Stockwell War Memorial

Friends of Stockwell War Memorial & Gardens

1918

Cecil Francis Seymour

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C.F. Seymour
Lance Corporal, Scots Guards, 2nd Bn.
Service no. 14265
Died on 24 August 1918, aged about 26
Remembered at Mory Street Military Cemetery, St Leger, France and on the Rainhill Asylum roll of honour, now in the care of Rainhill British Legion

Cecil Francis Seymour was born in 1892 at Christmas Common, Watlington, Oxfordshire, the youngest of Henry and Sarah Seymour’s eight children. At the time of the 1911 census, Cecil was working as part of the large domestic staff of the Scottish-born landed proprietor Charles Adrian James Butter and his American wife Agnes Marguerite at the Abbey, Witham, Oxford. Most of the staff were from Scotland. 

On 9 August 1915 Cecil Francis Seymour volunteered in Liverpool for the Scots Guards. He had previously been working as an attendant at Rainhill County Lunatic Asylum in St Helen’s, Merseyside. His place of birth was either falsely given or incorrectly recorded as Edinburgh. In keeping with the Guards, Cecil Seymour was a tall individual at 5ft 11in. He was first sent to France on 5 October 1916 but suffered trench foot and a damaged ankle and was returned to England just after Christmas. This, and other illness, prevented him from being declared fit for active service until he returned to France on 30 March 1918. 

While in England, on 30 April 1917 Cecil married widowed Amy Maria Petrie (née Carrett) at Holy Trinity, Clapham. Amy gave her address as 12 Landor Road. Her first husband Robert Alexander Petrie, a tailor, died on 7 May 1916 after being discharged from the Army with tuberculosis. 

Petrie, an old soldier who had re-enlisted on 2 August 1914 in the Army Service Corps, had married Amy at St John’s, Newington on 5 April 1908, after six years service as a military tailor in the Scots Guards. His service record was incorrect, which meant that Amy had difficulty claiming her widow’s pension, so she  turned to the Moffat Institute at Esher Street, Upper Kennington Lane, for help.  Further assistance was given by the Lambeth Branch of the London War Pensions Committee before an award of 10 shillings a week was made in September 1916. 

Cecil Seymour rejoined his battalion when the enemy were at their most active on the Western Front. The 2nd Scots Guard had suffered around 160 casualties during nine days of constant heavy shelling at the end of March 1918. There was little respite until July when the battalion had its first contact with US troops, but they had to endure a night of gas shelling in the final week of July. After a period of rest and training the battalion was ordered to attack and encircle the enemy at St Leger. Over the two days of 24/25 August 1918 the battalion suffered 16 other ranks killed and 94 wounded. Amy Maria had been made a widow for a second time. 

A letter from the Ministry of Pensions dated 28 March 1919 informed Amy that as the widow of the late 14265 Lance Corporal C.F. Seymour 2nd Scots Guards she has been awarded a weekly pension of 13 shillings and ninepence. Four weeks later, a small parcel of her late husband’s effects was posted to her. 

On 24 October 1923 37-year-old Amy departed England to start a new life in Australia. Her last address in the United Kingdom was recorded as 12 Landor Road. 

Victor Albert Scutt

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A. V. Scutt
Service no. G/15812
Lance Corporal, The Buffs (East Kent Regiment), 1st Battalion
Born, enlisted and lived in Lambeth
Killed in action on 21 March 1918
Remembered at Arras Memorial, France
(Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Soldiers Died in the Great War databases has Scutt as Victor Albert rather than Albert Victor)

George Frederick William Sach

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G. F. W. Sach
Service no. 470989
Rifleman, London Regiment (The Rangers), 12th Battalion
Born in Ealing; enlisted in London; lived in Stockwell
Killed in action on 21 September 1918, aged 21
CWGC: “Son of George and Emily E. Sach, of 28 Edithna Road, Stockwell, London.”
Remembered at Villers Hill British Cemetery, Villers-Guislain, France and St Andrew’s Church, Landor Road, London SW9

National Roll of the Great War 1914-1918

SACH, G.F.W., L/Cpl., 12th London Regt., (Rangers).
He volunteered in February 1915, and after completing his training served at home until 1917, when he was drafted to France. Whilst overseas, he fought on the Somme, at Ypres, Arras, Albert, St. Quentin, St Eloi and Lille. He also served in the Retreat of 1918, and on September 21st of that year was unfortunately killed in the Allied Advance. He was entitled to the General Service and Victory Medals.
“Whilst he remember, the sacrifice was not in vain.”
28, Edithna Street, Stockwell, S.W.9.

