People on board

CALLINGHAM, Loris Muriel Natalie (née Crawford)

Loris Crawford was born about 1888 to Frank Fairbairn Crawford and Frances Marland Hill, but no birth certificate has been found, so her place of birth remains unknown. Frank Fairbairn Crawford was in the Royal Artillery when he married Marianne Robinson in 1879 in Kent, but she died five months later at the age of twenty-three. He remarried in County Longford in 1882 to Frances Marland Hill, daughter of a local magistrate. A son, Ivo Fairbairn Crawford, was born in Longford in 1883, when he was a Major in the Veterinary Service. He served in Bechuanaland and Zululand as well as in India, so it has to be assumed that Loris was born during one of these postings. Frank was a noted cricket player in India and Africa and had represented Kent in the early 1870s. Serving in the Boer War, he died of dysentery at Pietermaritzberg in January 1900 at the age of forty-nine.

Back in England Ivo became a middle-distance runner, competing in the 1908 London Olympics. In April 1912 Loris married Roland Robert Callingham, a Chartered Accountant, and their address in 1918 was Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. There appears not to have been any children of this marriage. During the war her mother, Frances Maria Crawford, was listed on the Red Cross Register of Overseas Volunteers as a V.A.D. nurse (Voluntary Aid Detachment). She was living in Bexhill-on-Sea in 1918.

It is not known why Loris was on RMS Leinster on 10 October 1918; possibly she had been visiting some of her Irish relatives. She did not survive the sinking and a newspaper notice on 26 October described her as “Missing, believed drowned”. Roland Callingham remarried in 1920 and her mother Frances lived until 1950.