Reginald Charles Clemo 1895?-1917

I’ve spent the last couple of days chasing down leads, scanning old photographs and trying to find out as much as possible about the family link between Wilhelmina Vollmer and her descendants which include me, her great great grandson.

As I’ve discovered, she married James Henry Hayes, who worked at Harveys foundry in Hayle, in 1863. They had seven children, and I am descended through the fourth child, Elizabeth Henrietta Trevaskis Hayes, who was born in 1868, and who married Charles Clemo at St Erth on the 1st May 1895. He too was an engineer, though his father was a seaman.

I was unable to trace them after that, so I started looking for their children, who include my grandfather Richard James (Jim) Clemo.

According to the family Bible, the eldest son was Reginald Charles Clemo and he was killed in action in 1917, so I decided to see if I could find any trace of him.

I found two records. The first is of a Reginald Clemo, a stoker 2nd Class , ID K38321 (Dev) who was killed when his ship HMS Tornado was sunk with the loss of 75 lives in an action that also saw HMS Surprise sunk with a loss of 48 crew, and also HMS Torrent, sunk with a loss of 69 men. This occurred on Sunday 23rd December 1917 and the details can be found here.

http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?10768#128267

One of the worst days the Royal Navy had during WW1, with three brand new destroyers and 252 lives lost, when they flotilla strayed into a minefield protecting the port of Rotterdam.

That was it, or so I thought. However I continued my search and found this entry

http://www.pembrokeshire-war-memorial.co.uk/page42.htm

Charles Reginald Clemo, Shipwright 2nd Class, M/16543, Royal Navy. Charles was one of the few Royal Naval regulars serving aboard HMS Prize. He was the Son of Charles and Elizabeth H. T. Clemo, of Duke Street Inn, Duke Street, Devonport, and was a native of Hayles, Cornwall. Charles was killed when Prize was sunk by U-48 in the Atlantic on 14 August 1917. He was 22 years old, and is commemorated on the Plymouth Naval Memorial.

Paydirt! At last we can pick up the trail of my great grandparents. I knew that my father grew up in Devonport and this locates the family there.
Sometimes it pays to keep digging. It seems that there were two Clemos killed in action in 1917, and both called Reginald. Time to get searching again.