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Joseph Edward Hobson was born on 2 May 1879 in Upperthong, West Yorkshire, the eldest son of Ralph and Caroline Hobson. In the 1901 census he is aged 21 and listed as '3rd Charge Attendant' at Sunderland Borough Asylum, Ryhope village, and giving his occupation as 'Attendant on Insane'.
He subsequently joined the RAMC and then emigrated to Canada where he married his wife Mildred Florence on 28 Feb 1912 in Carleton, Ontario. They had two sons.
The local newspaper, the Holmfirth Express, published his own account of how he won the DCM in its edition of 8 May 1915 which he had sent by letter : “All I can say is, I did what was expected of me. The Germans shelled us very badly at a certain place – they just rained shells on us. It was last November, so no doubt you will be able to guess the place. Well we had to do a quick move, and several officers and men got wounded and I and another young fellow stayed behind and got them safely away, what were living, but I am sorry to say some of our fellows were past our aid, and are now at rest. We got the wounded bandaged up, and got them under cover, but the shells were still coming over, and if one had hit us we should have been with the other fellows now, but thank God we came out all right.” I said to the man with me “Of course if we get hit we shall know nothing about it, but then that is not the worst, there is someone in Canada who would feel it. That is the thing that was troubling me most.”
He continued “Well, we had to get them wounded away somehow, and we had no ambulance, so I left the other man with them while I went in search of some conveyance, and I found a French ambulance coming through a certain town. Now the next thing was to make these Frenchmen understand I wanted their ambulance. They could not speak a word of English, and what French I knew I might as well have been dumb. However, I met an English officer and he could speak the ‘bat’ as we say, so we got over that little difficulty. All I know, someone got to know my name and the next I heard about it I was awarded the DCM some two or three months after, but after all I only did what I am here to do, to look after the wounded. There must be hundreds, yes thousands of unseen heroes out here. Every man is a hero out here, for he is seeing death night and day, but we shall whip them, and you can bet they will have to wallow some of their own medicine for some of the devilish tricks they have done. They have stooped lower than savages, and if there is a God above He will surely punish them to the fullest extent. It is not right to bear malice, but I can have no respect in the future for any of these square-headed sauerkraut-eating devils after what I have seen and heard out here."
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