People on board

DONOHOE Edward

Edward Donohoe was born in 1876 in Manchester to Edward Thomas Donohoe and Mary Kelly. Edward had been born in Manchester while Mary came from Gort in County Galway. Edward Jnr was the second of their ten children, only five of whom were alive in 1911. Edward Snr was a ‘Lath Maker’ and all three of his surviving sons were in the wood working trade. The family lived in the Oldham area until Edward died in the 1890s and then they moved to Prestwich.

In the 1891 census Edward Jnr, aged fifteen, gave his occupation as ‘Machine Joiner Apprentice’. He married Ada Woods in 1899 and their first child, also named Edward, was born in early 1901. In the census of that year Edward described himself as ‘Woodworking Machinist for Joiners’. By 1911, living in Ramsay Street in Manchester and with two more children, Elsie and Harold, he gave his occupation as ‘Sawyer and Wood Machinist’. Another child, Bernard, had been born in 1906 but died in 1909.

The Manchester Evening News of the 16th of October 1918 carried a notice from the Manchester branch of the Amalgamated Society of Woodcutting Machinists in memory of Edward Donohoe, their General Organiser. It stated that he had gone down with the Leinster “when returning from Trade Union activities in Ireland”. The Western Times on the 18th described how he was well known in Devon in connection with that society.

Edward’s body was recovered from the sea and brought to the City Morgue. Corrigan Undertakers in Dublin arranged for his body to be returned to Manchester where he was buried in Moston Cemetery. His younger brother Joseph, who had fought in the war as a Gunner with the Royal Garrison Artillery died in early December 1918 of bronchial pneumonia. Ada Donohoe died in Manchester in 1969, aged over one hundred.