Private Frederick Watson Bowers from Burwell Cambridgeshire was the firstborn of 10 children. Our Roll of Honour in the War Memorial Institute gives his surname name as Watson, but he actually took his mother’s surname Bowers. In 1910 he was married to Florence (known as Flora) when he was 23 and had two sons. From the 1911 census we know that he was still living at Burwell and was “an engine driver on a tug boat from a chemical manufacturing works”. Soon after that he brought his family to Stathern and worked either on the railway or the ironstone quarrying. We think he lived in the last house in Penn Lane on the left as you leave the village which was then three cottages.

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Frederick’s army papers have survived but are fire damaged. They show that on 11 December 1915 he enlisted at Melton Mowbray in the Leicestershire Regiment as a private in the 8th Battalion. We know that in 1916 he was shot in the back and was invalided back to the UK and was in hospital for 3 weeks. He was killed in action on the Somme on 22 March 1918 and has no known grave. He is mentioned on the Pozieres Memorial, and at Stathern, and Burwell. He left children aged 7 and 3. One of his brothers was also killed in the war.

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Flora, his wife, stayed on in Stathern in the Penn Lane cottage with her two sons Frederick and Horace, and did not remarry. She died in 1960, aged 73.

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Joy Widdowson, living in Stathern, is Frederick’s and Flora’s granddaughter. The family still have his medals and a photograph of Frederick. So, Frederick’s memory lives on in the village.

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Roger Hawkins, November 2018