Born: March 9th1925
Died: September 14th 1940
Age at Death: 15
Killed by enemy action while on self-imposed duty at the Odeon Cinema, Kemp Town, Brighton, September 14th 1940
Frank was born in Brighton on 9 March 1925, to Frank Hugo Stuttaford, a GP, and his wife Winnifred (née Moore). He was a day boy at the College.
One Saturday afternoon he went to the Kemptown Odeon cinema, just five minutes from Brighton College, where the Cavendish House flats on St George’s Road now stand. A volunteer for the St John’s Ambulance service, which rescued people from bombed buildings and took them to hospital, he decided on his own initiative to do self-imposed duty at the pictures – perhaps, like a normal healthy schoolboy, in large part because he wanted to see the double bill of films that was showing.
The second film of the double bill, “The Ghost Comes Home”, had just started when a bomb, jettisoned by a German bomber lightening its load to escape from pursuing Spitfires, landed on the cinema. This was one of four bombs from the same plane that killed 52 people, making 14 September 1940 Brighton’s bloodiest day of the war.
Passers-by and workers from the Kemptown Brewery rushed bravely into the cinema to help, beating the rescue services to it, but Frank was already dead – the youngest casualty in this book.
After his death The Brightonian remembered him with the comment:
He threw himself heart and soul into School life, and when the war came tried, with characteristic energy to make himself available to his country.
He is buried in Brighton and Preston Cemetery.
To mark Remembrance in 2023, several members of the Brighton College community visited Brighton and Preston Cemetery, and placed flowers and poppies on Frank’s grave.