Sydney John Chandler was born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire on Thursday, 2nd June 1892 and baptised in Holy Trinity Church in the town on Sunday, 14th August in the same year. He was the second child and first son born to George Chandler and Jane Clingan. Sydney had two siblings, an older sister Dorothy Ada and a younger brother Victor George Clingan. Victor also saw action in the Great War as a sailor in the Royal Navy where he served from 1913 until 1926.

Sydney’s father George was a Police Constable with Wiltshire Constabulary and it was this service that would eventually bring the family to Hemel Hempstead. In 1901 when Sydney was nine years old, the family were living at the Old Police House in the small village of Kington St Michael just north of Chippenham in Wiltshire.

Both Sydney and his older sister Dorothy had started Kington St. Michael Church of England school on the 20th October 1898 shortly after coming to the village. They both left on the 5th May 1902 when their father was transferred to the Hertfordshire Constabulary and the family moved to Hemel Hempstead. However, misfortune followed in 1909 when Sydney’s father George was forced to retire from the Police due to an illness which resulted in his paralysis.

By 1911, nineteen-year-old Sydney was working as a Domestic Gardener at Westbury Manor Gardens, Brackley in Buckinghamshire. This was the home of Sir Samuel Scott 6th Baronet and a retired soldier, who for twenty years was the Conservative MP for Marylebone West and the Assistant Private Secretary to the Earl of Derby, Secretary of War in 1916. George was one of five full time gardeners working at the Manor, but it appears that he moved north to Ashington, Northumberland at sometime before the outbreak of war.

His father George died in 1913 aged fifty, the first tragedy that befell the family. This was followed in five short years by Sydney’s death in 1915 and the deaths of his mother Jane and sister Dorothy as a result of ‘Spanish Flu’ in December 1918. It is estimated that as many as 100 million people succumbed to the epidemic (5% of the World’s population) whilst approximately 16 million people died in the Great War. Victor Chandler was the only family member left alive after 1918.

On the outbreak of war Sydney joined the Northumberland Fusiliers, enlisting with the 8th (Service) Battalion in Sheffield, Yorkshire. The 8th Battalion had been raised in Newcastle in August 1914 as part of Kitchener’s New Army and Sydney joined his comrades at Belton Park Grantham for initial training. In April 1915 he moved with the unit to join the new 11th (Northern) Division at Witley north of Derby for final training.

Orders to mobilise arrived on 30th June 1915 and two days later Sydney sailed with the Battalion, as part of the 34th Infantry Brigade, from Liverpool aboard the “SS Aquitania” bound for Murdos on the Gallipoli peninsula. During the voyage the ship was attacked by enemy submarines but fortunately the torpedoes missed their target and the Battalion arrived safely at Murdos on the 10th July.

By early August the Battalion had moved to Kephalos Camp on Imbros just off the Turkish coast before taking part in the landing at Suvla Bay on the 6th August. This was the first action that Sydney and his comrades experienced. Suvla Bay was an amphibious landing made on the Aegean coast of the Gallipoli peninsula and part of the August Offensive, the final British attempt to break the deadlock in the Battle of Gallipoli.

Despite facing only light opposition, the landing at Suvla was mismanaged from the outset and quickly reached the same stalemate conditions that prevailed on the Anzac and Helles fronts. On the 15th August, after a week of indecision and inactivity, the British commander at Suvla, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford was dismissed. His performance in command is often considered one of the most incompetent feats of generalship of the First World War.

By the 19th August the 8th Northumberlands were ordered to attack an entrenched Turkish position. Despite advancing some 700 yards and almost reaching the enemy trenches, it failed to capture the position owing to heavy machine gun, rifle and shrapnel fire. The Battalion retired having lost its 2nd C.O., eight officers wounded or missing and "other ranks: 23 killed, 141 wounded, 88 missing and 2 wounded missing"

Sydney was one of the twenty-four men killed on Thursday, 19th August 1915.

He is Remembered with Honour on the Helles Memorial, Turkey on Panel 33.

Sydney was 23 years old when he died.

He was eligible for the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal and the Allied Victory Medal.