Information from the censuses

George Frederick William Sach was 13 in 1911. Born in Ealing, he lived at 28 Edithna Street with his parents milkman George Sach, 39, from Ealing, and Emily Elizabeth Sach (nee Betts), 45, from Litcham, Norfolk, and brother James Walter Sach, 9, born in Clapham. Three aunts (sisters of his mother) from Norfolk lived with the family, Louisa Harriett Betts, 46, Alice Ann Betts, 42, a lady’s maid, and Florence Betts, 40, as well as Ivy Alice Betts, 9, born in Clapham.
In 1901 the Sachs were  living in 36 Wirtemburg Street, Clapham, and a decade earlier they were in Twyford Abbey, Ealing.

Thomas Edward Ross

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T. E. Ross
Service no. R/6733
Able Seaman, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hood Battalion R.N. Div.
Died on 29 September 1918, aged 24 (missing, later reported killed in action or died of wounds)
Next-of-kin & home address: Wife, Emily [née Brown], 56 South Island Place, Clapham Road, Clapham, London SW9.
Service history: Army Reserve 24 June 1916
Entered 29 April 1918
Draft for BEF (British Expeditionary Force) 3 September 1918; joined Hood Battalion 8 September 1918-29 September 1918; Discharged Dead
Remembered at Anneux British Cemetery, France

Sydney (or Sidney) Herbert Rogers

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S. Rogers
Private, Middlesex Regiment, 1st Bn.
Service no. G/43526.
Died on 23 October 1918, aged 32.
Remembered at Remembered at Vis-En-Artois Memorial, Pas de Calais, France

Chris Burge writes:

Sydney (aka Sidney) Herbert Rogers was born in Lambeth in 1886 and baptised at All Saints, South Lambeth on 24 October 1886. His parents, William and Mary Rogers, were living at 5 Gladstone Street, off Wyvil Road, in Stockwell, at the time and his father worked as a porter for the London & South Western Railway, which employed many of Gladstone Street’s inhabitants. 

The 1891 census shows Sydney was the second youngest of six siblings and the Rogers family lived in four rooms at the Gladstone Street property, which was shared with a family of three in two other rooms. The Rogers family were still living at the same address ten years later when Sydney’s father was 56 and his mother 51. Sydney worked as a printer’s messenger, his older sister Alice as a domestic servant and his younger brother Tom was still at school. Sydney’s widowed grandmother Mary lived with them.

Sydney’s mother died in 1911, leaving just his sister Alice and brother Tom living with their father at Gladstone Street. William Rogers was still working as a railway porter for the L&SWR and Alice, 26, was looking after the family. Tom, 21, was now an engine stoker for the L&SWR. The property also housed another railway porter’s family with three young children, living in two rooms. 

In 1911, Sydney was one of Alice Swan’s three boarders at 72 Fulwell Road in Teddington, Middlesex. All three boarders worked as railway engine stokers for the L&SWR which had a locomotive shed at Fulwell Junction. 

Sydney Herbert Rogers was conscripted in around March 1916. (Estimated from the £12 War Gratuity paid to William Rogers as recorded in the Army Registers of Soldiers’ Effects.) He first served in the 1/7th Battalion, a Territorial Force unit, as private 6064 Rogers, but there are no surviving records to say exactly when and where he was transferred to the 1st Middlesex, and was renumbered. (The pages of Middlesex Regiment Medal Roll show a number of men transferred from the 1/7th to the 1st Middlesex in the service number range G/43440-G/43720, with the first casualty in this range on 16 January 1917.) Sydney Herbert Rogers’ service in the 1st Middlesex probably dates from the beginning of 1917. Their main actions in 1917 and 1918 are listed here.

Sydney was killed in action during the final advance in Picardy when the end of the war was in sight. His 74-year-old father William was the sole beneficiary of Sydney’s will which amounted to £133 2s 1d when probate was granted on 8 January 1919. 

Alice married George Griffin in 1917 and by 1925 the couple had moved to 5 Gladstone Street to be with William, who died in 1926, aged 81. They were still in residence when the street was renamed Trenchold Street in the 1930s (it was redeveloped in 1948; its one remaining landmark is the Builders Arms pub).