Spr Martin William Hull

Martin William Hull, who seems to have gone by William, was born in about 1891. His family were in construction - his father worked as a platelayer for the railway and uncle was a bricklayer. Likely due to his father's trade, they lived not far from the station. Unfortunately, Martin's father died when Martin was only a boy and so him and his brothers got jobs as soon as they left school.

His family was large, and he had 8 siblings - all but one brothers. On 23rd August 1914, only a couple of weeks after the outbreak of the first world war, he married Ethel Sewell at Great Warley. He joined up to fight in the first world war in May 1915, it was a war that would see two of his brothers killed. He had previously worked as a platelayer on the railway, which qualified him to work in the royal engineers.

He landed at Port Said in Egypt on 17th Feb 1916 and saw active service on the Mesopotamian front. He was sick for a few months in the summer of 1916, but otherwise served without major incident until the end of the war, for the first few months of 1919 he was stationed in India and finally returned to England onboard the H.T. Egra.

After the war he returned to his work on the railway as a platelayer. Martin seems to have had a very violent streak, perhaps exacerbated by trauma he saw while serving in the war, and in January 1920 he attacked an off-duty soldier in Brentwood who was chatting to a girl - wounding the soldier with a metal rod badly enough that he lost an eye. For this he served two years in prison and was released at the start of 1922. However, in February 1922 he again attacked a man in Brentwood, one John Howell, while he was crossing the bridge over the railway at almost the same place as he had attacked the soldier two years before. He hit Howell with such force that he was impaled through his left eye on the iron fence of the railway bridge. It isn't clear how long he was jailed for this time, but the 1939 register shows him living at 28 Great Eastern Road with his wife and seven children, he was working as a road builder. He died in Brentwood in 1950.