Stockwell War Memorial

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G names

Thomas William Gray

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T.W. Gray
Lance Corporal, London Regiment, 1st/24th Bn
Service no. 1909 
Died 22 April 1915, aged about 23
Remembered at Le Touret Memorial, Pas de Calais, France 

Thomas William Gray was born in 1892 in Plumstead, southeast London, the second child of Walter and Helen Elizabeth Gray.  As a child, Thomas lived in Hare Street, within sight of the Thames. It was a short walk downhill to the Woolwich ferry, with the vast complex of the Victoria and Albert Docks across the river. The area was home to the Woolwich Arsenal and a Royal Engineers barracks but still had the open space of Woolwich Common and Shooter’s Hill on its southern boundary. 

By the time of the 1911 census, the family was living in the crowded environment of Lambeth. Walter and Helen were now in their fifties. Six of their eight children had survived into adulthood, but it was just Thomas, then 18, and his sister Annie, 17, who lived with their parents.  The family included an elderly widowed aunt. Walter worked for a biscuit manufacture as a commercial clerk, Thomas was as a clerk at tourist agent and Anne was a costumier’s dressmaker. The family had four rooms at 16 Thorne Road, a house they shared with two other families.

Thomas was one of the thousands who volunteered in the first week of August 1914. He had gone to the drill hall in nearby Braganza Street (previously New Street), Kennington, where the 24th (County of London) Battalion (The Queen’s) was based.  As part of the Territorial Force, battalion was mobilised on 5 August, but were under-strength and needed to large numbers of new volunteers from Lambeth and beyond.  

Thomas was on the move in mid-August when The Queen’s marched to a camp in the St Albans-Hatfield area. Training continued through the autumn and winter until the battalion left for France, disembarking at Le Havre on the 16 March.  Thomas  had already been promoted Lance Corporal.  Between March 28 and April 18 The Queen’s were mostly employed to dig  trenches at Lapugnoy, near Bethune in northern France. A hot march on 19 April took The Queen’s into the front line trenches at Richebourg Saint-Vaast.Sporadic shelling wounded one man on 20 April, killed another and wounded two on 21 April. It was noted that ‘1 NCO was wounded from A company’ on 22 April 22. Thomas Gray’s war had been cut brutally short.

The wedding of Thomas’ sister Annie Alice May on 22 December 1917 to Robert Bessant, a former neighbour, must have brought some comfort to the family. Bessant had volunteered for The Queen’s in September 1914 but was discharged unfit in April 1916, having never served in France. 

At the end of the war Thomas’s parents received a small pension. The REgister of Soldiers’ Effects shows that the war gratuity was split between his father and May Elizabeth Martin, a dressmaker from Southwark, who we can infer was probably Thomas’s sweetheart.

Members of the Gray family remained at the Thorne Road address until at least 1932.

The Queens’s memorial is in Kennington Park.

Frederick Walter Grey

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F. W. Gray
Service no. 35426
Private, Essex Regiment, 2nd Battalion
Born in Lambeth; enlisted in Clapham; enlisted in Clapham
Died age 34 on 12 April 1917
CWGC: “Husband of Alice Gertrude Gray, of 43, High St., Marylebone, London.”
Remembered at Athies Communal Cemetery Extension, Pas de Calais, France

Philip Thomas Wilson Grant

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WW1 officer Philip Thomas Wilson Grant
Philip Thomas Wilson Grant

P. T. W. Grant
Second Lieutenant, Wiltshire Regiment, 8th Battalion attd. 5th Battalion
Killed in action, age 18, on 15 October 1915
Born 30 November 1896
Son of Philip and Isabel Emilie Letitia Grant, of 52 Stockwell Park Road, Stockwell, London
Remembered at Green Hill Cemetery, Turkey and on the war shrine at St Michael’s Church, Stockwell Park Road, London SW9 0DA

Information from the 1911 Census

In 1911 the Grant family were living at 52 Stockwell Park Road, where they had 10 rooms. The family consisted of Philip Grant, 41, a butcher born at Withington, Lancashire; his wife Isabel, 35, born at Irvinestown, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland; two children born in Stockwell and still at school – Philip Thomas Wilson, then 14, and Isabel Winifred Jessie, 11. There was also a boarder, Henry Harling Denning, 28, a cashier born in Bristol, and a live-in servant, Lily Ellett, 17, born in Lambeth.

