Researching Robert

Gladys Gamble of Hull, England

by Jim Potter

When Robert Parks left Sunrise, Wyoming, I wonder if he had any idea he’d meet and fall in love with a young, vivacious, fun-loving, and daring woman living over five thousand miles away.

According to Parks family history, Robert met Gladys Mary Gamble in 1925 as he walked down his ship’s gang plank on shore leave in Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Gladys had a nice figure, marvelous legs, black marcelled hair, and brown eyes that were direct and flirtatious.¹ Robert was about twenty-seven years old; Gladys, probably seventeen.

Most likely, Gladys was with her two older sisters, Ada, about twenty, and Dolly (Doris), around nineteen. The Gamble sisters, all pretty, enjoyed watching ships arrive at the port of Hull and meeting free-spending sailors on the docks. They would encourage men to attend movies and dances with them as dates and they welcomed gifts of candy, perfume, and silk stockings. If a sailor didn’t spend freely, the young women considered him “greedy,” and if they didn’t like a date, they might disappear, abandoning him in a movie theater or dance hall, running off to find another fellow.²

Their mother, Sarah Mary Hodgson Gamble, grudgingly allowed the behavior of her three oldest daughters, since they were “morally good.”³ The girls knew their mother’s rules; if they loitered at the end of the terrace while saying goodnight to a date, she’d yell at them to hurry up and get inside.

In 1904, Sarah, twenty-two, married Thomas William “Bill” Gamble, twenty-four, in Hull.

It wasn’t long before Sarah had her hands full. She gave birth to six living children in seven years while living at 6 Luther Terrace, Alexander Street, Hull. I’m not sure of the living conditions of the Gamble family, but a wide majority of the population who lived in terrace housing were challenged by the crowded and unsanitary living conditions.

Prior to Bill Gamble enlisting in the Army in November 1915, he was a woodcarver who had worked on part of the York Minster pews. He chose to enlist to provide Sarah and their children with much needed cash. Ada (born in 1904), the oldest Gamble girl, was eleven when Bill “took her with him to the the recruiting office so that he could send her home with what Mother (Sarah) described as ‘3 and 6 pence’.”⁴ The money paid by the government was called a signing bonus

Bill was mobilized in July 1916, serving with the Durham Light Infantry, 12th Battalion.⁵ He was severely wounded in France in April 1917, and returned home to recover. While mending, Bill and his parents learned that his brother—their son—Charles Edward Gamble, twenty-three, was killed in action in the Battle of Arras, France, on April 29. The battle on the Western Front was a massive, weeks-long British offensive involving hundreds of thousannds of troops across a wide theater. Both sides fought from intricate, mud-filled network trenches utilizing heavy artillery bombardments, machine-gun nests, barbed wire, and costly frontal assaults to contest yards of terrain.

Because the British Army needed men so desperately, Bill wasn’t exempted from returning to service. When he was ordered back to the Western Front, he told Sarah that he doubted he would make it home alive. He was correct, killed in action on October 14, 1917, in the trenches of Belgium, east of Ypres, near Polygon Wood, days after writing a card home describing the hellish conditions of war. He died during the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele), known for its sea of mud that was often waist deep, drowning soldiers and animals, persistent cold rain in near freezing temperatures, and harassing artillery fire. Bill was thirty-six years old.⁶

Edward and Bill’s parents, William “Tom,” Sr. and Annie “Elizabeth” Pougher Gamble, had to cope with the loss of two of their sons within a six month period.

Sarah was left a widow, with six children to support, all under the age of fourteen. Being the primary caregiver, Sarah forced herself to become a strong, dominant person for the sake of Ada, Doris (Dolly), Gladys, Laura, Thomas, and Eric.⁷ Fortunately, beginning in June 1918, Sarah did receive a war pension and child allowance of forty-two shillings and one penny a week.⁸ The pension address was 17 Wainfleet Terrace, Stanley Street. I’m not sure of the timeline, but Sarah also worked as a post mistress and bus conductor.⁹ My guess is that her employment was during the war years when women helped fill the employment needs created by a shortage of men who were fighting, or had been wounded or killed in the war effort.

