedema. This camp was a vast enterprise, in reality a collection of smaller camps or forts that at one point housed up to 20,000 men. More than 4,000 of them had come from Dunkirk. The camp was liberated on 1 February 1945 by Soviet troops.
George married Emily Theresia, who my father thought was Austrian, but I don’t know where or when. He died on 18 March 1982 of heart failure at St James’s Hospital, Balham. Described as a retired insurance assistant, his address was given as Cromer Court, Streatham High Road.
Reginald Albert Harvey (1912-1993)
Reginald Albert Harvey served as an electrician in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War. Documents at the National Archives in Kew show his date and place of engagement as 4 November 1943 in Ellesmere on the British Destiny, an oil tanker built by Harland and Wolff in 1937.
He was discharged from service in July of 1944, giving his address on leave as 30 Sunningdale Close, Leigh on Sea, Essex – where his mum was living at the time. He had much less luck on his next ship, the Rio Bravo, which he joined in August of 1944 and that was sunk by the Germans on 2 November the same year with the loss of 14 men. Reginald was one of the survivors. The tanker, built just a year earlier, was torpedoed while at anchor two miles off the coast at Ostend in Belgium by an E-boat (a fast attack craft). The Rio Bravo reportedly flooded, caught fire and sank. Records show that Reginald was sent home and told to report first to Tilbury and then to shipbuilders F T Everard at Greenhithe, Kent. It’s not clear whether he went to serve on any other vessels after what must’ve been a traumatic experience.
He died on 20 March 1993, his address given as 15 Blueberry Gardens in Coulsdon.
Sources. All data has been gathered from family memories, Ancestry.co.uk, FindMyPast.co.uk, the British Newspaper Archive and Norfolk Family History Society. Wreck Site. Further information on Rio Bravo. George Leonard Harvey’s service records at Ministry of Defence.