People on board

ATTWOOLL, Jennins

Jennins Attwooll was born on the 3rd of January 1862 in Portland, Weymouth, Dorset. He and his twin brother John were the eldest of the six children of Jennins Attwooll and Jane Comben who had married the previous year. Two more children, Bessie and Charles, were born in Weymouth before Jennins, a Customs Officer, was promoted to the post of Examining Officer in Dublin in September 1867. They lived at 9 Bay View Avenue, North Strand where two more children, Robert and Jane, were born. The family, all of the Methodist faith, later moved to 243 Clonliffe Road. Jennins Attwooll Snr. died in Dublin in 1881, aged forty-five.

All six Attwooll siblings married in Dublin and had families there. Jennins Jnr. married Edith Jane Earls on the 23rd of March 1895 in Clonliffe Methodist Church and their first child, Mildred, was born in 1896.

The family lived in Norman Terrace, Jones’s Road, a first-class house with ten rooms. By 1911 they had ten children, four boys and six girls. Two of the sons served in the army. Jennins Attwooll first began work in the Post Office in 1879 and gave his occupation in both censuses as ‘Sorting Clerk and Telegraphist’. By 1918 he had completed thirty-nine years of service.

Aged fifty-six, he was one of the older Post Office workers on the mailboat shift on the 10th of October 1918. He would have been well used to the routine of sorting the post in the compartment below decks, the compartment that received a direct hit from the first torpedo that hit RMS Leinster. He did not survive the sinking, nor was his body recovered but he is remembered on the family grave in Mount Jerome cemetery.

His name is also on the memorials in the G.P.O. in Dublin and in Dun Laoghaire Post Office.