Stockwell War Memorial

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navy

Alfred Frank Spice

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A.F. Spice
Service no. M/1766
Cook’s Mate, Royal Navy, HMS Good Hope
Killed in action on 1 November 1914 at the Battle of Coronel off the coast of Chile, aged 23
Remembered at Portsmouth Naval Memorial
See LondonWarMemorial.co.uk

This identification was made by Chris Burge, who writes:

Albert Frank Spice was born on 9 March 1891 in Clapham, the third child of James Spring and Julia Spice. The family were living in Larkhall Lane at the time. Albert’s father worked as a house painter and decorator and by 1901 there had been two further additions to the family at Larkhall Lane. But fortunes changed with the death of Albert’s father in 1905.

The 1911 Census shows Albert’s widowed mother Julia was employed at home as a sewing machinist doing piecework, and Albert’s sisters Florence and Elsie worked as cardboard box makers. A cousin of Albert’s mother was staying with them, together with a paying boarder. Five people where sharing five rooms at 133 Larkhall Lane, Clapham.

Albert was not to be found at the family home in 1911, he was in the Navy. Albert joined on 11 April 1910, as a 2nd Class Cook’s Mate and had progressed to Cook’s Mate in the intervening year. He served on HMS Dreadnought for two years and moved to HMS Ariadne in 1913 when he had passed for Leading Cook’s Mate. At the outbreak on the war, Albert had been on the armoured cruiser HMS Good Hope since 31 July 1914. Later that year, HMS Good Hope was part of the 4th Cruiser Squadron, which engaged the enemy off the coast of Chile on 1 November. Outnumbered and outgunned, the HMS Good Hope was lost with all hands, a total of 926 officers and ratings.

Albert’s mother and sisters were left to mourn his loss as the war dragged on with no end in sight. The creation of the Stockwell War Memorial offered them a lasting act of remembrance. It had been a long wait.

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. 

George Sidney Miller

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G.S. Miller
Petty Officer Stoker, Royal Navy, HMS Vanguard
Service no. 311632
Died in an explosion on 9 July 1917, aged 27
Remembered at  Chatham Naval Memorial, Kent

Chris Burge writes:

George Sidney Miller was born in Willesden, northwest London in 1892, the second child of parents George Henry and Elizabeth Miller, who were both originally from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. At the time of the 1901 census, George, 33, and Elizabeth, 29, lived in four rooms at 47 High Street Clapham with their three children: Irene, 12; George, nine; and Samuel, five. George Snr, a police sergeant, died in 1903, aged 36. On 16 January 1909 Irene married Talbert Vincent Wilcocks at St Mark’s Church, Kennington, giving their addresses as 74 and 76 Clapham Road. The marriage was witnessed by Talbert’s sister and Frederick Staughton.

By the time of the 1911 census, Irene was living in four rooms at 26A Mandalay Road, Clapham, with her husband and their two baby daughters. George Sidney Miller appeared in the census at the Royal Navy Torpedo School Ship HMS Vernon, Portsmouth, listed as ‘Stoker 1st Class’. He was listed as 22 and single, both of which were untrue. 

George Sidney Miller had joined the Navy on 1 May 1907, signing for 12 years. He claimed to have been born in Willesden on 25 November 1888. He was described as 5ft 6in tall with dark brown hair, brown eyes and a fresh complexion. He married Laura Hazelden on 17 November 1910 at St Barnabas, South Lambeth, where Laura had been baptised as a child. Her family home was at 8 Horace Street. At the time of the wedding George gave his true age, which was 18, and HMS Vernon as his place of residence. Frederick Staughton was one witness of their marriage. George and Laura’s first child, George Frederick Sidney Miller, was born on 25 April 1911 and baptised on 10 May 1911 at St Stephen’s, South Lambeth, at which time Laura gave her address as 76 Clapham Road, where she lived in one room and had been working as a laundress. 

In the 1911 census, policeman Frederick Staughton was living at 74 Clapham Road with his wife ‘Amy’ and 15-year-old stepson John Miller, born in Harlesden, northwest London. Amy Staughton was 38 and from Great Yarmouth. Frederick had married an ‘Amy Miller’ in 1906. While it’s not certain that George’s mother Elizabeth and Amy were the same person, his younger brother was baptised Samuel John Miller, which suggests Frederick Staughton may have been more than a family friend.

At the of outbreak of war, George Miller had risen to Leading Stoker and already educationally passed for Petty Officer; he was at the Pembroke II shore station. Between July 1914 and May 1916, he served on HMS Stour, part of the 9th Destroyer Flotilla that patrolled home waters. George and Laura’s second child, Eileen Laura,  was born on 7 December 1915 and baptised at St Stephen’s, South Lambeth, on two weeks later, when their home address was 35 St Stephen’s Terrace, which was virtually opposite the church.