Information from the 1901 Census

Ten years previously, the family were living at 1 Sidney Road, SW9, with George Wilson, 23, and also a butcher, born in Stratford, Essex, who is described as “brother-in-law”, as well as an 18-year-old servant, Jane Ray, born in Fulham.

St Olave’s School

The picture of Grant is taken from a presentation by Peter J. Leonard available on the St Olave’s School website at www.saintolaves.net. When you enter the site, click on ‘Welcome’ then on ‘Chaplaincy’ and scroll to the bottom. There is a thread on St Olave’s at the Great War Forum.

Grant attended the school between May 1908 and December 1912.

Frederick James Grant (Frederick Vincent Grant)

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F. J. Grant
Service no. 654451
Rifleman, London Regiment (First Surrey Rifles), 2nd/21st Bn
Died 30 December 1917, aged 24
Remembered at Chatby Memorial, Egypt

This identification was made by Chris Burge, who writes:

Frederick James Grant was born on 26 March 1893, the first son of Frederick James and Eliza Rose Grant. Frederick was baptised when nearly three years old at St Barnabas, Kennington, on 16 January 1896 when the family was living at 18 Thorne Street. By 1901, Frederick was one of six children and the family lived at 12 Vauxhall Walk, a densely populated area running along the Albert Embankment with its gasworks, distillery and crossed by the London & South Western Railway. Fredrick’s father made his living as a railway carter.

By the time of the 1911 census, the Grant family appeared to have fallen on hard times. Both Frederick and his father were out of work and while his mother Eliza Rose continued to find work as a charwoman. Somehow Frederick’s mother had managed to raise seven children (three others had died). The family of nine persons lived in just four rooms at 51 Conroy Street. The address no longer exist but it was close to Fountain Street, off the Wandsworth Road, and around half a mile from what would become the site of the Stockwell War memorial.

Frederick’s circumstances seems to have driven him into Army, as he enlisted in 1912 joining the Royal Fusiliers. When and how this service ended is not known, but he had sufficient reason not to disclose his real name when he joined the Army a second time, enlisting at Camberwell using the alias of Frederick Vincent, some time late in 1916 or early 1917.

Late in 1917, Frederick James Grant (aka Fredrick Vincent) was one of around 2,200 troops who boarded HMT Aragon at Marseilles, bound for Egypt. Reaching Malta on December 23, a few days where spent celebrating Christmas. Disaster struck on 30 December abut 10 miles outside Alexandria port when the Aragon was stuck by enemy torpedoes. The vessel sunk in twenty minutes. Frederick James Grant was one of the 610 to die that day.

It is the Army Registers of Soldiers’ Effects that reveals Frederick James Grant served as Frederick Vincent. The £3 war gratuity paid to his father Frederick at the end of 1919, indicates he had served for no more than 12 months at the time of his death.

Frederick’s parents had continued to live in Conroy Street throughout the Great War and after. Fredrick’s mother Eliza Rose passed away in 1926 aged 55, and his father Frederick James Grant passed way in 1938, aged 72.

Horace Granger

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H. Granger
Service no. 684457
Private, London Regiment, 2nd/22nd Battalion
Formerly 700253, 23rd London Regiment
Died age 30 on 10 October 1918
Born in Lambeth; enlisted at St John’s Hill; lived in Lambeth
CWGC: “Son of Ann Granger of 8 Ashburton Villas, Fruen Road, Feltham, Middx. Native of South Lambeth, London.”
Remembered at Kantara War Memorial Cemetery, Egypt

Information from the 1911 census

In 1911 Horace Granger (given as Horrace by his father on the census return) was 23 in 1911. He lived with his parents and sister in 6 rooms at 20 Rutland Street (now gone), South Lambeth. John Granger, 71, was a house decorator from Broadhembury, Devon. Ann Granger, 66, was from Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Elsie Granger, 34, was born in Lambeth as was Horace (Horrace).

