Howards and Sons Memorial Tablet

Howards and Sons Memorial Tablet. Photo by Pat O'Mara.
Address 
Barkingside Cemetery
Longwood Gardens
Ilford
RDB
IG5 0ET

A stone tablet at Barkingside Cemetery commemorates 22 employees of Howards and Sons Ltd., who died during the First World War.

Howards and Sons, established in 1898, was known as the ‘City of Chemicals’. Its 30 acre site just off Ilford Lane included workshops, warehouses, laboratories, and a huge chimney which became a local landmark.

Howards manufactured a wide range of chemicals that were vital to the war effort. The most important products they made were medicines, including ether (used as an anaesthetic), aspirin (a pain-killer) and quinine which was developed as a cure for malaria and taken by troops when serving in the Middle-East and India. So important was quinine that the government requisitioned all supplies.

Howards’ Managing Director became the Chairman of the Association of Quinine Manufacturers in Allied Countries and the company entered into an agreement with the Indian government in 1918 to ensure future supplies of cinchona bark, from which quinine was made. The company finally closed in 1980 and the site redeveloped for housing.

The memorial was previously fixed to the west wall of the Ilford Cemetery Chapel in Buckingham Road but when the chapel was demolished in 2011, it was re-sited in Barkingside Cemetery.

Another stone tablet, positioned above, is dedicated to those of the company who lost their lives in the Second World War.

Find out more...

Find out more about some of the individuals featured on this memorial by selecting from one of the names below.

To view a complete list of every individual commemorated on this memorial, please click on the memorial inscription link above.

Biography available.

Name Regiment Year of death
Edward Charles Hamshire Essex Regiment 1916
Edward Clarence Page London Regiment (Kensington's) formerley London Regiment (Artists' Rifles) 1917
F C Eckworth Royal Field Artillery 1915
Herbert Frederick Beasley East Kent Regiment (The Buffs) 1917
William Stephen Myers Essex Regiment 1917