Lives of the First World War

Private John Thomas Wintrip was 35 when he was killed in Flanders in November 1917. He was born in Rothbury, the son of George Wintrip, a Cartwright and Joiner who worked at Warton Burn. He and his wife, born Eleanor Rutherford, lived at Model Buildings at the turn of the century with their five children and Eleanor’s parents. John, known as Tom to his family and Jack to his friends, worked first in Rothbury as a draper’s assistant but by the outbreak of war had married and was living in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, where he worked as a tailor’s shop assistant for Bainbridge’s, claimed to be the world’s first department store, with a staff of 600 by the end of the 19th Century. Jack was a highly respected colleague and, interestingly, by the time of his death was one of the longest serving members of the Newcastle Branch of the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks, a forerunner of today’s USDAW. A tribute in a January 1918 edition of The Shop Assistant said that: All who came into contact with him loved him for his worth as well as his work. ... He was a typical Northumbrian, not possessed of flowery language, but clean logical reasoning. His sincerity of purpose was always manifest, a hater of shams and all which was wrong, he would express his mind and nothing could move him from what he deemed was right. ... Our loss, keen as it is, is not so great as to the little girl left behind, the mother having died shortly after her birth. Little is known of his Army service, save that he served in the 4th East Lancashire Regiment and that he was killed in action at Zonnebecke on 27th November 1917, in the centre of the Ypres Salient in an area completely destroyed in the fighting. He has no known grave and his name appears on the panels of the Tyne Cot Memorial. He is remembered, too on his parents’ gravestone in Rothbury Cemetery, a much loved son who had known tragedy in life and in death. From "The Valley Remembers" by the Coquet Valley history team - Sandy Hunter, Duncan Glen and Freda Walker.

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