Army Ordnance Corps
Job Cooper was born in Derby in 1878, the third son of John Haynes Cooper and his wife Mary (née Smallwood). The Cooper family originally lived at 62 High Street, Gloucester.
In 1900 Job married Rose Bateman and the couple went on to have seven children by the time of the 1911 census, all girls (Marion Rose born 1900; Edith 1901; Alice Gwendoline 1904; Ena 1906; Lydia 1909; Mary 1911 plus one other unnamed child had died in infancy. A further two (Ellen 1913 and Charles Edwin 1915) followed after the census.
At the time of the 1901 Census, Job was shown as a blacksmith at the Gloucester Wagon Works and in 1911 as a furnaceman, then living at 27 Stanby Road, Gloucester. In time the family moved to 69 Cecil Road, Gloucester, which was home at the time of Job’s death.
No Army service record has survived for Job but a Medal Index Card held at the National Archives shows him to have first gone abroad, to France, on 15 September 1915 and therefore it appears likely that he volunteered for military service early in the war.
A death notice in the Gloucester Journal of 4 March 1916 states that he died from pneumonia at Leicester Military Hospital on 27 February 1916. He was buried in Gloucester Old Cemetery, where a standard CWGC headstone marks his grave. He is commemorated on the Gloucester War Memorial. His widow, Rose, never remarried and lived until 1933.Two of her and Job’s daughters lived until over ninety years of age.
Researched by Graham Adams 9 November 2018