Frederick Slade lived for 82 years, and has his memorial in All Saints Church, Aston Upthorpe, despite living only a short number of those many years in the village.  Fred’s only appearance in the Parish Records, after his baptism, comes in the 1841 Census.  Thereafter he disappears from view.  Perhaps he spent part of his life down in Gloucester: certainly the memorial tablet lists him as from Beckford, Gloucester.  Fred was the second surviving son of Henry and Charlotte (William had died after a year).  According to Mrs Fuller, however, Fred pursued a career on the railways.

Although always in the background, Fred receives amongst the highest number of entries in the letters.  Through the six years of the letters, we watch him grow from a teenager to a young adult.  Fred acts as his father’s right hand man on the farm, but he operates as a general factotum.

We see him going sparrowing and hare coursing with his brother and Wellingham Fuller.  He likes to shoot and makes his own bullets.  He joins the gypsy parties, goes swimming in the heat, takes his dog walking most evenings and looks forward to playing cricket with the Fullers on summer evenings.  Fred keeps pigeons, has a King Charles spaniel called Fanny.  Forsayth and Fred dig to improve the garden.  They go and review the new threshing machine together.  They play dominoes together. Henry Senior takes him to help at the stock fairs.  Always helpful, he puts out fires and assists Mr Dawson with his steam driven horseless carriage. He drives his sister Anne over to Benson, where she catches the coach that takes her back to school in Hammersmith.  He walks his brother Ben over to the train station so that he can catch the train to Mr Havel’s school in Reading.  He drives Aunt Amelia Thorpe over to Stadhampton.  Fred is the broad back that helps the Workmans to move across country to Cricklade and he repeats the process when they move down to Reading.  Later he has the trust to go down to London and settle his brother’s bills with Mr Gillott.  Fred likes to be playful and teases George Finch only to get teased in return about Jane Fuller’s apparent interest in him.  He plays a trick on his mother by pretending that letters from abroad have not come.  Horseplay features, sometimes to his detriment: he turns his knee over when fooling with the builders and suffers a nasty fall when out hunting hares.  As he gets older, he takes an interest in phonography, helping the society of that name to spread its wings.  He and a group put together participatory publications using phonography, sending them around in the post.

After constant bullying by his mother, Fred eventually writes a letter to his brother.  We only have the second one preserved, written some two years after Henry had left.  To an extent we learn from the letter itself that Fred is no great correspondent.  It bears a close similarity to the letter written early on in the sequence by Wellingham Fuller.  That letter concentrates mostly on killing game of various descriptions, harvest prices and, perhaps amazingly, news of the outside world.  Fred’s letter does not stretch that far.  The first part of it accounts in remorseless detail for all the birds killed during the shooting season of 1841.  Having got that off his chest, Fred then continues to a lower level of detail about the railway.  Here he reveals himself as candidate for one of the earliest train anoraks.  We hear about the line developments, several accidents, and then gives us more than sixty names of engines he has seen himself.  With the appetite of an addict he reports that the engines total almost one hundred in number.  We must assume that he continued to keep his collection of trains spotted all the way up to the magic hundred figure.  Fred finds himself besotted by the railway.  He goes to Oxford for the opening of the line running from there to Didcot.  He even buys a chain and measures the distance from the village to Moulsford station.  His father and he set their watches by the trains, according to Charlotte, thereby demonstrating how well they know the timetable.  Perhaps his career on the railways allowed him to pursue the fascination of his hobby and a livelihood at the same time.

Dramatis Personae; TOP