Roll of Honour

Lost on the 'D'-class destroyer HMS Coquette. 

Sydney Bradley was born in West Hartlepool on 22^nd January 1897 to George Bradley and his wife Isabella. Both his parents had been married before. George, a native of Coatham, Redcar, was born around 1863 and had been: a farm labourer in the Throston area of Hartlepool in 1881; a depot superintendent in Dewesbury, Yorkshire  in 1891; and by 1901 was living in Church Row, Stranton (next to Stranton Church), working as a drayman for nearby Cameron’s Brewery.

George’s first wife, Mary Jane had been born in Fishburn. The 1891 Census records the couple as having four children - Sarah, aged 10, John, 8,  Jonathan, 5, and Fred, 1. A further child, Elsie was born after this Census in Dewesbury.
Mary Jane Bradley died in Hartlepool in 1895 and is buried in Spion Kop Cemetery.

George Bradley then married  Isabella Carter, a widow, in Hartlepool in 1897 and together the couple had children Sydney, George, Maurice and Isabella. Isabella had been born in Thornley, Yorkshire in 1866, but her first marriage had taken her to Illinois, USA, where she had children Margaret and Thomas around 1890 and 1892. The children of the three marriages all lived in a small terraced house in Church Row in 1901 and 1911.

As a teenager, Sydney Bradley joined the Royal Navy. On March 7th, 1916, he was serving a stoker on HMS Coquette when the ship was hit by a mine laid by the German submarine UC-10 off Clacton on Sea in Essex. He was one of 22 crew members who perished and his body was not recovered.
Sydney’s mother Isabella is recorded as living at 22, Church Row Stranton, West Hartlepool, at this time.