51st Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment
Alfred Rupert Gardiner was born in France Lynch on 24 July 1900, the third child of Edward Thomas and Mary Ann Gardiner. Edward was born locally in Bisley in 1857 and Mary Ann came from Hampshire. Alfred was baptised at St John’s Baptist Church in France Lynch on 19 August 1900 when his father gave his occupation as a retired Warrant Officer.
Edward had been married previously. He was presumably serving in India where he married in 1886. His wife, Adelaide died three years later and their daughter Louisa died in 1894 aged just six.
At the time of the 1901 Census, Edward had remarried and the couple had three children, Dudley aged five, Linda two and Alfred eight months old. The family lived in Chalford.
By the time of the 1911 Census, the couple had four children under six with Linda and 10-year-old Alfred at school.
Edward died aged 44 in June 1901 and was buried at St John’s on 15 June. He had served as an instructor with the Indian Army (according to Dudley’s marriage register of 1920). Mary Ann remarried on 31 October 1904. Her husband was 31-year-old Walter Minchin.
No service records survive for Alfred. The website of Chalford and the Great War states that the Stroud Journal wrote of Alfred: ‘He joined the army on reaching the qualifying age some months ago and was a promising young man’. The article added that he died whilst training in Norwich. The 51st ‘Graduated’ Battalion was a training unit which had moved to Henham Park near Southwold in June 1918.
There is an entry in the Register of Soldier’s Effects and a PensionRecord Card on Ancestry.
Alfred died at the War Hospital, Norwich on 26 October 1918, aged 18, from influenza. He was buried on 3 November 1918. The vicar wrote in the margin of the burial record ‘died of influenza’. Alfred has a CWGC headstone.
Alfred’s older brother Dudley, served with the 1/4th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment and survived the war.
Researched Helen Wollington May 2021