Cecil Ernest Wells Charrington was born on 31 March 1885, the only son of Ernest Charrington (1853–1894) and his wife Joanna Margaret, younger daughter of the portrait painter Henry Tanworth Wells (1828–1903).
Canon Frederick Gosnal Jameson Page, master of Lord Leycester Hospital; they had one son and two daughters.
[2] His career was interrupted by the First World War, when he served with the South Staffordshire Regiment in France and Belgium, was wounded and received the Military Cross (1918).
He was Master of the Brewers' Company in 1930 and Chairman of the Brewers' Society three years year; he joined the Institute of Brewing in 1909, became a Council member in 1933, was twice its President, in 1937 and 1944 (in the former term, he applied for a grant of arms for the Institute, and paid the costs himself), and served as a Trustee from 1941 to 1950, when he was involved in the establishment of the Brewing Industry Research Foundation and helped to find new offices for the Institute.
In work, he was described in his obituary as "tireless ... a stimulating and staunch friend"; although in person he was "a little shy ... he was in all the vicissitudes of life a man of outstanding courage".