People on board

ADSHEAD, Arthur

Arthur Adshead was born in Stockport, Cheshire on the 31st of March 1857 to William Adshead and Sarah Potts. At the time of his marriage in 1856 William Adshead was a Weaver but by the 1861 census he was a Grocer and Provisions Merchant and later he was also a Sub-Postmaster. Arthur and his twin Emily were followed by two more daughters, Annis and Ada. The family lived at the Hazel Grove Post Office in Bramhall, Stockport where Sarah died in 1875. She was buried in the Wesleyan Methodist Burial Ground in Hazel Grove.

In 1881 Arthur was a Boarder in Barrow in Furness working as a ‘Shipowner’s Correspondant’, possibly already for the firm of James Little & Co. a Steamship and Railway Company. His father William remarried in 1889 to Kate Davies and in the 1891 census Arthur, then thirty-four and single, was living with them in Bramhall. His occupation was a Railway Clerk, which suggests that he had joined the Midland Railway Company by then.
In 1895 Arthur Adshead married Edith Scowcroft, daughter of a Grocer, in Bolton, Lancashire and a daughter, Evelyn Elizabeth, was born the following year. In the 1901 census they were living in Turton, between Blackburn and Bolton. Arthur’s occupation was then ‘Ship Owners Travelling Agent’.

The Midland Railway Company of England had purchased a Northern Ireland Railway Company in 1903 in order to gain access to Irish traffic. Arthur Adshead was located in Belfast for several years and then moved to Dublin about 1910. The family were at Villiers Road in Rathgar in the 1911 census when his occupation was given as ‘Railway Agent’. The family were members of the congregation of the Brighton Road Methodist Church. Edith’s father, Walter Scowcroft, then a widower, died at their home in Rathgar in 1914.

On the 10th of October 1918 Arthur Adshead travelled to England on RMS Leinster to attend a Midland Railway Company meeting in Derby. He is recorded as having been on deck and commenting to a crewman on the sighting of RMS Ulster in the distance. He did not survive the sinking but his body was recovered. He was mentioned in several newspaper reports, both Irish and English, and described as being well known in “railway circles”, and as being the ‘General Traffic Agent’ for the Midland Railway. The Belfast Telegraph reported that his body was being returned to Bolton for burial, but a record has not yet been found.

His will was probated in London in November 1918 and in Dublin the following April, by which time his widow Edith and her daughter had returned to Bolton. Evelyn married there in 1920 and Edith lived there until 1941.