Albert Ernest Rayment was born at Islington in London during the year 1896, the son of a house furnisher named Albert Benjamin Rayment and his wife Florence Mary Rayment née Morris.

Albert was the second of their five children and he grew up in North London where he met and married Lilian Lawrence in late 1917 whilst he was on leave from the Army, in which he served as a Driver in the Royal Field Artillery.

On the 18th April 1918 their first child Lilian Dorothy was born and on 20th April just two years later they were blessed with a second child whom they named Gladys Eileen.

Albert was only 25 years old when, on 1st May 1921, he died as a result of bullet wounds that he had received during the First World War.  Although he lies buried in the ordinary part of Tottenham and Wood Green Cemetery in North London, he is commemorated by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission on a screen wall in the Military Section of the Cemetery.

Before his death he is said to have charged his younger brother Edward Charles Rayment with taking care of his wife and children in the event of his early demise.

Edward must indeed have taken this commitment seriously because on 18th June 1927 he and Lilian were married, following a change in the law that had previously forbidden a widow to marry her deceased husband’s brother.  This marriage produced a daughter named Kathleen Margaret who was born on 14th September 1929 and she was brought up together with Albert’s two children Lilian and Gladys as one family, their surnames all being the same.

It is very sad that, according to Lilian Elder née Rayment, (who was interviewed by the Rayment Society in 1993) no photographs of her real father Albert Ernest Rayment are known to have survived but nevertheless she and her sister were still funding the upkeep of his grave.