He fought with pride and a miners’ tattoo ..but without the right to vote
11/11/1918-11/11/2018: 100 years since end of World War 1 Readers share their memories of loved ones who fought for our freedom
As we approach the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, we will be telling the stories of the ordinary people who made an extraordinary sacrifice for our country. Daily Mirror Associate Editor Kevin Maguire pays tribute to an ancestor could have played in the Christmas football match of 1914.
Grandad was one of hundreds of thousands of patriotic working class men who enlisted to fight for a country that denied them the vote. Durham coal miner Arthur De Redder, then 23, swapped backbreaking shifts down St Hilda’s colliery in South Shields for the 7th Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment in August 1914.
Half the British Army didn’t win the right to elect the politicians ordering them over the top until property qualifications were abolished in 1918, in a victory better known for enfranchising most women. Germany was more progressive, with every
soldier in the trenches opposite on the electoral roll in the likes of Berlin, Bonn and Bremen.
Private De Redder served with the Green Howards in France and Italy and was wounded twice. A bullet smashing his ankle was followed by a head shot in 1915 requiring convalescence in Eastbourne then Glamis Castle in Scotland.
The veteran of the Somme was described as an “exemplary” soldier in his military record.
Personal details include the tattoos to identify grandad’s body had he been killed: a “Labour and Honour” miners’ crest on his left forearm, “True Love” with a heart and crossed hands on the right. After the war, it was back down the pit before joining the merchant navy and then Readhead shipyard on the Tyne, dying in 1965 aged 74. My mam Jennie, youngest of his six kids, recalls her mother Sophia saying the Sunderland fan played in the Christmas Day football match (almost certainly family folklore). “He walked with a slight limp but had a good head of hair so you couldn’t see the more serious wound,” she reminisced. “People didn’t talk about that war and he was no different. He tried to go to a reunion of the Green Howards in York but never made it, probably not having the train fare.”
His sailor son George drowned in the Second World War when the Germans sank his ship.