Fred Clement's signature

Fred Clement was born in Deseronto on March 3rd, 1892, the son of George Edmund Clement, a builder and member of Deseronto Town Council, and his wife, Mary Jane (née Porter). He was a student in Toronto when he signed up there on this day in 1915.

Clement had some experience with the military before he signed up: his attestation paper notes that he was in the Officer Training Corps and that he had served in the 9th Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery in 1907 and 1911. He was five feet 11½ inches tall, with a fair complexion, grey eyes and brown hair. He served in the Canadian Army Medical Corps, then obtained a commission as a lieutenant in Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) in May 1915. He was appointed as a captain in the Canadian Army Medical Corps on July 15th, 1918.

Clement’s service record shows that he left Canada on the SS Northland in April 1915. He served in France with the RAMC from July 1915 until July 1918, then was transferred back to Canada. There is a mention of his suffering malaria in East Africa in 1917 in his records.

After the war, when he was still working as an army doctor, Fred married Marion Lois Locke, a nurse from Weston, in Brampton, Ontario on June 25th, 1919. He was demobilized on August 31st, 1920. In the 1921 census we find the Clements at 440 Shaw Street, Toronto, with their ten-month-old daughter Jean and an English maid called Sable. In 1930 the family were at 2417 Middlesex Road [now Middlesex Drive], Toledo, Ohio, and had another child, [Frederick] Locke, who was five years old and had been born in Ohio.

Fred Clement died on March 5th, 1979 in Naples, Florida at the age of 87.