When I play the Last Post tomorrow, I’ll remember my uncle Jack

I thought I knew all there was to know about my Uncle Jack. My father’s brother died on the first day of the Battle of Ypres in 1917 – he was a 20-year-old artillery captain whose life, dreams and ambitions stretched out ahead of him, before being cruelly snatched by conflict . In that respect, he was much like millions of other young men whose lives were snatched away by war and his story, while of immeasurable significance to my family, was familiar.

But by great fortune, new light was shed on Jack’s life – and sacrifice – when I received an unexpected email from a collector of military memorabilia a few years ago. “I have a largish collection of medals, among which are the medals to Capt Jack Strain RGA, which comprise [a] British War Medal [and a] Victory Medal with Mention in Despatches clasp, both in their original boxes of issue,” the collector wrote. “I shall be putting the group up for sale imminently and thought the family might be interested before I do so.”

We were, of course. Obtaining the medals, which disappeared from our family in the 1970s when my aunt’s house in Hampshire was burgled, has helped us write a new chapter in Jack’s story. And fittingly, their long, tumultuous journey has now concluded in the hands of another officer in today’s British Army: my son, Maj Anthony Kironde-Strain, who will be bringing them to this year’s Remembrance Day commemorations . Each November, as part of the Remembrance events , I play The Last Post on the trumpet at the war memorial of our local church, St Saviour’s, in St Albans.

I will do so again tomorrow, when it will be especially poignant in light of our new understanding of Jack’s service, and of his incredible bravery. The Last Post is a short piece and is simple to play, but it is always a nerve-wracking moment. My part comes after the names of those who gave their lives have been read out, and the gathered congregation has declared: “We will remember them.” Then there is silence, before I take a big breath, steel my lips and send the first two notes out into the autumn air.

At this point, I always think of Jack. I think of the life I have had – and the one that he didn’t. Jacko He was a serious young chap, the kind of friend you would want with you in the trenches. His friends knew him as Jacko. He was short and good looking. Born in 1896, Jack was the oldest in a family of 10 siblings. His father was a stern man with a deep Christian faith who had been a successful doctor in Brazil and a founding partner of the Samaritano Hospital in São Paulo.

It was in Brazil that Jack was born. When he was nine, the family came back to England, to live in Wimbledon. Jack went to Westminster School, where he thrived. He was bookish and kind. On Sundays, he loved attending a local Christian group called South Lodge. Occasionally, well-known speakers would visit. Capt Scott, the explorer, once popped by to give a talk on his travels. His kind inspired my uncle, no doubt. Indeed, our family records note he himself once gave a much-praised lecture to the science society on plant diseases.

Family expectations weighed heavily, albeit perhaps naturally, given his position as the eldest sibling. His five brothers and four sisters hero-worshipped him. Jack was already 16 when the last but one, little Malcolm, was born. Malcolm was my father. He would skip around Jack’s feet, in awe of his older brother. But the pressure of expectation, and adoration, never seemed to drag Jack down. Indeed, aged 18, he enrolled at Cambridge University to study medicine.

He planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. At Cambridge, Jack quickly created a happy, close-knit group. He and his friends would often sit up until the small hours in Trinity College, drinking coffee around the coal fire, and sharing their dreams for the future. Each member of the group had a nickname. Some were better than others: Jacko, for example, paled in comparison to Poggy Pile. But their jollity wasn’t to last for long.

It was 1915, after all, and everyone was talking about the war, including Jack and his friends, who, before long, were drawn into the conflict. In fact, Jack only completed one year at Cambridge before applying for an army commission. He and his friends were determined to join up and “do their bit”. Missing life at home Jack was initially rejected for a commission on the grounds he was a medical student. But undeterred by the knock back, he eventually secured a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant with the Royal Garrison Artillery.

In the summer of 1916, after a short period of training, he was posted to the Western Front in Belgium. Jack was 19. Less than a year later, in the spring of 1917, he was promoted to Captain. There were plenty of gaps in the ranks to fill and so he stepped up to become second in command of 214 Siege Battery. He frequently wrote letters – chatty and anxious – to his family and friends at home. In one such piece of correspondence, dated May 1917, Jack recalled a “very hot and strenuous… last few days”.

