Remembering Joel Cole

This year marks the centenary of the end of the First World War and I am pleased to be involved with a project to remember the fallen from Fraddon, Indian Queens, St Columb Road and Summercourt. Organised by St Enoder Parish Council and part-funded with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, it involves the publication of a book which will include the life stories of more than seventy servicemen who lost their lives in the 1914-1918 conflict.

I would like to share what we have found out, so far, about one of the men. He happens to be my second cousin, three-times removed, and died one hundred years ago today.

Joel Cole from Fraddon was born in 1884. Both of his parents were local to St Enoder Parish and he worked in the china clay industry. He married Laura Annie Tregunna from the parish of Veryan in 1906 and they had two children, though one died while an infant.

Joel enlisted at Newquay and served with the 7th Battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, which was particularly badly hit during a German Spring Offensive in March 1918 near Picardy. In his history of the regiment, Hugo White has written that 18 officers and 413 solders from the Battalion “were killed, wounded or reported missing,” though “thankfully, many of the missing eventually found their way back to the Battalion or were reported as prisoners of war.”

The war diary for the Battalion listed Joel as “missing during operations 22-3-1918 to 2-4-1918,” while the Cornish Guardian in May 1918 reported he was a prisoner in Germany. Sadly, his family were unaware that he had already died, approximately one month earlier, at Cologne’s Fortress Hospital on 11th April 1918. He is buried in the city’s Southern Cemetery.

Joel’s passing was not confirmed in Cornwall until August 1918 and on the first anniversary of his death, Laura Annie Cole paid a heartfelt tribute to her husband and “darling daddy of Charlie” with a notice in the Cornish Guardian:

He dropped like a flower that’s nipped in the bud,
He has the repose of the gentle and good.
Cold, cold lies the clay of his mouldering head,
But sweet is the rest of the innocent dead.
And the love which we love him shall dwell in each breast,
Till we meet him again in the realms of the blest.

Anyone interested in finding out more about the project is welcome to view a display, which will be in the Ante-Room of the Indian Queens Victory Hall on Saturday 21st April, between 10.00 and 1.00. The Parish Council is particularly keen to hear from anyone who may have family memories and / or photographs about local servicemen from the First World War.

This is my article in today’s Cornish Guardian.