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Oxford Inscriptions: Irene Frude, Walton Street

From 1935 to 1969 Mrs Irene Frude ran a university lodging house at 130 Walton Street where she cooked memorable breakfasts for Keble students.

In 1968 outline planning application was granted to the University for a major new development at 25 Wellington Square, 32–42 Little Clarendon Street, and 128–150 Walton Street (68/19991/A_H), and Mrs Frude had to move as her house was one of those scheduled to be demolished. In the event, most of the Walton Street houses, survived, and only the first four houses, Nos. 128–131, were lost. A full planning application for a smaller scheme was approved in January 1973 (72/26688/A_H).

Alumni of Keble College arranged for a memorial to Mrs Frude to be attached to the new building on the site of her house, and the above cast-iron plaque was fixed to the breeze-block wall of an alleyway off the south side of Little Clarendon Street. It shows damage caused by a wheelie-bin fire in c.2008.

Around 2023 this damaged plaque was replaced by the new one below, which is in a new and more prominent position on the front of 132 Walton Street. It has exactly the same inscription as the original, but with these additional lines at the end:

POST CONFLAGRATIONEM INOPINATAM
HOC DENUO ANNO MMXXII FAC. CUR. EIDEM ALUMNI

[After an unexpected fire, in the year 2022 the same alumni arranged once again for the making of this]

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Mrs Frude

Mrs Irene Frude was born on 27 February 1899. When she married she was Irene Langrish, but no child appears to have been registered with that name in England or Wales. (It is of course possible that she was a young widow of 35 when she became Mrs Frude, but no marriage between a woman called Irene to a Mr Langrish can be found either.)

In 1934 in the Tetbury registration district of Gloucestershire (registered third quarter) Irene Langrish married Albert Edward Frude.

Albert Edward Frude is much easier to trace: he was born at Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire on 14 January 1875 and in 1891 at the age of 16 was living with his family in Tring and working as a groom. He was employed as a coachman when on 23 September 1903 at Shipton Moyne, Gloucestershire he married his first wife Alice Frances Wicks: they do not appear to have had any children. Alice died at Lower Hill Lodge, Wick, Pershore at the age of 48 on 9 August 1931.

The Frudes appear to have moved to Oxford in the mid-1930s. Up until 1935 Kelly's Directory listed a man called Gerald Harris running a university lodging house at 130 Walton Street, but from 1936 it was listed as a university lodging house licensed in the name of Irene's husband, Albert E. Frude.

The 1939 register shows just Irene and Albert (described as a retired stud groom) living at 130 Walton Street. Albert Frude died there at the age of 66 on 16 April 1941 and was buried at Wolvercote Cemetery three days later.

Soon after his death Mrs Frude started to take in students again, and from 1943 to 1968 Kelly's Directory (in its Commercial section) lists Mrs A. E. Frude thus: “Frude A. E. (Mrs.), university lodging ho 130 Walton Street”.

Mrs Frude seems to have remained in Oxford after 1968 and died there in 1977. She does not appear to have been buried with her husband, and Michael Clibbon (49) was buried in his grave in 1971 and Gwen Muriel Clibbon (79) in 2000.

• See also Lugubelinus, “Alma mater” for more information about this plaque

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The building that replaced 130 & 131 Walton Street

Near the end of 2024 a major proposal was unveiled to replace the massive building (above) on Wellington Square and the corner of Walton Street and Little Clarendon Street on which the earlier plaque has been placed:

• Oxford University Development (OUD), the partnership between Oxford University and Legal and General:
  Wellington Square redevelopment
• Planning application 25/03242/FUL