Like so many other families of Hull, England, who lost a loved one in the Great War (1914-1918), their grief was deepened when a soldier or sailor’s body was never returned home. Instead, most of the 7,500 local war dead were buried overseas in unmarked graves. This lack of visual closure, led neighborhoods to build street shrines as a coping mechanism. It’s also why Hull’s Cenotaph (a tomb-like monument to someone buried elsewhere) was erected in Paragon Square on September 20, 1924, six years after the World War ended.

Before the severe economic challenges in war-torn England and its deepest recession, in 1920-1921, the Gambles were a hard-working, lower-class, poor family. When the children turned fourteen, they were expected to find work, not continue with school.

Some, if not all, of the older children—all girls (Ada, Dolly, Gladys, Laura)—found jobs at Rickett & Sons, a leading manufacturer of household products in Hull with women representing a significant portion of the workforce. Female employees typically worked in the departments responsible for packaging starch and polishing materials. The company, founded and run by Quakers, was noted for its progressive working conditions, such as maintaining clean, well-lit environments, and providing social clubs, housing, and health services for the employees.

The Gamble girls brought their pay home to Sarah to support the household. In turn, mother gave them back a small amount for spending money.¹⁰

Despite rough economic times, inflation that caused steep increases in the price of housing and food, the Gamble family supported one another, determined to survive. We’ll never know if the family’s poor economic situation encouraged the Gamble girls to seek free-spending sailors. Either way, Gladys remembered those days fondly.

As I examine Glady’s early life, I’m reminded of a play titled, As You Like It, by William Shakespeare, the world-renowned Englishman born and raised in Stratford upon Avon. One of his characters begins a long dialogue this way: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; …”  Prior to their days meeting sailors on the Hull docks, Gladys and her sisters were all on stage, dancing in little theater productions in Hull.¹¹

I see Gladys as a determined woman who was in a hurry to get ahead. Living on the edge of poverty, losing her father, and surviving a war on the home front, may have taught her to appreciate every moment in life and to not let time slip away. She used her outgoing personality to get what she wanted. As with Gladys’ earlier participation in theater productions, attracting merchant marines on the docks was enjoyable entertainment. Once her older sisters taught her the intricacies of dating, Gladys had her way with men.

I’ve often wondered if during the mid-1920s, Gladys adopted the flapper lifestyle that symbolized a new era of freedom for women challenging traditional norms. Flappers were recognized by their distinctive fashion, short hairstyle, makeup, and risqué behavior like dancing, smoking, and drinking. Since Gladys loved attending the cinema to watch movies, and she lived in a city, her visits would have been at least once a week, the nation’s average. A large majority of the films were American made, with American actors, showing off the popularity of jazz music and dance styles, including the flapper lifestyle which was a move toward modern social life—and a threat to those who preferred a social culture where women were seen as the moral centers of the home, focusing on domestic life and child-rearing.

Gladys must have had some dark days in her youth. As with all wars, it’s not only those who leave home to fight who deal with hardships. Born January 28, 1908, Gladys was six years old when her father enlisted, nine when he died.

At age seven, beginning in 1915, she experienced war firsthand when Germany’s zeppelins began bombing Kingston upon Hull at night. The British citizenry were outraged at the indescriminate bombing, nicknaming the airships “Baby Killers” following civilian bombing raids. Until the war ended, like many of her neighbors, Gladys may have been terrified every time the air raid whistles sounded, and the city blacked out. During this time of terror, people weren’t sure how to respond to the air attacks. Some parents warned their children to be quiet or to whisper so they wouldn’t attract a bomb; others stopped the family clock to prevent the “ticking” from giving a signal to the enemy. A local law made it illegal to whistle for a taxi for fear it would be mistaken for an emergency whistle.¹²

When Robert and Gladys met, I imagine it wasn’t too long before they shared with one another their life story. Gladys, with her heavy Hull accent, would have revealed how, when she was nine, her father died in the war. She might have revealed her family’s constant anxiety during and after the World War caused by their financial difficulties. A war widow’s pension and children allowances were barely adequate due to post-war inflation and the rising cost of living.

Robert would have empathized, talking about how, at age two, his father died, and his mother passed in 1921. On a positive note, Robert would have been anxious to tell Gladys about his adventures as a radio operator in the United States Navy and his employment on the merchant ship, the SS Capulin. Since Gladys was fascinated with life in the United States, she would have bombarded Robert with questions about what it was like.

