▶Date of birth:  4Q 1866       Place of birth: Stroud, Gloucestershire

▶Father:  John Cottrell Strudwick     Mother: Catharine Esther Knight

▶Spouse(s): Sarah Annie Raynor    Date(s) of marriage: 7 November 1893  Place(s) of marriage: Wollaton, Nottinghamshire 

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Anglican)

▶Lifestory: Eldest son of clothier John and Catharine Strudwick, of Stratford Park, Stroud. Charles was brought up in Stroud and at the time of the 1881 census lived with his family at Ryde in Hampshire. Ten years later, in 1891 and aged twenty-four, he lodged in Morton, Lincolnshire as a “Theological Student”. He obtained his Licentiate in Theology at University College, Durham; he was ordained Deacon in 1893, and Priest (both Southwell) in 1895. In 1893 he married Sarah Annie, only daughter of John Raynor Esq., of Wollaton, Nottinghamshire; they had six children.

In the same year he was licensed Curate of Blythe, in Nottinghamshire, and then in 1894 became Curate of St Mary, Ilkeston, Derbyshire until 1896, when he became Priest-in-Charge of Ilkeston’s St John the Divine for a year. In 1897 he was presented with the vicarage of France Lynch, Stroud, in Gloucestershire, where he remained until appointed Curate of All Saints, Cheltenham in 1901. Charles lived from 1901 until 1903 with his wife, two daughters and a son at 2 Segrave Place (now 3 Pittville Lawn), Pittville. He was for several years a missioner of the Diocese of Gloucester, and was a popular preacher, often occupying pulpits for colleagues in different parts of the district. In 1903 he moved as Curate to St Augustine, Kilburn, and then, again as Curate, in 1905 to the Rectory of Thorpe-Malzor, Kettering, Northamptonshire. By 1909 he was using Hanmer-Strudwick as his surname, and did so until the end of his life. In 1912 he also accepted the living as Vicar of Whetstone, near Leicester.

He was recorded as spending two nights in a haunted house in 1913, and each night felt the bedclothes torn roughly off his bed, which previous occupants had previously experienced (there was no further trouble from the ghost after an exorcism was performed). In 1926 he accepted the living as Rector of Glooston and Vicar of Slawston-with-Cranoe, near Market Harborough in Leicestershire; in this year, after the death of his wife one year earlier, he married his former housekeeper, Miss Nora French (she had been in his employ since the age of thirteen, and for over thirty years).

Strudwick lived at Slawston until at least the late 1940s, and died on 13 January 1954, at the age of eighty-seven, when he lived at West End Vicarage, Southampton. His effects at death amounted to just over £1,450.

▶Moved to Pittville from: France Lynch, Gloucestershire       Moved from Pittville to: Kilburn, London

▶Date of death: 13 January 1954       Place of death: Southampton, Hampshire

▶Date of burial:         Place of burial:

▶Notes:        ID: 564

Contributor(s):  John Simpson/Alan Munden