Claude Tongue

Bank: Coutts & Co

Place of work: London Strand office

Died: 26 October 1918

Claude Leslie Tongue was born in 1884. In March 1904 he went to work for Coutts & Co as a clerk. In 1911 he married Alice Samson, and their daughter, Marjery Eileen, was born the following year. Alice died in 1916.

In June 1917 Tongue left his job as the bank's chief In Clearer to go on military service, joining the Inns of Court London Officers Training Corps. He was later commissioned into the Worcestershire Regiment, and went to France in October 1918. Second Lieutenant Tongue died of influenza in a Red Cross Hospital in Rouen on 26 October 1918, not long after arriving in France. His six-year-old daughter Marjery later became a beneficiary of the Bank Clerks' Orphanage, which existed to help pay for the education of children of deceased bank workers.

Claude Tongue is commemorated on a bank war memorial at Coutts & Co, London 440 Strand.