Auntie Audrey and Uncle Les used to visit us at 36 St. John's quite often in the 1950s and less so in the 1960s presumably because they were occupied in the shop. I do remember visiting them once in Gosport; that must have been about 1955.  This narrative tells what we have found out about Uncle Les, mainly from before he met Audrey.

His father was George Webb who had been a Regimental Sergeant Major in the 1st Royal Dragoons. He served in South Africa (see the page on the Boer War) and India. George married Rosina Dawson in Hounslow in 1903. Rosina came from an army family, her father and grandfather were also senior NCOs. 

They had a son Frederick in 1905 who was born in India. The family returned to the Hounslow area in 1909, and on 5th January 1910 Leslie Charles was born in Hounslow. George retired from the army later that year and took a job as a Park Keeper in Richmond Park.

When Les was four years old in 1914 his father re-joined the army serving in an office administration role as a staff quartermaster sergeant. This would have been to assist with the recruitment of volunteers for the war. However he was discharged in 1916 through illness. In the meantime in 1915 a daughter Kathleen was born. By this time the family was living in Chelsea: consisting of the parents George and Rosina, and three children, Fred, Les, and Kathleen. 

After the war ended the family moved to Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire, which is not far from Northampton. We haven't found any family connection to this area, so why they chose to go there is a mystery. Anyway here it is on a map from about 1920 - the High Street was part of the A5, the old Roman Watling street. The adjacent town of Wolverton also features in this narrative. Wolverton developed as a railway town - you can see the Carriage works of the LMS Railway on the map, and the rows of terraced houses for railway workers.

George and Rosina Webb ran a shop at 18 High Street in Stony Stratford from 1919, selling needlework and art materials. The family home was above the shop. And it's still there today - now divided into two shops, one of which is still selling art materials.

Les attended the nearby Wolverton County Secondary School, until he was fourteen early in January 1924. The school was located just behind Victoria Street in Wolverton, which as we will see later has a connection with Les's story.

Later in the same month that Les left school, January 1924, Les's father George died suddenly of a heart attack in Kingston upon Thames. He was taken to Kingston infirmary and pronounced dead there. The inquest returned a verdict of death from natural causes. Why he was in Kingston we don't know. The address where he was staying has no connection with other family members, and we don't know even if the rest of his family were with him. 

That left Les's older brother Fred aged 19 as the eldest male in the household. Les started work as a shop assistant possibly in their own shop, but the High Street in Stony Stratford is quite long and full of shops so there were plenty of opportunities. 

Four years later in 1928 he took a decision that changed his life, when he joined the Royal Navy. He could have joined years earlier but would have needed his mother's permission. He seems to have joined up more or less as soon as he was able to make his own decision. Perhaps she might have given her permission for Les to join the army. Was he making a point of not following his father?

His first posting in the Royal Navy was as a stoker on the Battlecruiser HMS Repulse for 2 years. You might think that a stoker was someone who shovelled coal into the boilers - it certainly was in earlier days but by this time ships burned oil to heat the boilers. So a stoker by now was the term for a sailor who worked in the engine room of a ship, carrying out whatever tasks were necessary to maintain the boilers and engines. (Mum's brother Thomas George Osborne was a stoker on HMS Royal Oak, built around the same time as Repulse).

But in 1931 Les changed direction and transferred to the submarine service. It seems a strange choice given that he was a big man, but there are aspects of submarine working that perhaps were more to his liking. Life in surface ships of the Royal Navy, particularly large ships like Repulse, was subject to rigid discipline and a strict adherence to hierarchy and trades. Stokers were considered to be a lower class than seamen for example. 

On submarines the situation was entirely different. All the crew were subject to the same living and working conditions in a much harsher environment than on large surface ships. As a result there was a much closer bond between the crew members and everyone looked out for everyone else. There was no formal dress code - there were no clothes washing facilities so many submariners dressed in overalls and never changed them.  And all trades had to be capable of performing other trades. For example stokers like Les had to learn to operate hydroplanes in the control room, and man the gun when surfaced. All submariners were volunteers, and their pay was double that of the surface ships. In spite of that there was always a shortage of crew members.

Anyway he underwent his initial submarine training at HMS Dolphin in Gosport for three months and in June 1931 he joined the crew of HMS Odin. Over the course of the next few years he served in several more submarines and at the outbreak of war he was a Leading Stoker on HMS Severn. Here are photographs of each of the submarines he served on with dates. 

In 1934 Les married Beatrice Edith Linnett in Gosport. Beatrice came from Wolverton, Buckinghamshire, the town adjacent to Stony Stratford, living at 76 Victoria Street. Les's school was off the end of this street, and Les must have had to pass along Victoria Street on his way to school. He must surely have met Beatrice in Victoria Street during his school days. Her father was a reporter with the local newspaper in Wolverton, and she had a brother who was also a local newspaper reporter. She was four years older than Les, and it's surprising that the marriage took place in Gosport, rather than in her home town of Wolverton.  And with Les being away at sea a lot it seems an odd decision for them to have got married at all. We don't know where Beatrice lived after they married, Gosport or Wolverton, but we do know that by September 1939 she was living with her parents in Victoria Street, Wolverton. She seems to have continued living there during the war, and for a period she was working in the maintenance and repair shop at the carriage works of the LMS railway.

