If you followed the romantic, if brief and one-sided, postcard correspondence between Jack and Miss M. Hards in Bakewell you may, like me, have wondered what became of them. I’m pleased to say that there may have been a happy ending.
A colleague kindly drew my attention to a free family history website – freebmd.org.uk – which gives access to records of births, marriages and deaths. From this I discovered that Miss Margaret Hards married John W. Thorpe in Bakewell in June 1920. Of course, this may not have been ‘our’ Jack, but it seems likely to me. That’s as far as I got in that website and exploring the online medal index cards at The National Archives was rather a dead end. There are 29 John W. Thorpes listed – a number of whom served in regiments or corps which were part of the BSF – and he may not even be listed under that name in that format. Still, it’s nice to know that there’s a good possibility that he came home safely and got his girl!
As a reminder, these are the postcards in the correspondence: 7 January 1918 | 12 January 1918 | 17 January 1918 | 19 January 1918 | 1 February 1918
Salonika Campaign Society, 1915-1918 