People on board

DALY, Peter Paul

Peter Paul Daly was born on the 30th June 1875 in Kilteely, Co. Limerick. His father, Timothy, was a ’Shopkeeper’ and his mother, Anne Kinkead, was a National School Teacher. Peter Paul was the second of thirteen children, only seven of whom were alive in 1911. He was listed in the 1901 census with his parents and two sisters in Kilteely, although his occupation was ‘Clerk G.P.O.’  When he died in 1918, he had completed twenty-one years’ service with the Post Office, so he would have started there in 1897.

He married Anne Mary McCraith from Co. Tipperary in July 1910 in the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, both giving Upper Gardiner St. as their addresses.

In the 1911 census they were living at 23 Richmond Road, Fairview and Anne was calling herself Annabella. In July 1911 their first child Paul Anthony Benjamin was born at Richmond Road. Two more children would be born later.

In September 1915 Peter Paul Daly was travelling to Kingstown Pier on the train, presumably while on duty to sort the mail on the boat to Holyhead. Near Blackrock the door of the train flew open and, in attempting to close it, one of his fingers was chopped off. He sued the Midland and Great Western Railway Company for damages and the case came to court in January 1918. No report of a decision has been found.

On the 10th October Peter Paul Daly was on the train to Kingstown again with his fellow Post Office workers. As RMS Leinster sailed towards Holyhead the men in their special compartment were sorting the mail, as they did on a regular basis. When the torpedo hit the ship, it destroyed the area where they were working and only three managed to reach the deck, and of those, only one survived. Peter Paul Daly did not survive, nor was his body ever recovered.

There are memorial plaques to the twenty-one brave men who lost their lives that day, in the General Post Office in Dublin and in the Post Office in Dun Laoghaire.