VINCENT SEWELL &
JACK VALENTINE SEWELL
from Mike Sewell
This article was originally published in the December 2007 edition of Soul Search, the journal of The Sole Society
Mike has kindly given us the following photos of his Grandfather and Father
VINCENT SEWELL (1884-1955)
He was born in Cottingham in the East Riding of Yorkshire and was the fifth of the eleven children of John Warkup Sewell, an agricultural labourer, and his wife, Margaret. When he left school he worked as a farm servant, which involved living in on the farm for a year at a time under an unwritten contract. Half of the wages were in board and lodging and the other half in cash, which was only paid when the year was up. Much of the work was involved with driving and tending farm horses. In 1912 he married Sarah Draper, who came from rural Worcestershire, and was working as a domestic servant in Cottingham. The couple produced a son and four daughters.
Shortly after their marriage Vincent and Sarah Sewell moved about five miles into the city of Kingston-upon-Hull where he worked for the Earles Cement Company delivering bags of cement around the city by horse and cart. When the service was motorised he then worked as a coal trimmer in the cement works.
He retired in 1949 and died six years later. The main cause of his death was from lung disease caused by breathing in cement dust.
JACK VALENTINE SEWELL (1918-1985)
He was born in Hull, Yorkshire and was the only son of Vincent and Sarah Sewell.
His middle name comes from the fact that he was born on St. Valentine's Day. When he left school he worked briefly in a factory that made wooden boxes and then as a mechanic in a garage. In autumn 1939 he was conscripted into the East Yorkshire Regiment and on Boxing Day of that year he married Bessie Parker of Hull. The couple produced a son and a daughter. He was present at Dunkirk in 1940 and four years later he landed on Sword Beach, Normandy in the first wave of the D-Day landings. Shortly afterwards he suffered from kidney problems and was invalided back to the UK.
On leaving the Army in 1946 he obtained a job as a bus conductor with East Yorkshire Motor Services, based at the company's Bridlington depot. He worked for the company for more than 30 years and eventually became a Regulator before being made redundant in 1979. n