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tender age of 14, John Goldsmith was 37 and married with three children when his father died. His third child – Kate’s great-grandfather – was born at home in Priory Road, Acton, on 6 November 1886, a cause of great celebration for the family. He was christened Stephen Charles but known as Charlie to his family. The couple went on to have another six children – in those days, large families were the norm among the working classes – although several died. The couple eventually settled in a run-down house in Featherstone Terrace, Southall, shortly before the turn of the century. It was there that they heard about the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901, and the coronation of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. Little did the Goldsmiths realise how different from the Victorian age the dawning twentieth century would be for them and their descendants.
    Within a few years, Charlie had moved to Villier Street in Uxbridge, where he worked as a mechanic. It was there that he would meet his future wife, Edith, who lived with her family two streets away in Chiltern View Road. Although Edith had grown up with her father Benjamin, an ornamental plasterer, and mother Amelia in a large house in the village of Denham, Buckinghamshire, her family had fallen on hard times and been forced to sell up and move three miles to the less salubrious town of Uxbridge, known for its flour production and breweries. However, it seems they soon became part of the community, as Benjamin became a bell ringer at St Margaret’s Church in the heart of the town.
    Their daughter Alice Tomlinson, now 97, and the only one of her siblings still alive, recalls her mother telling her about her background. ‘My mum was the baby of the family,’ she says. ‘She grew up in a big house in Denham. Her parents were both quite well off. Their families had had a baker’s shop and a butcher’s shop opposite one another and that’s how they came together. Somehow or other, along the line, they lost all their money. It was held in chancery and somebody signed the wrong documents or something.’
    Edith was a tiny woman, under 5 ft tall and weighing 7 st. She was disfigured by a huge scar on her torso, which she had got during a narrow escape from death when she was a toddler. ‘Grandad used to light his cigar in his big oil stove in the hall of the big house where they lived,’ says Alice. ‘He would roll a piece of paper up and put it in the stove and light his cigar. Of course, when he went out, my mum copied. She had a go doing the same thing and nearly burned herself to death.’
    Charlie and Edith got married at Uxbridge Register office on 27 March 1909. He was 22 years old and she was a year younger. The ceremony may have been brought forward because she was four months pregnant with their first child. They moved into their first home, just streets away from his parents, at 16 Spencer Street, Southall. Their eldest son, Stephen Charles, also nicknamed Charlie, was born on 20 August 1909, followed by Alice, nicknamed Minnie, in 1911, and Edith, known as Ede, in 1913.
    However, within a year of Ede’s birth, war had broken out. Charlie signed up on 19 May 1915 and served in France with the Royal Fusiliers, initially in the trenches and afterwards in the cookhouse. He was one of Kitchener’s ‘shilling men’, having signed up in the wake of Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener’s campaign for men between 19 and 30 to join the army. ‘My dad used to work on the coal carts when we were little,’ recalls Alice, ‘but then he went to war. All the lads joined up together to get the King’s shilling to get some beer.’
    Just ten days after Charlie arrived in France, he discovered that his elder brother John, a private in the 3/8th battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, had been taken into South Western Hospital in Stockwell, which cared for people with fevers, smallpox and other infectious diseases. He died at the age of 30, one of 2,343