One of the eight children of the Reverend Francis Allfree, Vicar of St. Nicholas- at- Wade with Sarre, Geoffrey Allfree was born in the parish in January 1889. He was privately educated at Alexander House College, a boarding school on the High Street in Broadstairs. After leaving school Allfree served an apprenticeship as a deck officer in the merchant navy and made the return journey to Australia and back at least once, as the record of his arrival at Sidney, New South Wales in July 1908 on the cargo ship the Waipara shows. In 1910, aged 21, Allfree was awarded his Master’s Mate Certificate by the Board of Trade, which qualified him to act as a mate on foreign going steamships.
Although a trained mariner Allfree’s career had changed direction by the following year and he described himself as a painter (artist), living on his own means on the census of 1911, whilst staying at Church Cottages, Stopham in Sussex. When war broke out, he volunteered in October 1914 and was commissioned a Sub-Lieutenant in the R.N.V.R. He served initially in the Royal Naval Division, despite its name an infantry division formed of surplus to requirement reservists and volunteers from the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. Before joining the Naval Division Allfree married Alice Maud Mary Godwin, in Pimlico, on 17th October 1914.
Shipped to Egypt en route for the Gallipoli landings in 1915 and by then promoted to Lieutenant; one of Allfree’s brother officers in the Royal Naval Division was the famous poet Rupert Brooke, who died before reaching Gallipoli in April 1915 of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite on the Greek island of Skyros. By 1916 and the Gallipoli campaign over, Allfree had been transferred to sea-service and was commanding His Majesty’s Motor Launch 286 the following summer. By then he was a father, his eldest daughter Stephanie having being born in 1917. His Majesty’s Motor Launch 286 was a U.S. built; petrol engined motorboat, 86’ long, armed with a 3-pounder gun and depth charges and had a ship’s compliment of eight.
The following year, in September 1918, Allfree lost his life whilst in command of HMML 247; an identical, New Jersey built craft. A four-boat flotilla of Motor Launches had entered St Ives Bay for shelter during a strong southerly gale, which rapidly escalated to hurricane force winds. In the eye of the storm, the Motor Launches started engines and tried desperately to work their way into deeper water. Allfree’s launch developed engine trouble, one mile off Clodgy Point, and started to drift helplessly towards Oar Rock. The St. Ives’ lifeboat raced to reach the stricken ship, but arrived minutes too late by which time the launch had blown up on impact with the rock, presumably as its depth charges detonated. All the crew, bar one survivor, were killed in the explosion or subsequently drowned.
At the time of Geoffrey Allfree’s death his wife, who was pregnant with their second child, was the sole beneficiary in his will. His estate was comprised of effects to the value of £253-14-3d. Allfree’s body was never recovered and he is commemorated on both the Portsmouth Naval Memorial and the Birchington and Acol War Memorial in Kent. Alice Allfree, never remarried, lost her youngest child Rosemary in 1929, aged ten, and finally passed away in Paddington in 1969. Allfree’s eldest daughter inherited her father’s artistic flair and became a well-known artist, illustrator and writer in her own right, both in England and the USA. Best remembered as Stephanie Godwin, she died in Woodstock, New York in 2006, having lived in America since 1948.
Geoffrey Allfree left an artistic legacy of his own behind him; the aspirant artist went to war with a sketchbook always to hand and later turned many of his sketches into what are now extremely collectable paintings. Most of his works were of events he had participated in and have a suitably naval content. His talent was officially recognised by the Royal Navy, who in January 1918 announced that he was to be their official painter; not a permanent position but an occasional commission to produce paintings as requested. His ‘The Evacuation of Sulva Bay’, an evocative depiction of the last warship sailing away from Gallipoli, hangs in the National Library of New Zealand and other examples of his work can be seen at the Imperial War Museum in London. Perhaps one of his more unwittingly prophetic paintings, ‘Motor Launches’, depicts two of the class of motorboats he would loose his life in struggling against monstrous waves, under a grey, foreboding sky.
The lives of both Geoffrey Allfree, and his father, the Reverend Francis Allfree who died in 1904, are remembered on separate memorial plaques in St. Nicholas Church, St. Nicholas- at- Wade in Kent.
world war one: the untold stories 