Family Lessons 133: Joining Up

Was it the sense of excitement? Was it the glamour of the uniform? Or the dullness of life as a weaver at Darwen’s Peel Mill? My Great, Great-Uncle, John Taylor Marsden, enlisted with the East Lancashire Regiment, 2nd Battalion, aged barely sixteen. He was wounded in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915, but survived another two years in the British Army, dying in June 1917 as an eighteen-year-old Lance Sergeant. He must have been one of the youngest acting sergeants in the Army, which either bespeaks his natural, military mindset, or the drastic rate at which older sergeants were getting shot or blown up.

The Darwen News of Saturday, July 28, 1917 reported:

Sergeant J.T. Marsden

It is reported that Sergeant John Taylor Marsden of 28 Dandy-row, Eccleshill, has been killed in action.

Sergeant Marsden who joined the East Lancashire Regiment in January 1915, went to France about seven weeks ago, and was killed on June 21st. Sergeant Marsden who was wounded at Gallipoli was 18 years of age and before enlistment he was a weaver at Peel Mill, also working for his brother, a clogger, in Chapelbrow. He was connected with Lower Chapel. He has two brothers serving, one in Mesopotamia, and the other in France.

Whether he had the time and sense to remember the lessons of his Congregational Sunday School, or the Lower Chapel preachers’ exhortations to believe in the Lord Jesus, I cannot say. Life as a sergeant in the British Army would have been more exciting than a weaver in a Lancashire mill town, but it was certainly more dangerous. War is nasty and brutal, flinging men and women into eternity ahead of their expected time. It may not be the guns or snipers of the German Empire which hurls us toward the grave, but there are plenty of people reading this who shall die suddenly or unexpectedly. The questions which I asked of Uncle John at the start of this paragraph, will be asked of you.