A year later George Sidney Miller was involved in an incident that threatened to end his naval career. He appeared in court accused of the manslaughter of Herbert Jones. George Sidney Miller, 24, stoker, had been bailed in a police court on 23 November 1916 after a Coroner’s Inquest into the death of Herbert Jones. The case was heard by Justice Avory on 13 December 1916 at the Old Bailey where George pleaded guilty, and was reported in newspapers soon after:

A NAVAL WHIRLWIND. A naval stoker, aged 23, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to-day to the manslaughter of Herbert Jones, whom he was said have struck outside a public-house. It was alleged that an insulting remark had been used to him and he ran amok. Mr. Justice Avory said that he doubted whether the prisoner intended to hit the deceased. You were the victim of that mistaken kindness which people show men in the services home on leave. I wish it could be made a more serious offence than is now to treat soldiers and sailors. You were mad with drink for the time being, and you ran amok. “I understand that someone called you a coward. Anything more calculated to irritate a man like you I don’t know. You ran about waving your arms like a whirlwind, striking anyone and not caring who it was.” Prisoner was bound over.

Justice Avory’s sympathetic hearing saved George from disgrace and worse. Whether it was chance or the Navy deliberately keeping George out of further trouble, he found himself sent far from London to the Fleet at Scapa Flow where he joined the crew of HMS Vanguard on 1 January 1917 and by April was an acting petty officer (stoker). HMS Vanguard was the Royal Navy’s seventh dreadnought battleship when launched in 1909, part of the Naval Arms Race that had preceded the war when the public were associated with the chant ‘We want eight and we won’t wait!’ The only time HMS Vanguard fired her guns in anger was during the battle of Jutland in 1916. In the Fleet anchorage in Scapa Flow on the evening of Monday 9 July 1917, it was overcast, with a gentle northeasterly. Vanguard and her neighbours carried out their usual evening routines until about 11.20pm when, without warning, flames became visible abaft Vanguard’s foremast, followed immediately by two heavy explosions, and the battleship disappeared under a pall of smoke. When the smoke lifted the great ship had gone. Of the 845 onboard, only two survivors were found. George Sidney Miller had died that day. 

The Naval Court of Inquiry was unable to determine any definite cause to the explosion. It was only able to conclude that it may have been due to the ignition of cordite from an ‘avoidable cause’, or the deterioration of perhaps unstable cordite. No blame was attributed to any one person. 

By the time the loss of the Vanguard was widely reported in the British press on 14 July 1917, the next of kin had been notified and Laura Miller was still at St Stephens Terrace, South Lambeth Road, SW8. When the Stockwell War Memorial was unveiled in 1922, Laura had been living at 111 Gaskarth Road, near Clapham South since 1918. It was the home of George’s married sister Irene, whose husband Talbert had served in the Royal Garrison Artillery during the war. 

Laura Miller was married for a second time in 1925 to Edward Henry Gardener, an older man who had served in the Royal Navy between 1897 and 1906 and during the war. They lived in Boyd Road, Colliers Wood, from 1925, where Laura was still living when Gardener passed away in 1954. Laura passed away in Merton in 1971, aged 78. 

George and Laura’s daughter Eileen Laura Miller died in 1934, aged 18. His son George Frederick Sidney Miller died in 1989, aged 78.

Herbert Carey

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H. Carey
Able Seaman (RFR/CH/B/5028), HMS India
Service no. 212125
Killed in action on 8 August 1915, aged 31
Remembered at Narvik Old Cemetery, Norway

Chris Burge writes:

Herbert Carey was born on 27 November 1883 in Holloway, north London, the third of Thomas George and Mary Carey’s five known children. Herbert was still living in Islington when he joined the Navy on his birthday in 1901. His occupation was recorded as ‘Engine Cleaner’ and Herbert was described as 5ft 11in tall, with brown hair, blue eyes and a fresh complexion. Advancement in the Navy was slow and Herbert was not rated as AB seaman until 1903. He served on several ships with HMS Pembroke being the last before he was placed on fleet reserve and left the service on 6 April 1908.  

On 2 May 1909 Herbert Carey married Susan Ethel Parnell St Barnabas, South Lambeth. He gave his address as 43 Lansdowne Gardens, and described himself as a labourer. Susan Ethel was from Bristol but had lived in Lambeth for at least a decade before they married. 

In the 1911 census, Herbert and Ethel were living in just two rooms at 46 Priory Road off the Wandsworth Road.  Herbert worked as a printers warehouseman. Their daughter Irene Maud Carey was born at home on 12 May 1912. 

