Stockwell War Memorial

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N names

Reginald Nicholson

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R. Nicholson
Signalman, Royal Navy, HMS ‘Vehement’.
Service no. J/32529. Died 2 August 1918, aged 18
Remembered at Chatham Naval Memorial, Kent

Reginald Nicholson was born on 6 May 1899. After he was deserted as a baby he was admitted into the care of the Hammersmith Board of Guardians where he remained until 1917. Baby Reginald was initially fostered by  a ‘Mrs Neal of Southbrook Street’ before he was moved to the Milman Street Receiving Home For Children in Chelsea, west London. On 1 August 1903, four-year-old Reginald was sent to the ‘District Schools, Ashford’ whose records show that he was fostered on 20 July 1904.

In the 1911 census, Reginald, aged 11, is a boarder in the six-room home of George and Elizabeth Noyes and their son Earnest, aged nine, at Stockwell Furlong, Haddenham, Buckinghamshire. George Noyes was a ‘coach smith’  (blacksmith) and was originally from Lincoln. Elizabeth Noyes (nee ?????) was born in Brixton and Earnest was born in Streatham. The Noyes’ stay in Haddenham may have been a brief interlude. George and Elizabeth had previously lived in Streatham for the decade after they were married at St Leonard’s Church in 1900.

On 13 September 1911, Reginald was sent to the HMS training ship Exmouth, moored in the Thames off Grays. He was 4ft 8in tall and weighed not quite 5 stone. Over the next three years, Reginald led an active life, excelling at swimming and gymnastics. His conduct was always rated as ‘VG’. Reginald’s expectation was to join the Navy as a boy sailor when he left the Exmouth on 7 September 1914 and he went straight to the shore-based HMS Ganges at Shotley, near Ipswich. Reginald was trained in the signalling methods of the time, a mixture of flag, semaphore, and Morse code, sent both by wireless telegraphy and searchlight. 

On 6 May 1917, the day that the Hammersmith Board of Guardians ceased control of his life, Reginald Nicholson signed for 12 years service in the Navy. He was still small in stature, a little over 5ft, and described as having fair hair, brown eyes and a fresh complexion. The records show that he had been onboard the battle cruiser HMS Inflexible for two years when he was transferred to the destroyer HMS Vehement in November 1917. Close to midnight on 1 August 1918, during mine-laying duties in the North Sea, HMS Vehement struck a mine. One officer and 47 ratings were killed in the resulting explosion which partly destroyed the ship. The remaining crew abandoned ship at 4am on 2 August when all hope of saving HMS Vehement was lost and she began to sink. 

The Noyes family had moved to Stockwell by 1918. Naval records show Reginald’s next of kin as ‘Mother: – Elizabeth. Goldsboro’ Rd, Lambeth, S.W. 8’. George and Elizabeth Noyes were still at the same address in 1934. 

James Henry Newman

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J. H. Newman
Service no. 3409
Private, London Regiment, 1st/24th Battalion
Enlisted at Kennington, resided at South Lambeth
Killed in action on 17 September 1916, aged about 18
Remembered at Thiepval Memorial, Somme, France

Information from the 1911 census

James H. Newman was a 13-year-old schoolchild in 1911. He lived with his parents and 6 of his 11 siblings in four rooms at 39 Horace Street, Stockwell. His father, James, 51, was a railway guard from Sturminster Newton, Dorset. His mother, Mary Jane, 51, was from Holt, near Wimbourne in Dorset. James’s sisters Maud and Violet, 19 and 15, were domestic servants.

Information from the 1901 census

James Henry Newman was 3 in 1901 and living at 39 Horace Street with his family. His parents were from Dorsetshire – father, also called James, was a 41-year-old railway breaksman from Sturminster Newton and his mother, Mary J. Newman and also 41, was from Wimbourne. The 5 children registered on the census were:
George W. Newman, 13, a milkman’s assistant
Annie Newman, 12
Maud M. Newman, 9
Bessie Newman, 6
Violet Newman, 5
James H. Newman, 3, named on the memorial

Information from the 1891 census

In 1891 the family were living at 35 Horace Street. James Newman senior is described as a railway porter. The census shows that there were two older children:
Elizabeth Newman, 7
Florence Newman, 5
George Newman, 3, and Annie Newman, 2, appear in the 1901 census
There was a lodger, James Cunningham, a 22-year-old cab driver born in Lambeth, and a visitor from Sturminster, 21-year-old Elizabeth A. Bleathman.

Information from the 1861 census

James Newman senior appears on the 1861 census as a one-year-old living in Sturminster. His father, George Newman, 25, was an agricultural labourer, married to 28-year-old Mary A. Newman, who like George was born in Sturminster. At that point they had two children, James and his two-year-old sister Ann. They lived at Church Street, Sturminster.

Arthur John Newman

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A.J. Newman
Rifleman, Rifle Brigade, 2nd Bn.
Service no. S/15670
Missing in action on 23 October 1916, aged about 26
Remembered at Thiepval Memorial, Somme, France

Chris Burge writes:

Arthur John Newman’s origins were in north London. He was born in Highgate, the third child of Alfred and Mary Elizabeth Newman (nee ????), and baptised at St John Holloway in Islington, on 20 April 1890; his older brother Alfred Edward was baptised on 6 January 1884 at the Archway Road Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, and his sister Edith Charlotte was baptised 16 October 1887 at St John Holloway, Islington. The family were living in Kentish Town at the time of the 1891 census and had moved to Pimlico by the time of the 1901 census. Arthur’s brother Alfred Edward was married in 1905 and set up home in Kent. 

