'They are still there': Francesca's profile number 3 - Jo Kirlew

A 2013 visit to the western front in France unearths a remarkable story for one Adelaide Hills resident.

Julie Reece Tours’ Connecting Spirits trips’ has been connecting the spirits of those who fought in world wars with their loved ones for some time, by taking groups to the western front of Europe to commemorate the fallen. For retired South Australian primary school teacher Jo Kirlew, the visit to her grandfather’s grave in France would allow a whole story of her own fathers’ history to unfold. A history learnt by coincidence, after travelling to her grandfather’s grave, Jo has spent most of her life completely unaware of the tragedy her father had dealt with and ultimately kept to himself, through much of his life.

“It’s almost something you could make up as a fiction story,” Jo says. “It truly is an amazing story and I now see my dad in a different light altogether,” she recounted.

Jo always knew of her grandfather Walter Kirlew and his service as a Private in the 7^th East Yorkshire Regiment during World War I. Private Walter Kirlew sadly died on July 1^st 1916, during the first day of The Battle of the Somme and is now buried in Fricourt New British Cemetery in France.

After meeting tour manager Julie Reece in 2009 and again in 2011, Jo decided to embark on her first Connecting Spirits tour in 2013, to visit the grave and commemorate her grandfather’s service in the war. Having known of her grandfather’s service, Jo was eager to expand her knowledge and gain a connection to him by visiting his gravesite.

“The very first time that I went to my grandfather’s grave would have been 2013 and I thought no more about the visit other than the fact I’d been,” Jo says.

“Later that year Julie got an email from someone called Allan Kavanagh from Kent (in the UK), with an attached photo of himself at Walter’s grave,” she says.

Unsure of what to expect after the initial contact, Jo soon realised she and Mr Kavanagh shared the same great-grandfather, consequently making the two of them distant relatives. During her next trip to England, Jo arranged to meet with Allan in person, however did not realise she was about to learn a whole hidden story about her own father, one he had kept secret through all his married life.

“He came to meet me to have lunch together and he brought with him a large A4 folder of my grandfathers’ history and we chatted about having both visited Walter’s grave,” Jo explained.

“I believe he must have done a significant amount of research as in his folder he had information of family history going back to around the 1600’s.”

Jo described how after about an hour of chatting about Jo’s own father, as well as her grandfather, Mr Kavanagh’s wife asked him to ask Jo ‘the question’. Absolutely clueless, Jo asked what they meant, only to be asked if she knew much about her father before he married her mother.  

“I told them all I knew, which was not a lot.”

Jo knew he lived in Hull and that his father had been killed in the war, so he lived with his mother and auntie, whose husband had also died. She knew he delivered coal as a lorry driver and they were not rich, living on next to nothing. Jo was again asked another question by Allan, this time if he had been married before meeting her mother.

 

Jo explained how the next question took her by surprise but it was very possible there was a part of her father’s life she had known nothing about. She quickly recounted her father’s age when he met her mother and how it differed to many men during that era, being that he had married later in life, rather than at 18 to 20 years, like many people did in the 1930’s and 1940’s.   

“I said he could have been, because my dad had me at the age of 30, had married my mother at the age of 29 and only met her when he was 28,” Jo replied.

Allan then presented Jo with a document from the archives at Somerset House containing information of a wedding between Ivy Abbott and Joseph Kirlew, held sometime during the last three months of 1936. Jo questioned the name because she knew her grandmother had named her father Joe, due to being illiterate and the name being an easy one to write and spell.

“My dad wasn’t Joseph, he was Joe, but maybe officially when they said his name was Joe, maybe the officials wrote Joseph. He then took out a copy of an article from the Daily Mail in Hull of a death notice for Ivy and another for a baby who died at 6 weeks. If this was the case, he had married this lady in 1936 and within a year she had died as a result of childbirth and the baby died weeks later,” Jo explained.

Before returning home, Jo contacted Somerset House to gain more information of the particular wedding, interested in the fact it may have been her father, yet still bewildered about possibility it was he. After receiving the marriage certificate from the unknown wedding, Jo was able to compare it to her own parents and she noticed Joe Kirlew was named as a bachelor on both.

“I knew he had not told my mum. On the first certificate, his father was named as Walter, deceased and his address listed as 2 Richmond Court. Once I read that, I knew it was him.”

As Jo spent some time understanding the significance of her father’s former life, a life she only found out about by chance, she began to plan attending another Connecting Spirits tour. After the tour, Jo made the decision to visit the gravesite of Ivy and the baby, who was technically her older half-brother, by birth.

“Julie and I were going back to Europe for another battlefield tour and so we said let’s go back Hull. We met with Allan (Kavanagh) and his wife Sue and we sprinkled some of my dad’s ashes at the gravesite of Ivy and the baby.”

There was no headstone so Jo decided to have a black marble stand with a little vase for flowers made to place at the site, with the words of the death notice from the newspaper in Hull. Jo continued to find out more about this compelling story after visiting the gravesite and now thinking back to her father’s life, understands why he made some of the decisions he made, for their family.

“Through the cemetery register we discovered that Ivy died of Septicaemia and the baby died of Gastroenteritis. That was enough to dissolve me into tears because there was an incident when my nephew was 18 months old and had gastro and my sister had just had another baby so was unable to stay with him in hospital. My dad said he’d do it and the whole family thought it was really odd, because we didn’t think it was to be something my dad would do,” she stated.

Finally the dots all joined together and Jo finally has found out a somewhat amazing story about her father and she and her family are now able to appreciate her father in a different light. The way her father was such an involved family man, wouldn’t go anywhere without his family and who clearly was a very dedicated husband and father made perfect sense. Having attended several tours since 2013, in this sense Connecting Spirits has enabled Jo not to just connect with her grandfather but for her entire family to connect with other people, both those living and those not, by truly connecting spirits to one another.

The name of the project ‘Connecting Spirits’ is embodied in the story of Walter, Joe and Jo Kirlew all linked because of a laminated commemorative card left on a grave in the fields of the Somme valley. They are now forever one.

Postscript...out of this extraordinary story Jo not only discovered she wasn't the eldest child of Joe Kirlew and had lost a baby brother she never knew, but from my perspective I gained the friendship of this beautiful soul. Jo and I will be forever connected ...

Julie Reece

May 2019