Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

95 Tragedy 1911 Annie was living (with three of her children, as just noted) as a lodger at a house in Hounslow, Middlesex; aged 42, she was not shown as having any specific occupation. And there the trail goes cold. I can find no record of the death of an Annie (or Susan) McKay, or Southin, or Horne, at roughly the right sort of date in any of the standard online genealogical sources. But she does not seem to have an entry in the 1939 Register, which would suggest that she may have died by that date. If she had survived, she would have been 74 at Christmas in that year. 68 Woolwich and Plumstead today are very different from the world where tragedy was played out on 1 August 1883. The barracks have been re-built, Pattison Road has been re-developed, and even St Margaret’s Church is no more, demolished in 1974 and replaced by towering blocks of flats. I had hoped to find at least some memorial to John James Boys at Charlton Cemetery, where he was buried; I even had a reference number to help locate his grave. But when I visited in August 2014 I spent a long while exploring the relatively small area where his grave should be, without finding any headstone or other memorial for him. There was no-one to ask for assistance - the cemetery office was locked, and the sign saying that in these circumstances the cemetery manager could be found elsewhere on the premises proved to be, I’m sorry to say, untrue. So this tragic Mr Boys must be left to lie in peace. 68 An Annie Southin married Alfred Smith in Brentford - not too far from Hounslow - early in 1916. It is certainly possible that this was our Susan Annie McKay, but the surname Smith unfortunately makes later searches for her impracticable.