Robert Grainger

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R. Grainger
Private, East Surrey Regiment, 1st Bn.
Service no. 201552.
Died on 18 July 1917, aged 31
Remembered at Arras Memorial, Pas de Calais, France

Brother of John Albert Grainger

Chris Burge writes:

Robert Grainger, the first child of Robert Grainger and Amelia Sarah Lea, was born on 17 March 1866 and baptised four days later at St Andrew’s, Lambeth, when the family address was recorded as 17 Windmill Street and Robert Snr worked as a carman (carter). 

In 1891, the Grainger family lived at 83 Thomas Street (now Warham Street) near Kennington Oval. They later moved to 16 Surrey Lodge, a complex of social housing on Kennington Road.

School records show Robert and his next youngest brother Frederick attending nearby Walnut Tree School in 1893. Robert stayed with his family during their various moves over the following years until on 19 March 1907 he walked the short distance from his home in the Hayles Buildings on St George’s Road, across the busy Elephant and Castle junction to the Army recruiting office at 38 New Kent Road. Within a week he had been posted to the depot of the Lincolnshire Regiment. He was discharged medically unfit after just 163 days. 

At the outbreak of the war, Robert and his younger brother John were living near Clapham Junction railway complex and working as goods porters. In December 1915, Robert Grainger attested in the final days of Lord Derby’s Group Scheme, with the obligation to come if called up later on. His medical, which took place at Wandsworth Town Hall on 12 December 1915, recorded him as 29 years and 9 months, 5ft 9in tall, 10 stone, with a 37in chest and physically strong but with bad teeth.

He was issued with a grey armband with a red crown, and have his National Registration card stamped, “ATTESTED 12 DEC 1915”. His call-up date followed Lord Derby’s group schedule and Robert reported to the Wimbledon recruitment centre on 1 March 1916. Robert Grainger was now private 3806 of the 3/5th Battalion, East Surrey Regiment. 

There was no immediate expectation that this Territorial Force unit would go overseas. It moved to Cambridge on 1 January 1916, then Crowborough and was in Tonbridge by October 1916. A year after Robert was first in uniform, on 27 December 1916, he married Beatrice Harriet Salmon at St Jude’s, Southwark. The couple gave their address as 63 Hayles Street, which was Beatrice’s home. Robert had first met Beatrice when they were both living in the Hayles Building some nine years before, when she was just 16. 

Robert was a trained signaller and was sent to France on 29 March 1917 (he was renumbered 201552). He had been in the Arras sector when he was posted from the 7th East Surrey to the no. 1 company of the 1st Bn East Surrey on 10 June 1917, they were north-east of Arras. June had ended with a quiet five days in trenches opposite the shattered Fresnoy Wood. Specific mention was made of good communications between HQ and front companies by use of ‘Fullerphones’, buzzer, pigeon and lamp. Early in July, orders were received that a ‘two company’ strength raid was to be made on enemy trenches at Fresnoy. Preparations and training followed after nos. 1 and 4 company had been chosen for the task. Bad weather delayed the raid from the 15th to 4am on the 18th. The raid casualties were two officers wounded, other ranks four killed, 20 wounded and 14 missing. The missing were not thought to have survived. 

On 18 July 1917 Beatrice was informed that her husband had been reported missing. She was left waiting for further news, her hopes fading as the months past until finally Robert Grainger was officially presumed to have died on or since 18 July 1917. 

German documents show that Robert did die on that day. His identity disc was retrieved when his body was buried and returned to British authorities. The disc was the only possession returned to Beatrice. Inexplicably this happened twice, once in July 1918 and again in November 1920. On both occasions Beatrice dutifully acknowledged receipt of the item posted to her address at 52 Hayle Buildings, St. Georges Road SE 11. 

In order to receive her husband’s Plaque and Roll, Beatrice was obliged to complete Army Form W5080, a statement naming all living relatives of a deceased soldier. Beatrice took the completed form to St. Jude’s Vicarage in Southwark to be witnessed and countersigned on 9 October 1919. Apart from herself, she listed Robert’s parents and his four remaining siblings who all lived at various addresses in Stockwell. 

Beatrice Harriet Grainger did not remarry and remained in Southwark for many years. She died in 1971, aged