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Post date: Oct 24, 2017 7:34:39 PM
There are several photographs in Dora Winters’ album from the 1929/30 period of a man who looks like he could have been a matinee idol. However, like so many other Grimsby men, his work took him to sea, as it had his father before him.
Leslie Jolliffe was born in Grimsby on 21 September 1902, the son of George Henry Jolliffe, a marine engineer, and his wife Elizabeth Mabel Calvert. George and Elizabeth married in Grimsby in 1897 and were living at 263 Wellington Street when Leslie was born. He was eventually christened at St John’s, although not until March 1911, 16 months after his younger brother Alec Brumpton Jolliffe was born. Sadly, when he was six years old, Alec died, the burial records giving the cause of death as Epilepsy.
Merchant Navy records show that Leslie’s first voyage to sea was in 1924 on the Scottish Maiden. He took up the same career as his father and, in February 1927, passed his Second Class Motor Marine Engineer’s Examination.
The Jolliffe family remained in Wellington Street for many years, but by the early 1930s they had moved to 19 Revigo Avenue in Grimsby. In the mid-1930s, Leslie moved again after marrying Mary Louisa MacOlive in 1935, this time to 115 Highgate, Cleethorpes.
The MacOlives had arrived in Cleethorpes in the early 1900s, Mary’s father working as a baker, whilst the family rented out rooms to visitors in their Rowston Street home. Mary was the youngest of a large family and the first of the MacOlives to be born in Cleethorpes. After the marriage, Mary’s widowed father lived with the couple in Highgate until he died in 1937, five years after the death of his wife Jessie.
After war broke out, Leslie joined the Royal Naval Reserve. In September 1942, he was made a temporary lieutenant, by which time he was a Chief Engineer. In 1943, he
Although there are only three photographs of Leslie Jolliffe in Dora’s albums – of him with Dora and her friends, the Lengden family, who lived in Hainton Avenue and ran a commercial school – he is a man who cuts a striking figure and his father’s photograph on his Merchant Navy record suggests that this ran in the family, as both men scrub up very well in a suit! It is hard to think that this happy, smiling young man, captured nearly ninety years ago relaxing in a garden, ended his days in a lonely ocean grave, but sadly that was the fate of so many of our brave local men who gave their lives for their country.
was posted to H.M. Rescue Tug Lariat, an American-built vessel, which had been launched the year before. On 10 May 1943, Leslie died and was buried at sea. His was the only fatality on the Lariat that day and the cause of his death is unknown, as is precisely where he was buried, but naval records show that the vessel had been sent to Gibraltar the month before Leslie’s death and a few weeks after was part of a North Atlantic convoy of thirty plus ships.
Leslie was survived by his widow Mary, his six-year old son Derek and his parents, although his mother died nine months later and his father two years after that. Mary and Derek moved to Norfolk at some point and she died there in 1986. A search of the internet reveals that Derek, who turned eighty last year, is alive and well, enjoys walking with a local Norfolk group and looks a lot like his father.
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