7th Battalion Manchester Regiment
Charles Dudley was born in 1880 in Ashton-on-Mersey to his parents Charles and Charlotte Dudley. Charles Dudley was a tea merchant and it appears he had a successful business, judging by the number of household servants he employed as recorded in census returns. Charles lived with his parents in Ashton-on-Mersey until he was sent to Uppingham School sometime after 1891.
At the outbreak of the Boer War, Leonard volunteered for army service and was enlisted as a Trooper in The 21st Company (Cheshire) Imperial Yeomanry. After the Boer War ended, Charles went to British Columbia and worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway returning to England and Ashton on Mersey after four years. Evidence suggests Charles followed his father into the tea trade.
On 7 September 1910 Charles married Cassie Lillian Bird of Brooklands in St John's Church and moved to 'The Moorings', Brooklands. They had no children. Lillian later remarried (to a man named Thompson, in 1918) and moved to Mossley Hill in Liverpool. She died in 1940 aged 60.
At the outbreak of WW1 Charles was awarded a commission on 8 August 1914 as a Second Lieutenant in the 7th Battalion Manchester Regiment. The following month the 7th Battalion sailed for the Middle East as part of the Manchester Brigade and after a few months’ service in Egypt and the Sudan was transferred to the Balkans, landing in Gallipoli on 6 May 1915.
On 4 June the Division in which Charles was serving launched an attack on the village of Krithia; it was during this engagement that Charles was killed; he was 34. He is buried in Twelve Tree Copse Cemetery, Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey and commemorated on our War Memorial at St. John’s.