F. J. Chaddock
Service no. 9238
Corporal, Gloucestershire Regiment, 1st Battalion
Died around age 33 on 31 October 1918
Remembered at Busigny Communal Cemetery Extension, Nord, France
Frederick Joseph Chaddock was born in late 1880 in Lambeth, the fourth child and third son of Augustus Chaddock, a stone mason, and Caroline Ellen Chaddock.
The family lived at 12 Esher Street (now Aveline Street) in Kennington, an area defined in 1899 by Charles Booth as ‘fairly comfortable: good ordinary earnings’ and populated by ‘labourers, cabmen, mechanics, police.’ By the time Frederick started attending Vauxhall Street School in 1885, the family had moved to 47 Bonnington Square. In 1891, when Frederick was 10, the Chaddocks had moved a few doors down, to No. 14. There were now seven children in the family (there were eventually eight).
In 1901, Frederick was lodging at Rowton House, a working men’s hostel in Vauxhall accommodating 470 men in ‘cubicles’, while his parents, four siblings including his married sister, her husband and their two young children, along with three people from another household, lived at 10 St Stephens Terrace. Frederick was then listed as having no occupation. It is possible that he was between jobs, unwell or the Chaddock household was simply too full to accommodate him.
Rowton House at Bondway, Vauxhall was the first of a new type of accommodation created by politician and philanthropist Montague William Lowry Corry (Lord Rowton), formerly a private secretary to Benjamin Disraeli. Rowton was previously involved in setting up the Guinness Trust, which aimed to provide low-cost housing for respectable working people in London and Dublin (there is a Guinness Trust estate on Kennington Park Road).
Frederick entered the Lambeth Infirmary on 26 September 1903, for unknown reasons and left nearly five weeks later. The reason for his stay is unknown, only that he was discharged at his own request and to the care of his father.
At an unknown date Frederick enlisted in the 1st Dragoon Guards. He was later transferred to the Gloucester Regiment. The 1911 census records him as a private with the 2nd Battalion, then stationed at the Verdala Barracks in Malta. At some point before 1911, his parents had separated, with Augustus, by then retired, lodging at 28 Tradescant Road and Caroline living with two daughters a three-minute walk away at 39 Guildford Road.
Frederick served from the beginning of the war, arriving in France in December 1914. In early 1918 he married Florence Victoria Ding. He was killed in action in the final push against the Germans near Busigny (south-east of Cambrai in Nord) less than two weeks before the end of the armistice. His widow Florence later married Frederick’s older brother Percy, and had two children.
Many thanks to the Chaddock descendants for this information. All images are © Stanley Fletcher