John Arthur UTTLEY

14439, Private. b. 1885, Clayton d. Thu. 2nd December 1915 (aged 30).

John Arthur was the son of John and Nanny Uttley. His father was a plasterer by trade. The 1891census shows John and Nanny Uttley living at 26 Fenton Street, Princeville when John Arthur was aged 4 with his younger brother Jowett Uttley, aged 1. Next door at 28 Fenton St lived Johns Grandad Robert and Grandmother Nancy and Great Uncle Charles. The men all being Plasterers. Johns mother, Nanny, died on September 1891 aged 37.

On 21st December 1907 aged 22 John Arthur married Hilda May Ronan, he is shown as living on 8 Brecks Row in Clayton and his father John also deceased. The 1911 census shows John Arthur and his wife Hilda living at 4 Vignola Terrace with their two young girls Emily and Hilda.

John fought in the ill fated Gallipoli campaign. He died at a time when fighting had virtually come to a standstill on the Peninsula. On the afternoon of 27th November 1915 in what must have seemed a bizarre contrast to the blistering heat of the summer, the sky clouded over and heavy flakes of snow began to fall, mixed with freezing rain.

The temperature across the Peninsula had soon dropped to below freezing and remained this way until the New Year. Hostilities very much slowed down whilst both sides tried to come to terms with this unexpected turn of events. Before the Allies could do anything about this though, thousands of their troops clad only in thin tropical kit had died of exposure and frost bite.

Judging by the location of John’s burial in Hill 10 Cemetery it is quite likely he was one of these victims, as the cemetery’s primary use was by the nearby field hospital. He is recorded to have ‘died of wounds’.

In a poignant description by one of the soldiers who survived the big freeze of December 1915, Private Harold Broughton wrote home (found in Defeat at Gallipoli):
“My pal and I, Corporal Dean, sat on two empty tin biscuit boxes up against the wall of our trench. We pulled some blankets over our heads, some ground sheets over that, put our arms around each other and sat like that through the night with water right over our boots. There was nowhere else to go so we sat there until the morning. When we tried to move we could lift these blankets and ground sheets off us like corrugated iron. Our feet, well they were frozen in the water and we could hardly move to pull them out. All around us there were chaps moaning and crying. Some of the sentries standing on the fire steps had frozen stiff and when they were touched fell over. Frozen. I had frostbite in my hands and feet. Some of them were so bad that they were told to get down onto the beach as soon as they could. That was the only place they could be treated but there was no road by means of taking them there. So I saw men crawling on their hands and knees. Grown up men crying like babies – even the Quartermaster Sergeant of the Royal Marines.”.

John is buried at Hill 10 Cemetery, Gallipoli, Turkey.

Johns younger brother Jowett Uttley survived the war and is shown in 1939 register as living at 2 Crestville Terrace