THE CATERING corps might have been seen as a cushy number compared with fighting in the trenches on the front line.

And for former Oakworth man Joseph Thomas Midgley becoming a Company Cook was a natural posting thanks to his experience as a peacetime butcher.

But nowhere was safe during the First World War, and Joseph was killed after being wounded in his leg from a bomb.

Joseph was certainly no coward – despite emigrating to New Zealand in early 1914 he signed up the following year to fight.

Joseph was born in Lincolnshire in 1888, son of Elizabeth Hannah Robinson, and when his mother married Joseph Midgley in 1891 the boy took his stepfather’s surname.

At the age of 13 he was living at Slack Farm, Oakworth, with six siblings, and working as a papermaker, possibly at the Turkey paper mill in nearby Goose Eye.

In 1911 he was 23, working as a butcher and journeymen for the Cooperative Society, now with 11 siblings.

After enlisting in August 1915 with the Wellington Infantry Battalion, he was a member of the New Zealand Army at the time of his death in June 10, 1916.