People on board

DELAMORE, Joseph J.P.

Joseph Delamore was born on the 14th of July 1838 in Willeston, Cheshire to Daniel Delamore and Isabella Huntington. He was born into a family that had been successful farmers in the Wirral for some three hundred years, diversifying in the 19th century. Daniel was variously a Baker, a Flour Dealer, a Publican and a Farmer and from at least 1851, a Custom House Officer. Joseph was the eldest child, with two siblings identified and both he and his brother William were Bakers. Joseph married Amelia Toleman in July 1864 and they had eight children, one of whom died in infancy. They lived in the village of Lower Bebington in the Wirral, not far from Willeston.

Joseph set up a Bakery and Grocery business at 20 Bebington Road, New Ferry and all his children worked with him. In November 1917 a notice in the London Gazette gave formal notice of the ending of the partnership in the Wirral Bakery, under the name of Joseph Delamore and Sons, between father and sons Joseph and George, the business to be continued by the sons. Joseph and George were the youngest in the family.

Joseph Snr was well known and respected in the neighbourhood having been a member of the Bebington Local Board and then Urban District Council for over forty years. He was also a Justice of the Peace and an authority on all rating matters. He was connected with the Birkenhead and New Ferry Wesleyan Methodist Church for over sixty years and was apparently very strict with his family. He also kept cattle and successfully showed them at Agricultural Shows, including in Belfast at the Royal Ulster Show in May 1911. His wife Amelia died in October 1915 aged seventy-five.

It is not known why Joseph and his son George had been in Ireland in October 1918. It has been speculated that they may have been there to buy horses for their delivery wagons, as horses were then in very short supply in England because of war demands. Neither Joseph nor his son survived the sinking nor were their bodies recovered. When Joseph’s Will was probated in February 1919 it was found that he left almost £20,000.

Additional information from Margaret Peters