During the war she wouldn't have seen much of Les, if at all. Most of the time he was at sea but he did return to Gosport on at least a couple of occasions. I don't think in wartime relatives of the crew would have been aware in advance that a submarine was coming back to port, and Les might not have had time to travel up to Wolverton to see her, so it's quite probable that she didn't see him at all for the duration of the war.

Les served on HMS Severn for most of the war, in the South Atlantic, North Atlantic, Nort Sea, a refit in Philadelphia navy yard, the Mediterranean, and Sri Lanka. Most of the work was convoy escort duty and supporting actions against German ships, including the famous sinking of the Bismarck, and the battle of the River Plate.

In March 1945 Severn was taken out of service in Sri Lanka and Les joined the crew of a new boat HMS Tiptoe. Tiptoe was larger than earlier submarines and was one of the first with an all welded hull, earlier ones being riveted hulls. The welded hull allowed the boat to dive deeper than riveted submarines.

Tiptoe operated out of Fremantle, Western Australia patrolling the Philippine islands to disrupt Japanese shipping. She saw action on many occasions sinking some merchant ships and coming under attack from Japanese escort support vessels. Here is an extract taken from her log for 3rd August 1945:

After her last patrol ended on 21st August 1945 Tiptoe returned to England via Hong Kong, Colombo, Port Said, and Gibraltar. She arrived at Portsmouth on 21 December 1945. 

Uncle Les was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his service on HMS Tiptoe.

Les would have been back at 76 Victoria Street with Beatrice and her family in time for Christmas 1945.

But what about his own family, his mother and brother and sister? His mother Rosina died at home in Stony Stratford in 1943 while Les was at sea. His brother Fred worked as a bus driver in Watford, and had a wife and daughter. Fred died in 1946. His sister Kathleen married a butcher in Stony Stratford and had two children. She remained in Stony Stratford all her life and died there in 1960.

Les was to remain in the Royal Navy until 1950, and he stayed at HMS Dolphin in Gosport for the rest of his service. Some time in 1946 he moved into this bungalow at 12 Fieldmore Road, Gosport with his wife Beatrice.

Soon afterwards Beatrice was diagnosed with breast cancer and she became gradually very poorly and unable to travel. In November 1947 her mother was planning to come down and stay with Beatrice and Les. But then tragically her mother died just days before she was due to come down from Wolverton to Gosport. Beatrice was too ill even to go to her mother's funeral.

After her mother's funeral Beatrice's father Walter gave up his job as a reporter with the local newspaper, auctioned the house at 76 Victoria Street, Wolverton and all it's contents, and moved down to Gosport to be with Beatrice and Les. All in the space of a few weeks.

Beatrice died on 2nd April 1948.

Shortly before she died Beatrice made a will leaving all her estate to Les. And here comes another mystery. Probate wasn't granted until 1956 - eight years after she died. Why did it take so long? There must have been some complication - maybe her brother challenged the will. When probate was finally granted her estate was valued at over £1000 - but liabilities reduced it to £150. Was Beatrice the owner of the bungalow rather than Les? Could it have been almost swallowed up by legal costs? 

Les met Auntie Audrey probably some time in the early 1950s. By 1953 they were living together as man and wife in the bungalow at 12 Fieldmore Road. (They weren't actually married because Audrey was still married to her first husband Herbert Jones, who she had married in 1941.) The visit that I remember from about 1955 was to a bungalow in Gosport, which must have been 12 Fieldmore Road. I distinctly remember travelling on the Gosport ferry which at that time was still had a boat shaped hull, unlike the modern flat bottomed ferries. Strange what you remember.   By 1957 they had moved to the shop in Arundel Street. So Uncle Les finished his working life as a shopkeeper having started out as a shop assistant at the age of 14.

In 1965 Audrey and Les did get married at last. We believe this picture was taken on the day they got married.

Uncle Les died suddenly on 11th June 1971, aged 61.

And finally, believe it or not ...........

While researching Uncle Les's story we discovered that there was actually a steam powered submarine in the Royal Navy, the K class. An ugly looking contraption, designed in 1913, eventually 17 of the class entered service. The boilers were heated using oil burners so at least the stokers didn't have to shovel coal. As you might imagine they were beset with problems, not least of which was that it took 30 minutes to submerge, having first to put out the fires under the boiler, and clear the air of fumes before they could submerge. They were very difficult to manoeuvre, with six of them lost in accidents. They were decommissioned and broken up in the 1920s.

One of our cousins Thomas Lawes actually served on one of them (K14) for 9 months in 1924.