Rowland, FHJM

Private Frederick Herbert John Mayne Rowland

Born on July 22nd 1880 in Iquique, Chile, Frederick was the son of Samuel Rowland, originally from Chester, who was at the time serving as General Manager and Chief Engineer of the Chilean Nitrate Railways. He was educated for a time at Parkgate Grammar School, as well as under private tutelage in Wales, before spending three years at Victoria College, Jersey, between 1891 and 1894. By the summer of 1894 the family were resident in Streatham, and he joined the College alongside his younger brother John; Frederick was a pupil for the next two and a half years, leaving at the end of 1896. From Dulwich he went to work in the City, joining what would eventually become the Anglo-South American Bank, where he remained for almost a decade. In 1906 he left his job and emigrated to Canada, eventually finding work as a farm labourer in Deep Cove, just outside Vancouver.
In the late summer of 1914, within weeks of the declaration of war, Frederick volunteered as a member of the Canadian Army and was assigned to the 7th British Columbia Battalion. He was part of the first Canadian Contingent who travelled to England later that year and moved to the front in early 1915. Shortly afterwards, between the 22nd and 24th of April that year, he, along with many others in the Canadian Contingent, was involved in heavy fighting at St. Julien Wood, near Ypres, during which the Germans launched the first major poison gas attack on the Western Front. It was during this battle that Frederick was last seen; as a result he was declared missing in action, and later was officially regarded to have perished during those two days.