Not Gerald Abrahams

[James Pratt]

Who lived at 8 Ingledene Road, Calderstones, Liverpool 18 ?
We are spooling back about seventy years here ..
James

[John Townsend]

Do you mean Gordon Crown? (It would be more than 70 years, as he died in 1947).

[Leonard Barden]

My dear friend Gordon Crown, who I visited at that address the day before he died, taking a day's leave from RAF Padgate. Gordon was in bed with what his GP had diagnosed as a stomach ache, but we spent several hours talking chess and playing blitz. That night it turned out that the GP had failed to diagnose appendicitis, which due to Gordon's diabetes turned into peritonitis and death.

I didn't know this for several weeks. When I wrote to his mother, she sent me a photo of
him making the winning move Rab6 against Kotov and told me that "this was his happiest moment", adding that they had lost another son in infancy so that "Gordon was all we had".

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

Gordon's younger brother, Rodney Stuart Crown, was born and died in 1938. However in the 1939 register there is a fourth person in the Crown household, in addition to Gordon and his parents, whose details are still redacted as he or she might still be alive. I wonder who that was?

1939_register_8_Ingledene_Road.png

[John Townsend]

Jon asks: "I wonder who that was? "

That is not readily obvious. I suggest having a peep at the will of Hilda Mabel Crown (Gordon's mother, maiden name Sharrott), who died in 1975. She still lived at that same address.

The mystery person would need to have been fairly young in 1939 if he/she is still alive. That seems to (almost) rule out a lodger. Possibilities include a child of a brother or sister of either Hilda or Gordon's father, James Crown. It's a bit early for an evacuee.

[John Saunders]

A real Jim Plaskett of a coincidence, this: only a day before reading this thread I had been clearing out some old papers and came across the following...

1947-10-19-crown-morry-letter.jpg

... which I immediately recognised as being from Gordon Crown to Ritson Morry, written about a month before he (GC) died. I don't have a continuation to this single page and the reverse is blank. However, there were quite a number of other larger sheets with his annotations of games from the 1947 GB v USSR match and the GB v Australia radio match. I guess I need to find a home for this material: I suppose the ECF Library would be the logical place.