Having served in the US Navy on a subchaser, and later, a minesweeper, Robert might have told Gladys that he had heard about the courage and bravery of Hull fishermen. Their work, fishing in the North Sea, was perilous even before U-Boat attacks. Working on the sea got even more dangerous when the skillful mariners and their trawlers were commanded by the English Navy to serve as minesweepers off Great Britan’s east coast. The men of Hull swept the seas for German mines day after day while U-boats prowled the waters.

Since Robert Parks was only in Hull a few days at a time during the Capulin‘s scheduled transatlantic voyages to Britain, he and Gladys would have used every precious moment to get to know one another. Gladys considered Robert a catch, not a man to be abandoned at a movie theater, and Robert, known as “Bob,” was smitten by Gladys. He wanted her to be his wife.

When Robert first met Gladys, most likely, he also met her sisters, Ada and Dolly, but when did Robert meet their mother? It’s possible that before a formal meeting of the two, when Robert said goodnight to Gladys outside her home, he may have been interrupted by her mother yelling across the terrace in her Hull dialect: “You, Gladdie, ger in this house!”¹³

*

Notes

1. Jacqueline Gamble Scott, “Memories,” unpublished manuscript, 2000, 1.
2. Scott, “Memories,” 1. 
3. Scott, “Memories,” 1.
4. Scott, “Memories,”3. Ancestry.com, “UK, WWI, Pension Ledgers and Index Cards, 1914-1923.” Note: Wikipedia. From July 1 to November 18, 1916, the Battle of the Somme, France, was fought between armies of the British Empire and French Empire versus the German Empire. Over three million men fought in the battle with more than a million men killed or wounded, making it one of the deadliest battles in human histroy. On the first day of the battle, the British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 wounded.
5. Ancestry.com, “UK, WWI, Pension Ledgers and Index Cards, 1914-1923.”
6. Scott, “Memories,” 3. Note: Goodbye to All of That, (Jonathan Cape, London, 1929) a memoir by Robert Graves, provides a candid, grim account of life on the Western Front, capturing the daily horrors and heavy casualties of trench warfare in France, beginning in May 1915. Graves, who volunteered for active service at the outbreak of the World War, age nineteen, served as a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. A memoir from the perspective of a German soldier, Ernest Jünger, who enlisted in August 1914, age nineteen, is titled Storm of Steel (German title, In Stahlgewittern, E. S. Mittler and Sohn, 1920). His experiences on the Western Front, beginning with the 73rd Hannoverian Fusilier Regiment, provide a highly detailed account of trench warfare, combat, and the devastating impact of modern weaponry.
7. a) Ancestry.com, “UK, British Army World War I Service Records, 1914-1920 for Thomas William Gamble,” Ministry of Pensions, Widows and Dependents Branch, May 1st, 1918. b) Note: This amount included a widow’s pension and the allowance for all six children (since they were under sixteen years of age). Note: In 1918, forty-two English shillings was worth about ten dollars in American currency. That amount would be worth approximately $210 in 2026. c) Ancestry.com. Jacqueline Gamble Scott, “Memories,” 3. “Sometime later, Sarah had a male friend whom she did not wish to marry. He was the father of her youngest child, Cyril.” d) Ancestry.com. East Riding, Yorkshire, England, “Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1925.” Cyril Gamble was born November 21, 1920, three years after the death of Thomas William “Bill” Gamble. e) Angela Smith, Discourse Surrounding British Widows of the First World War, Bloomsbury, 2013, 6-11. Note: In 1920, a British war widow who had a child out of wedlock faced a high risk of losing her personal pension because the Ministry of Pensions viewed her action as a violation of the moral code of the time. However, the allowances for her children from the deceased soldier were typically protected and continued to be paid. Most likely, Sarah felt the pressure to conform to the largely middle-class, Victorian ideals which reflected the ideology that women were the care-givers, irrespective of financial and social circumstances. The behavior of war widows became the focus of intense scrutiny for a variety of agencies that worked to ensure the women were “worthy” of allowances from public funds. Raising six children, with limited finances, must have been emotionally draining for Sarah.
8. Jennifer Funk, “Sarah Jane Hodgson Gamble: Brief Life History,” Family Search.
9. Scott, “Memories,” 3.
10. Scott, “Memories,” 3.
11. Funk, “Sarah Jane Hodgson Gamble.” Paul Bishop, Kingston upon Hull War Memorial 1914-1918: The Story of Hull in World War 1, www1hull.com.
12. Scott, “Memories,” 3.