BROOKES, Joshua

Private Joshua Brookes
7626 1st Battalion Sherwood Foresters (Notts & Derby) Regiment
402527 Labour Corps

Joshua Brookes was the son of Samuel Brookes b. 1852 in Holmfirth, Yorks & Louisa Ann Brookes.

Joshua was born in 1875 in Hanley, Staffordshire. In 1902 he married Margaret Emery in the Stoke-on-Trent Registration District and they had children: Arthur b. 1904/5 Hanley, Staffs, Florence May b. 1906/7 Hanley and Thomas in 1908/9 born Selston, Notts, Joshua b. 1911 and Lily b. 1914 in the Basford Registration District. There was also one other child who did not survive.

It is very likely that Joshua, an ironworker, moved from Hanley, the “Metropolis of Potteries”, where many of the inhabitants were employed in the local furnaces and foundries, to take up work at the Butterley Company’s Codnor Park Forge. At the time of the 1911 census Joshua and his wife and children were living in a stone cottage at ‘Jacksdale Street’ owned by and adjacent to the Codnor Park Forge. Joshua is included in the Butterley Company’s Roll of Honour - ‘Names and particulars of employees who have left the Butterley Company to serve the country in the European War of 1914’. Joshua is listed as working as a labourer before his enlistment on 29th September 1914 and that he lived at 9, Jacksdale Row and was married.

Joshua served until his discharge on 18th April 1919. He served overseas in France with effect from March 1915. He was recipient of the 1914-15 Star, the British War & the Victory Medals. A Derbyshire Daily Telegraph article of 1934 mentions that Joshua Brookes was standard bearer for the Jacksdale & District Branch of the British Legion.

We believe that Joshua may have died in 1954 in the Belper Registration District, aged 80.