I'll have a look in the church at Chester le Street next time I'm in town - there is a memorial in there with Fred's name on it apparently.
Drifting the thread....it must be a shock to people, in a way, if one is approached out of the blue with this sort of thing, this sort of news and link to the past. I am not sure if I would even welcome it. I've often wondered how I would react. We lost an uncle in WW2 killed by friendly shell fire of which we never knew anything and my Father spoke little, and we also think we lost two boy sailors (cousins) in the RN in some sort of almighty RN battleship catastrophe. But it wasn't really remembered much. Not that we didn't care-it was just the war.
Stoic working class British families were a different breed altogether in and either side of WW2-these terrible things seem to have been accepted as just the way it was.