By the time of the 1911 census, Arthur, Edith and their parents had moved to south London and were living at 19A Goldborough Road, off Wandsworth Road. Arthur‘s father was now 51 and his mother 50 and had been married 28 years. Arthur was working as a clerk, and both his parents and Edith were employed as office cleaners. The Newmans lived in four rooms of a sub-divided property that housed another family of six living in three other rooms.

Fragments of Arthur’s service papers have survived and show that he volunteered under Lord Derby’s Group Scheme on 4 December 1915, attesting at the Lambeth recruitment centre. He was not called up until 15 February 1916 and was processed at Whitehall, when he was posted to the 6th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, a reserve battalion who were based at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey, off the northern coast of Kent. On 14 June 1916, after four months of basic training, Private S/15670 Newman was sent to France in a draft of men destined for the 2nd Battalion. He reached the front on 9 July 1916. The keeper of the battalion’s war diary noted on 11 July that a draft of one officer and 50 other ranks reported for duty and were posted to C and D companies.

Arthur Newman joined the battalion when it was in billets after moving north from the Somme to the Loos sector. Several periods of trench duty in the Hohenzollern sector followed during the rest of July, August and September. By mid-October the battalion had returned to the Somme and took part, in deteriorating weather and ground conditions, in a divisional attack during the final stages of the offensive. Their assault on enemy position near Le Transloy on 23 October resulted in a loss of eight officers either killed or wounded and 230 other ranks killed, wounded or missing. Arthur was reported missing and his next of kin informed within a few weeks. In August 1917, ten months later, Arthur’s family were informed that he was officially presumed to have died on, or since, 23 October 1916. 

After the end of the war it was Arthur’s father Alfred who completed Army Form W5080 which listed the relatives of a deceased soldier in order that he could receive his son’s medals, plaque and scroll. Alfred took it to All Saints Church, XXXXXXXXX, to be witnessed and countersigned on 30 May 1919. 

Arthur’s parents were still living at 19A Goldsborough Road when the Stockwell War Memorial was unveiled in 1922. 

Alfred William Newcombe

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Alfred William Newcombe
Alfred William Newcombe. Photo © Richard Jones

A. W. Newcombe
Service no. 33465
Private, Bedfordshire Regiment, 8th Battalion
Born at Marylebone; enlisted at Bedford; lived at Watford, Hertfordshire
Killed in action on 27 June 1917, aged 23
Son of William Newcombe, of 96 Southville, Clapham Common, London.
Remembered at Philosophe British Cemetery, Mazingarbe, France

Information from the 1911 census
Alfred Newcombe, 17, worked as a grocer’s assistant and lived at 89 Priory Grove, where his family occupied four rooms. William Newcombe, his 42-year-old father, was a labourer from Wembworthy, North Devon; his mother, Betsy Eady, 43, was from Peterborough. Alfred’s sister, Maud Newcombe, 16, born in Clapham, worked in a factory.

Information from the William Alfred Newcombe’s family
Newcombe was born on 14 September 1893 at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, Marylebone Road to Betsy Eady, a night light maker of 98 South Ville, off Wandsworth Road. Newcombe was born William Alfred Eady. His mother married William Newcombe on Christmas Day 1893 and he appears to have taken that name.
Newcombe was always known as ‘Alf’.

Walter Henry Nethercott

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W. H. Nethercott
Service no. Z/2766
Company Quartermaster Serjeant, Rifle Brigade, 3th Battalion
Born in Battersea; enlisted in London; lived in Lambeth
Killed in action on 10 October 1917, aged around 26
Remembered at Tyne Cot Memorial, Belgium

Walter Henry Nethercott, 23, a clerk, enlisted on 12 September 1914. The medical officer described him as having a healthy complexion with brown eyes and auburn hair. He had a mole on the tip of his left shoulder. He stood 5 feet 7half inches, weighed just over 9half stone and his chest measured 33 inches.

The Army recognised Nethercott’s talents early. He rose through the ranks and was promoted to Serjeant in the field in July 1916 and made Company Quartermast Serjeant three months later.

In March 1915 Netherott married Majorie Ballance, of 15 Walberswick Street, South Lambeth. She gave birth to a daughter, Margarette Phyllis, a year later.  Nethercott’s parents were deceased and he had no siblings.

In February 1918, four months after Nethercott was killed, the Army sent his effects to Marjorie: a fountain pen, a disc and chain, diary, Kitchener’s message, a copy of A Rifleman Should Know, a lock of hair. However, a Mr. John Mayo, received his medals, sent to him at 93 Larkhall Rise. The file does not tell us why, and when Marjorie, still living at Walberswick Street, wrote to request to send them to her, the Army replied that they had already been sent to Mr. Mayo.

Marjorie was given a weekly pension of 22s 6d for herself and Margarette.

Information from the 1901 census

In 1901 Walter Nethercott, who was 10 (born in 1891), was living with his widowed grandmother Mary A. Nethercott, 60, at 31 Wheatsheaf Lane. Mary was born in Godstone, Surrey, Walter in Battersea. There are no other members of the household listed.