People on board

BOWERS, Joseph

Joseph Bowers was born in 1874 in Middlesbrough, Yorkshire to Robert Bowers and Rebecca Chapman. He was the sixth of their ten children. Both Robert and Rebecca were born and married in Suffolk and their first child was born there before they moved to Middlesbrough. Robert was a General Labourer as were some of his sons, though the eldest was a ‘Blacksmith Striker’ and another was an ‘Iron Moulder’. Joseph followed a different path being a ‘Furniture Dealer’s Assistant’ in 1891, becoming Manager in 1911. Robert Bowers died in 1892 aged fifty-one.

Joseph was thirty-seven and single in 1911, at home in James Street, Ormesby, Middlesbrough with his widowed mother and four siblings in their twenties and thirties, all single. He enlisted in the Yorkshire Hussars Yeomanry and in October 1918 was with the 2/1st Brigade which had moved to Ireland in April 1918. This was a training and draft-supply brigade.

Presumably returning home on leave, or possibly en route to the front, Joseph Bowers travelled on RMS Leinster on the 10th of October. He did not survive the sinking but his body was recovered and he was buried in Grangegorman Military Cemetery in Dublin. His name is recorded on the Middlesbrough War Memorial.