He was pained to be missing life at home – including a recent church meeting of note. “Especially as there was a good deal of iron flying about at the time [of the meeting] here,” Jack wrote. But God, he ended, had “been wonderfully good to me in preserving me”, before asking “that you will pray… earnestly that I may not be ashamed of my colours.” Two months later, Jack was dead. A perilous task On July 31, 1917, he was one of thousands of soldiers waiting in the trenches for a new battle to start at the Ypres Salient, in Frezenberg, Belgium.

A call for a volunteer Forward Observation Officer (FOO) went out. It was a perilous task, which would involve monitoring enemy artillery fire beyond the front line. Jack stepped forward with two others. A fellow soldier saw him retreat to his bunker for 10 minutes of prayer and reflection. Then he headed out into extreme danger. Shortly afterwards, he, a fellow officer and signaller were killed in a German barrage. That is all my family knows of how he died that fateful Tuesday.

The many heartfelt tributes and letters of condolence sent by fellow officers at the time offer scant, and occasionally conflicting, detail. Some of the terror nevertheless seeps through. Jack’s commanding officer, Maj Hachborn, wrote that he was killed at about 8am. These were the first hours of the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as Passchendaele , which resulted in more than half a million casualties across both sides. “The poor boy went over… as an FOO… and never returned alive,” Hachborn’s letter reads.

“He was… with another officer from the group and both these dear young men were found lying side by side where they had fallen.” Others focused on their memories of the young man, not the moment of his death. “Nobody could help loving Jack… He was the life and soul of the Mess, always joking and playing like a child, and yet most efficient as an officer and hugely respected by the men,” Lieut A W Cockburn wrote. Grief and honour My dad, just four-and-a-half at the time, could not fully comprehend the family’s loss.

But he would later speak of his own father retreating alone to his study, sometimes for days on end, in the wake of Jack’s death. He was a broken man. His wife, my grandmother, was left to try and hold the family up. But the household, my father said, was filled with “terrible grief” in the years that followed. Today, that grief has passed. Instead, we feel pride at Jack’s extraordinary sacrifice. And so, a century to the day after Jack’s death, on July 31, 2017, my younger son and I drove to Belgium and joined the ceremony at Tyne Cot Cemetery to commemorate the Battle of Ypres.

We were surrounded by graves, and fellow descendants of those who had died. Nearby, In Ypres town, we saw Jack’s name among the more than 54,000 others on the Menin Gate, those with no known grave. It was an extraordinarily moving experience. But still, we felt we knew too little of his final hours. That was until 2022, at least, when I received the unexpected email from Leslie Nicoll, the medals collector. Nicoll explained that he had tracked our family down via a website honouring Jack’s service , which had been created by my cousins, James and Iain Vellacott.

He was close to retirement, he said, and trying to reunite the medals in his collection with families like ours. Jack’s legacy But how, we wondered, had the medals found their way into his hands? We knew they had been presented to our family posthumously in 1923, six years after Jack died. But they disappeared decades later, when thieves burgled my aunt’s house, and had been missing ever since. Nicoll, for his part, had purchased them sometime in the 1990s, at a fair in Somerset.

To be sure they were genuine, I called on the London Medals Company, a small shop in Soho jam-packed with memorabilia. They asked who was selling them and smiled when I told them Nicoll’s name. “Oh, yes we know Les. He’s the best in the business,” an employee told me. The staff also explained what each of the medals meant, including the rare clasp in the form of an oak leaf denoting a Mention in Despatches, which I was previously unaware of.

That tiny clasp, they said, was the jewel in the crown, honouring the extreme bravery of Jack’s final hours. Finally, the true heroism of his last act was revealed to me, and our family. I knew what to do next. I had the medals mounted and framed, with a picture of Jack in the uniform of the Royal Garrison Artillery. I then gave them to my son for his 30th birthday. He has had them on display, wherever he is based, ever since. From one soldier to another, across three generations, the medals have come home.

And my uncle Jack with them.