FRANCES JOYCE CHAPMAN (1918-1944)

Frances Joyce Chapman died in Southampton in 1944 aged 26. It is understood that Joyce, as she was known, died of pneumonia and had worked for the NAAFI organisation probably at a munitions factory in Southampton but no documentary evidence has been found.

Frances Joyce Chapman, known as Joyce, was born on 1 February 1918. She was the daughter of Samuel George Chapman (born 1884) and Rosalie Hellen (nee Johns, born 1885, married 1908).

Her parents lived in Treneglos in 1911 and they had two children born there - a daughter Elizabeth Anne born in 1909 and a son born in 1910 who was named after his father but only survived three months and is buried at Treneglos. Elizabeth married in the summer of 1944 to Reginald T Pethick. Joyce had another elder sister, Edith, who was born in 1916 and a younger brother Jimmy (Harold James) who was born in 1928. The family moved to Newhay Hill Cottage in the 1930s and remained there for some years.

In the 1939 register, however, Joyce was living at The School House in North Hill with the family of Owen Mitchell, a stone mason. Joyce provided some sort of domestic assistance to Owen's wife, Beatrice.

Joyce is not recorded on the Commonwealth Grave War Commission's database which in addition to military casualties includes civilian deaths where the cause of death was directly attributed to the war or where the deceased contributed materially to the war effort. Joyce knew Doreen Sandercock well and both she and Doreen were amongst the many local young women who worked for the war effort far from home.

Joyce is commemorated on the Altarnun War Memorial and on the Roll of Honour in St Torney's Church in North Hill.

We are grateful to Peter Allen of the Altarnun Local History Society who has provided most of this biography of Joyce.