People on board

GRAY, Arthur Frederick

Arthur Frederick Gray was born in Lewisham, London in 1891 to Wallace Gray and Janet Battman Bridger, the eldest of their six children. In 1881 Wallace, a Telegraph Clerk, was living with his family in Borden, Kent and married in Tonbridge in Kent in 1890. He and Janet then moved closer to London to Brockley in the Borough of Lewisham. The 1891 census shows them and baby Arthur with Janet’s family in Tonbridge, presumably visiting, with Wallace then being a ‘Draper’s Clerk’.

Janet Gray died in 1899 about the time of the birth of her youngest son and Wallace was alone with his six children and two servants in Deptford in the 1901 census. He gave his occupation then as ‘Commercial Clerk’. He remarried in 1909 to Kate Avery and they moved to 24 Lewisham High Road in Deptford. Wallace was then a ‘Secretary’. In the 1911 census only Arthur, then aged twenty, a Shipping Clerk, his seventeen year old sister Frederica who was a ‘Student Civil Service’ and their eleven year old brother Albert, were living at home.

It is not known when Arthur Gray enlisted but he was initially a Corporal in the Royal West Kent Yeomanry. He received his commission into the Suffolk Yeomanry in April 1918 and was with the 2/1st Brigade which moved to Ireland in May 1918. Presumably returning home on leave he travelled on RMS Leinster on the 10th of October. He did not survive the sinking, nor was his body recovered.

His name is recorded on the Hollybrook Memorial in Southampton and on the Suffolk Yeomanry Memorial in Bury St Edmunds.