Joseph was the youngest of eight children of George and Ellen Rickard, born on 5 August 1873 at Wingrave, Buckinghamshire. The earliest of Joseph’s known ancestors were stonemasons at Whitchurch, in the mid-north of the county, but his great-grandfather moved westward to Grandborough. His grandfather, William Rickard, came east to Wingrave, where most of the inhabitants were in the employ of Lord Rothschild. Rickards could no longer find employment as stonemasons, and had become bricklayers, carpenters and general builders, or simply labourers. In 1891 Joseph (19) was a general labourer, residing with his older brother William and his family at Wingrave. Ten years later Joseph was back home with his parents and was employed as a bricklayer, like his father George and his brother William, who lived next door.
In 1910 Joseph married a young woman named Martha Mardell, from Pitstone, a village near the border with Hertfordshire. They lived at Wingrave for a few years and then moved to Pitstone. Their first child, named Joseph Ronald, died within a few weeks of his birth in 1911. The second child was a girl, Lilian Helen Rickard, my mother, born in 1912. The next was a boy named Maurice (born 1914), known for most of his life as ‘son’; to me he was always ‘Uncle Son’. The fourth child was born after the death of his father, and was named Joseph Neil, but always known as Neil.
Within the first year of the Great War (WWI), many answered the call for volunteers. Joseph (41) and his nephew Ralph Higgins (25) were two of them. They joined the Royal Engineers and were posted to Gillingham, Kent, where they trained with the Kent Fortress Engineers, before being sent to Turkey to participate in the ill-fated Gallipoli Campaign. Their main task on the Gallipoli peninsula was to improve trench design and maintenance.
During the night of 10/11 October 1915, two companies of Royal Engineers (1/2 West Kent Field Coy and 1/3 Coy) were conveyed by train from Chatham, Kent, to Plymouth, Devon. Ralph Higgins was in 2 Company and his uncle Joseph in 3 Coy. The following day they boarded HMS Scotian in the naval dockyards at Devonport, and set sail for an unknown destination. When they passed Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean Sea, they knew where they were headed. Scotian’s first stop was Malta, for refuelling, and then to the Greek island of Lemnos, some 50 miles (80 kilometres) off the Turkish coast. They arrived at the port of Mudros, on the isle of Lemnos, on 27 October, and disembarked.
The following afternoon they were conveyed in two smaller ships, to make a night landing on the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula, at Cape Helles (Cape Mehmetçik). Ralph and 2 Coy were aboard HMS Redbreast, and Joseph was with 3 Coy on board HMS Hythe. These were very small ships. Hythe was a paddle-driven cross-channel ferry of 509 tons displacement, which operated on the Dover–Calais route before she was requisitioned at the beginning of the war and converted into a minesweeper, then diverted to Gallipoli as a landing craft.
At about 8 o’clock on the night of 28 October, Hythe, overcrowded with soldiers and their bulky equipment, and sailing in the darkness, with no lights showing, approached the Turkish coast, where she was struck amidships by a larger vessel, also without lights, which was returning at speed from dropping its load. The bigger ship, HMS Sarnia, survived the encounter, but Hythe sank within minutes of the collision, with considerable loss of life. The number of deaths varies from one account to the next, but the official memorial at Cape Helles names 143 soldiers, in addition to the crew members who died, and 2207 Sapper Rickard J, Royal Engineers, is among those commemorated at that memorial.
Ralph Higgins, on Redbreast, landed safely on Turkish soil. He survived the fighting on Gallipoli, and later the horrors of trench warfare in France and Belgium, to return home to Wingrave and tell the tale.
Martha (Mardell) Rickard and her children, including Neil, born four months after his father’s death, survived the difficulties of life without a breadwinner.
Joseph is remembered not only by his descendants but also by the memorial in Turkey, the HMS Hythe memorial at Tunbridge Wells, Kent, smaller memorials in Pitstone and Wingrave, and a ceremony at the Tower of London in 2014, when his name was read out on 18 September, and broadcast, among countless others who died in the Great War.
Ironically, no living member of his five generations of descendants bears the surname Rickard.
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