City link to First World War medal dug up from garden
A MAN is on the hunt for Birmingham relatives of a Great War soldier after finding his medal while digging up his garden.
Peter Thorpe, 58, stumbled across the medal while moving earth to build a greenhouse.
It belonged to Phillip Jarrett, who joined the Royal Field
Artillery as a driver and was posted to France on August 17, 1915.
He was awarded three medals for his service – the Victory Medal, the British Medal, and the 1914/15 Star medal, which Mr Thorpe found.
The star was awarded to soldiers who served in France in the period between November 23, 1914, and December 31, 1915. Mr Thorpe, a photographer from Bristol, now hopes any remaining relatives of Phillip Jarrett can come forward and claim the medal.
“I’ve been building my house plus creating a garden on an old commercial site in BS5 and have found all sorts of old bottles and junk,” he said.
“On this occasion I was moving earth to build a greenhouse. As well as finding the usual junk, this interesting shaped piece of metal caught my eye. “Once cleaned up it was easy to do a quick Google search to establish which medal it was. Luckily, the stamp with the names and details were undamaged and easy to read.”
Via some online digging, Mr Thorpe found Jarrett had joined the RFA in 1914 before serving with the Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders.
He died at Kimnel Park Military Hospital, North Wales, on October 12, 1918, of malaria contracted while on active service.
He is commemorated in Bodelwydden Churchyard.
“There is a Joseph Jarrett who would have been about 18 at the time of Phillip’s birth, so he is a possibility as Phillip’s father,” Mr Thorpe said. “Joseph was the fifth of 11 children of John and Ann Jarrett who lived at Aston, Birmingham. They had moved to Birmingham from Bristol in about 1881 and probably had a lot of Bristol cousins.”