Frederick MOLYNEUX

Fred Molyneux's gravestone in Bavinchove Churchyard, northern France.

Frederick Molyneux, known as Fred, was born on 2 June 1919 at 2 Carter’s Yard, one of the many narrow courtyards which ran off St Aldates at the time (the area was cleared in the mid-1930s). He was the sixth of the seven children of John Molyneux (known by his second name of Alfred) and his wife Ethel (known by her second name of Maud), née Duck. Alfred came from a long-established St Aldates family. In his early youth he had worked as a omnibus conductor and cab driver, but when he was 22 he had joined the 18^th Hussars, Queen Mary’s Own Regiment, and served in India and South Africa. After having completed his twelve-year term, he remained in the Army Reserves, and as a civilian worked as a kitchen porter, labourer, and under gardener at Christ Church.

Maud was born in London and spent her childhood there, but as a young woman she moved to Oxford and in 1901 was working as a household servant in Polstead Road. She and Alfred married at the Oxford registry office in October 1904, a month after he finished serving in the regular army. Their first son Leslie was born five months later at 16 English Row off St Aldates. He was baptised in St Matthew’s Church, then a chapel-of-ease of St Aldates Church.

Alfred and Maud had another six children over the next seven years: Stanley, who was born in 1907 but died aged only nine months; William (born 1908); Daisy (1911); Frank (1913); Frederick (1919); and Gladys (1921). Only the first two, Leslie and Stanley, appear to have been baptised (Stanley at Holy Trinity Church in St Ebbe’s).

By 1911 the family was living at 12 Thames Street. War broke out in 1914, and by 1915, when Alfred was called up (at the aged of 44) to serve as an officer’s groom with the the 4^th Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, the family had moved to at 2 Carter’s Yard off St Aldates. They were to remain here for almost twenty years. Alfred was discharged from the army at the end of the War, and Fred was born the following June. By the time the last Molynuex child – Gladys – was born in September 1921, Alfred was 51 and Maud was 43.

In the 1921 census, taken three months before Gladys’s birth, Alfred was working as a labourer at Christ Church; Leslie was working as a porter at Simonds Brewery; Daisy, Alfred, and Frank were at school full-time, and Fred (aged two) was at home with his mother Maud.

In October that year Frank, aged only seven, was hit by a taxi cab on the Abingdon Road, and died in the Radcliffe Infirmary the next day. Six years later, in June 1927, Fred’s oldest brother Leslie, by now working as a builder’s labourer, died at home from a heart attack. He was 22. In January 1930, when he was eleven, Fred’s mother Maud died in the City Isolation Hospital in Cold Harbour (at the far southern end of the Abingdon Road), aged 51. Her funeral was at St Aldates Church. Fred’s father Alfred died six years later, aged 65, of bronchopneumonia. By this time (1936) the Molyneuxes had moved into a council house at 9 Bertie Place in Cold Harbour. This was almost certainly as a result of the demolition of their previous home in Carter’s Yard, part of a city-centre clearance programme. Alfred’s funeral was at St Matthew’s Church in Grandpont and he was buried in Botley Cemetery.

The 1939 register, taken on 29 September, three and a half weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, does not include Fred, probably because he had already enlisted. His brother William was living, with his wife Lilian, at 52 Dashwood Road in Headington, and working as a motor driver. His sister Daisy had married a builder’s labourer, Henry Viles, and was living in Swindon. Gladys, who – according to Women’s Land Army records – now called herself Gladys Allen, was working as a boot and shoe machinist in Northampton in 1941. She married James Allen (who had been a Prisoner of War in Italy) in 1945.

Fred enlisted as a Private in the 4^th Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, service number 5383306. After a period of training near Newbury, the battalion sailed from Southampton to Le Harve in northern France on 18 January 1940. Germany invaded on 10 May, and the fighting reached Fred and his battalion, who were by then stationed near the town of Cassel (about 60km south-east of Calais), in mid-May. Fierce fighting continued throughout May and into June – what became know as the Battle of France or the Western Campaign. (This concluded with the Fall of France and the evacuation of more than 338,000 Allied soldiers from the beaches at Dunkirk between 26 May and 4 June 1940.) Fred was killed in action during this period, some time between 11 May and 12 June. He wes twenty. His body was found by the Germans and buried on 2 October 1940 in the churchyard at Bavinchove, just outside Cassel. The gravestone later erected there by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission bears the inscription “In memory of Frederick / who died / that others might live / never to be forgotten.” His is one of eight graves of British soldiers in the churchyard, six of whom were with the 4^th Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry and all of whom died in the same period.

Fred is also commemorated on the Oxford City WWII Roll of Honour, which is in the Church of St Michael at the Northgate on Cornmarket.

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