Son of Robert and Margaret Kent, of 21 Barnard St., Sunderland.
Linda Gowans has submitted the following:-
Frederick William Kent, born 1888 in Sunderland to Robert Middleton Kent of Sunderland (by 1911 a Foreman Joiner, Shipbuilding) and his wife Margaret from Hylton. In 1891 the family is at 33 Wilson Street, and in 1901 at 63 General Gordon Terrace, where Frederick is the second youngest of seven children. Their address in 1911 is 251 Chester Road; Frederick is now an Iron Merchant’s Clerk. His father is probably the R. M. Kent on St Gabriel’s Church Council from 1905 to 1917 and Choirmaster from 1908 to 1918.
The date of Frederick’s parents’ move to 21 Barnard Street is unknown (other research also cites 25 Cleveland Road): a 1919 statement that they, his five brothers and a sister were all still living, signed by Fred. T. Salter, Curate at St Gabriel’s, shows them at 251 Chester Road.
Frederick enlisted in the DLI at Sunderland on September 18th 1914 aged 26 years 9 months – by then he had changed his occupation to Brewer’s Traveller. He was 5' 8" tall, with fresh complexion, grey eyes and dark brown hair, and weighed 11 stone. On October 9th he was mobilized at Cocken Hall, Finchale. Army discipline was apparently irksome: on November 11th he showed ‘Insolence to a N.C.O.’, for which he received 14 days’ C.B., and the following September he forfeited a day’s pay for overstaying leave from midnight to 9.30 am.
He served in Egypt from late December 1915 to early March 1916, when he was sent to France. In late 1916 he was suffering from conjunctivitis, and in February-March1917 myalgia: the Sunderland Echo reported that his parents had been advised he was in hospital in France suffering from trench fever. He was sent back to England by ambulance train and the hospital ship ‘Stad Antwerpen’, a converted passenger ferry. From March 25th to April 17th 1917 he was in the 4th Northern General Hospital, Lincoln, which had taken over Lincoln Grammar School premises. A form records him (in surprisingly non-technical terms) as ‘Much better’, and after convalescence in Eastbourne he was discharged on July 5th.
In September 1917 he was appointed Lance Corporal, and on May 1st 1918 embarked at Folkestone for Boulogne. His Battalion, the Durham Pioneers, who fought as infantrymen against the German Spring Offensive, took part in the Third Battle of the Aisne, which began on 27th May 1918 with one of the most intensive artillery bombardments of the war. It seems likely that he was killed in action on the second day of the battle. At first, he was probably buried close to where he fell, for on March 13th 1922 his body was exhumed and reburied in the CWGC cemetery at La Ville-Aux-Bois, between Laon and Reims.
Frederick William Kent is remembered at Sunderland on S140.009, S140.010 and S140.048 part 2
He is also remembered in The DLI Book of Remembrance page 134
