Frederick Edward Tullett was born in 1885 in Islington, Middlesex. The seventh of nine children, he was the fourth son of house painter John Tullett and his wife, Sarah.

When he completed his schooling, Frederick found work as an errand boy for a greengrocer. This appears to have been a trade he enjoyed: by the time of the 1911 census, he was employed as a greengrocer’s porter; while his marriage certificate records him as a fully-fledged grocer.

Frederick’s betrothed was Eliza Gundry, the daughter of a bricklayer from Wimbledon, Surrey. The ceremony was held on 18th April 1915 in the town’s All Saints’ Church. The couple were already living at 15 Dryden Road at this point.

It would appear that Frederick had already stepped up to serve his King and Country by the time of his marriage and, while his profession was listed as greengrocer, it may be that this was the job he continued while waiting to be formally mobilised.

Frederick had enlisted in the army by the start of 1915, and was assigned to the 8th (Service) Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment. The unit was based on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, and this is where Private Tullett would end up by that summer.

Crowded barracks were notorious as breeding grounds for infections diseases, and Frederick, sadly, was not to be immune. He contracted pneumonia, and was admitted to a military hospital in Codford. The condition was to prove his undoing: he passed away on 12th July 1915, at the age of 30 years old.

Finances may have prevented Eliza, who had been widowed after just 12 weeks of marriage, from bring her husband back home. Instead, Frederick Edward Tullett was laid to rest in the graveyard of St Peter’s Church in Codford, Wiltshire.

---