Leading Seaman Frederick Wilhelm Bernard Gill
4/2786 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve HMS Queen Mary
Killed in Action 31st May 1916 (Jutland), aged 25
Lived in Edmonton, London
Commemorated on the Chatham Memorial,UK
Burnley Express 14/6/1916 17/6/1916

HMS Queen Mary was a battlecruiser built by the British Royal Navy. She was the last battlecruiser completed before World War I being laid down in March 1911 and completed in March 1912 at a cost of £2,078491. She had a displacement of 31,486 tons fully laden with an overall length of 703 feet, a beam of 89 feet and drew 28 feet. She had a top speed of over 28 knots and was armed with 8 13.5inch guns in 4 turrets with a secondary armament of 16 4inch and 4 3 pounder antiaircraft guns and 2 torpedo tubes. As a battlecruiser she was only lightly armoured, sacrificing armour for speed compared to conventional dreadnought battleships, and this was to prove fatal to her at the battle of Jutland.
As part of the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron, she attempted to intercept a German force that bombarded the North Sea coast of England in December 1914, but was unsuccessful. She was refitting during the Battle of Dogger Bank in early 1915, but participated in the next major fleet action of the war, the Battle of Jutland in mid-1916. She was hit twice by the German battlecruiser “Derfflinger” during the "Run to the South" and exploded shortly afterwards with the loss of 1266 crew and only 9 survivors.
Her wreck was discovered in 1991 and rests partly upside-down, on sand, 60 metres (197 ft) down. Queen Mary is now designated as a “protected place” under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986