As a naval reservist, Herbert Carey was called up at the outbreak of war, serving on the old cruiser HMS Sutlej from 2 August 1914 until part of a draft of 88 men that joined the crew of the HMS India on 8 April 1915. The total crew numbered 32 officers and 270 men. The India was an Armed Merchant Cruiser, an ex-passenger ship, part of the 10th Cruiser Squadron Northern Patrol safeguarding shipping between Britain and Norway.  

Official reports stated: ‘While on duty intercepting and inspecting neutral shipping, HMS India was torpedoed by German submarine U22 near Helligvaer, Norway, on August 8, 1915. The ship broke in two and sank quickly.’

Some 160 men were lost, and those washed ashore were buried at Narvik Old Cemetery. 

After the war, Susan Ethel lived at 290 South Lambeth Road with her brother Frederick and his wife until just before she died in 1938, aged 53. Her daughter Irene, died aged 80 in 1992.  

Walter Alexander

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W. Alexander
Royal Navy, Stoker 1st Class, HMS ‘Fandango’
Service no. 311118
Died on 3 July 1919, aged 28
Remembered at Chatham Naval Memorial, Kent

Chris Burge writes:

Walter Alexander was born on 5 December 1888 in Camberwellin southeast London. In the 1891 census he is recorded as one of four siblings living at Faraday Street, Walworth:  Maud, aged 8; Phoebe, 3; Walter, 2; and James, 5 months.  His parents William and Ellen were 63 and 52 respectively. Although it was not unknown for women to have children late in life, especially if they had many births, there is a question mark over the accuracy of the children’s recorded ages and their true relationship with the parents. 

The family home was a three-storey property housing two other families totalling 16 people, close to the Michael Faraday Board School, St Stephen’s Church, the Newington Workhouse and the ‘Mineral Water Works’ in nearby Albany Street. William Alexander worked as a ‘traveller in mineral waters’. Walter’s infant brother James died in 1892 and his father William died in 1898. The family group is not found in the 1901 census. 

On 31 January 1907 Walter, previously a grocer’s assistant, joined the Navy as a stoker, signing for 12 years’ service. He was described as 5ft 3in tall, with light brown hair, blue eyes and a fresh complexion.  Advancement was slow, not least as Walter found himself in the cells more than once and in 1912 was given 30 days’ detention for insubordination. A more serious incident occurred on the very day Britain declared war on 5 August 1914. Walter was accused of inciting insubordination and attempting to strike. The nature of any grievance was not recorded.  Walter was threatened with 90 days’ imprisonment and dismissal from the service, an order that was cancelled on 4 November. After this date, Walter’s conduct was good to very good and he served on HMS Virago in the China seas until July 1915 when he was shore-based for a few months.  

Walter was a witness at the wedding of his sister Maud to George Thomas Dalton in Tooting on 17 October 1915.  The couple lived in Leigh on Sea briefly before George Dalton volunteered under Lord Derby’s Group Scheme on 1 December 1915, and joined the Army. George was called up on 1 June 1916 and Maud moved to 244 South Lambeth Road, Stockwell.  

The battle of Jutland took place on 1 June 1916 when Walter Alexander was on board the destroyer HMS Menace, part of the Twelfth Destroyer Flotilla which screened the Grand Fleet in the battle.  Walter was transferred to another destroyer, HMS Prince, in October 1916.  

In 1917,  Walter was given leave to marry Beatrice Alice Selina Dalton, a younger sister of his brother-in-law George.  The wedding took place on 3 June at St Andrew’s, Stockwell, and was witnessed by Walter’s mother Ellen and Beatrice’s father.The couple’s address was recorded as 40 Sidney Street, Stockwell.  Walter returned to HMS Prince but his service extended beyond the war’s end when he served on the armed minesweeper HMS Fandango from April 1919. Walter was killed on 3 July 1919 when his ship struck an enemy mine and was wrecked during operations in the Dvina River in north Russia. 

On 3 September 1919 Walter’s widow Beatrice gave birth to Winifred Elizabeth Alexander, who was baptised on 28 September. Walter was recorded as ‘killed in action’ in the Parish register. Beatrice was married for a second time in 1920 to Edmund Arthur Hartshorn and died in 1987 in Devon, aged 92. Walter’s married daughter Winifred passed way in London in 2002, aged 83. 

Walter Alexander, the son of Ellen and William Alexander, was born on 5 December 1888 in Camberwell, southeast London. He joined the Navy in 1907 and married Beatrice Alice Selina Dalton at St Andrew’s Church, Stockwell Green, ten years later. Their daughter Winifred Elizabeth was born on 3 September 1919 and baptised at the same church. 

Walter was killed when his ship, the HMS Fandango, struck a mine during operations in the Dvina River North Russia.

In 1920 Beatrice married Edmund Hartshorn, and lived at 40 Sidney Road, Stockwell.