Samuel David Frith was born on the 7th of February 1884 in the old streets by the river in Hull — Chapel Lane, in the parish of St Mary's, Lowgate — one of the seven children of Samuel David Frith, a fruiterer, and his wife Alice, née Houlton. He and his sister Kate were received into the church together at St Mary's on the 15th of June 1894, a boy of ten and a girl of twelve, the register noting their birth dates and the family's shop at 14 Chapel Lane. The schooling evidently served him well: at seventeen the census finds him a commercial clerk, still living over the fruit business.
In April 1906, at St Mary's, he married Lydia Wilson, an iron moulder's daughter born at Oldham in Lancashire; her brother Frederick stood witness. They made their home out at Marfleet, at 1 Brooklyn Villa on Ceylon Street, and the 1911 census finds him there at twenty-seven, a checker for a railway company — the dock railways were Marfleet's living — with Lydia and four-year-old George Henry. Clara followed that November, and Joan at the end of 1913. In the family's memory — his daughter Joan's words, set down by Janet — he was "a clerk who worked for Liptons the tea merchants".
He was a part-time soldier before the war began: his regimental number, 3/6594, belongs to the East Yorkshire Regiment's reserve battalion, and in Joan's telling "he joined up straight away". By October 1914 the Hull Daily Mail's roll of Holderness men "serving their King with the forces" carried his name among Marfleet's nineteen. He died serving with the 10th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment — the Hull Commercials, the battalion of clerks and office men the city had raised in the first weeks of the war — holding the acting rank of serjeant.
In the dark before dawn on the 3rd of May 1917 the Hull battalions attacked Oppy Wood, near Arras. Samuel was killed that day, aged thirty-three. His body lay out on the battlefield for more than three years; in August 1920 a graves unit found him on the ground east of Arleux, identified him by the wallet he carried — the wallet was sent home — and buried him in Orchard Dump Cemetery among rows of soldiers known and unknown. His headstone bears no age and no epitaph: number, name, regiment, the date, and a cross; the rank was corrected on the Commission's schedule, in red ink, from private to serjeant. A year after his death Lydia put a verse in the Mail — "they little know the sorrow which that smile hides all the while" — and his parents, three years on, five words: "Loved in life; not forgotten in death." Hull's memorial to its fallen stands in Oppy village today; Janet kept a photograph of it with this page.
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-03