Albert Edward Colenutt of Upper Ventnor was one of the Island’s first losses of the Great War, a twenty‑three‑year‑old stoker aboard HMS Aboukir, and the dearly‑loved eldest son of Alfred and Mary Colenutt of Lowther Road. Reported missing in the Isle of Wight Mercury and later confirmed lost with his ship,
“One of Ours”: The Short Life and Loss of Stoker Albert Edward Colenutt, 1891–1914
In the early autumn of 1914, as the first casualty lists of the Great War reached the Isle of Wight, the name Albert Edward Colenutt appeared among the missing. He was twenty‑three years old, a Stoker 1st Class aboard HMS Aboukir, and the eldest son of Alfred and Mary Colenutt of Upper Ventnor. He was also a nephew of Frank Colenutt, placing him firmly within the wider Wroxall–Ventnor Colenutt clan. Like many island boys, he had gone to sea in the service of King and Country. He would not come back.
The Isle of Wight Mercury first carried his name on 9 October 1914, in a brief but stark notice on page one, listing him among the missing:
“A.E. Colenutt, stoker 1st class on the Aboukir, son of Mr. and Mrs. A. Colenutt, of Upper Ventnor.”
On page four of the same issue, the paper confirmed what the family must already have feared:
“On 22nd September, lost in H.M.S. Aboukir, in the North Sea, Albert Edward Colenutt, 1st class stoker, dearly‑loved eldest son and twin brother to the second daughter of Albert and Mary Colenutt, of Upper Ventnor.”
That small phrase, “twin brother to the second daughter”, fixes him not just as a name on a list, but as one half of a pair, a boy whose life had been bound up from birth with his sister’s.
By then, the circumstances of his death were becoming known. HMS Aboukir was a Cressy‑class armoured cruiser, launched in 1901 and commissioned in 1904. On 22 September 1914, she was patrolling the North Sea with her sister ships HMS Hogue and HMS Cressy when they were sighted by the German submarine U‑9, commanded by Otto Weddigen. At about 6.20 a.m., U‑9 torpedoed Aboukir. She capsized and sank within minutes. Believing she had struck a mine, Hogue and Cressy stopped to pick up survivors; U‑9 then torpedoed both in turn. All three cruisers were lost in under an hour. Around 1,459 men died; roughly 837 survived. It was one of the first great naval shocks of the war and forced the Admiralty to rethink how such cruisers were deployed.
On the island, the loss was felt in streets and cottages rather than in strategy papers. At a meeting of the Local War Relief Committee in Ventnor, the chairman, J.N. Cater, J.P., proposed formal votes of condolence to several bereaved families, including the Colenutts of Upper Ventnor. The Mercury recorded it on 16 October 1914: a small civic gesture, but one that shows how quickly the town tried to gather its grieving households into a shared, public acknowledgement.
A week later, on 23 October 1914, Albert and Mary placed a notice of thanks:
“MR. AND MRS. ALBERT COLENUTT, of 37, Lowther Road, Upper Ventnor, desires to thank their many kind friends for sympathy expressed with them in the sad loss of their eldest son, Albert Edward, by the sinking of H.M.S. Aboukir.”
The address matters. It fixes the loss in a particular house, on a particular road, on the upper slopes of Ventnor. Behind that neat line in the paper was a front door that neighbours called at, a family that had to answer the knock, a mother and father who now had to live with the phrase “eldest son” turned into past tense.
The grief did not fade quickly. Two years later, on 22 September 1916, the Mercury carried an In Memoriam notice:
“In loving memory of Stoker Albert Edward Colenutt, lost on H.M.S. Aboukir, Sept. 22nd, 1914. – From his loving father, mother, sisters and brothers. ‘Asleep in the Deep.’”
Again, on 20 September 1918:
“In memory of Albert Edward, 1st class stoker, son of Alfred and Mary Colenutt, 37, Lowther Road, Upper Ventnor, who was drowned while serving on H.M.S. Aboukir, at the commencement of the war, Sept. 22nd, 1914. – From his Mam, Dad, Sisters and Brothers.
Not gone from memory, not gone from love,
But gone to his Father’s home above.”
Those lines place the family firmly within the emotional world of wartime Britain: a mixture of patriotism, religious consolation, and a determination that the dead should not be forgotten. They also show how long the loss remained raw. Four years into the war, with so many other names now added to the island’s rolls of honour, the Colenutts were still marking the date, still speaking his name in print.
Today, Stoker 1st Class Albert Edward Colenutt is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial, alongside the many sailors of Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy who have no grave but the sea. For the island, he stands as one of the first of its sons to be taken in the Great War; for his family, he was a twin, an eldest child, a nephew in a long Colenutt line that had its roots in Wroxall and Ventnor.
His story sits at the intersection of local and national history: an Upper Ventnor lad in a North Sea disaster that shocked the whole country; a name in the Isle of Wight Mercury that also appears on a great stone memorial at Portsmouth; a single life folded into a moment of intense patriotism, sudden technological change, and devastating loss.
He was, as the island would quietly say of such men, one of ours.