People on board

De PURY, Rose Mary Ann

Rose Mary Ann de Pury was born in 1857 in London to Henry Albert de Puy and Caroline Wiggins. Henry was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland and came to England in the 1840s. He married his first wife in 1848 but when she died in 1852 he married Caroline Wiggins in the same year. On that marriage certificate he gave his occupation as ‘Merchant’, but in the 1861 census he was a ‘Language Interpreter’. Rose was the eldest of six children, two daughters and four sons.

In the 1891 census Rose, giving an age of twenty, but actually thirty-three, was a ‘Governess’ in Hampshire. Her mother died in 1898 and her father in early 1901. In the census of that year she was living with her sister Louisa and brother David in Sutton, Surrey. He was a ’Railway Clerk’ and Louisa was a ‘Governess’ but Rose gave no occupation. In the 1911 census she was again employed as a ‘Governess’, this time in Dorchester and this time giving the age of forty-three, when she was actually fifty-four.

It is not known when Rose de Pury became governess to the two Blackburne children, Audrey aged eleven and Peter aged seven. However, on the 10th October 1918, at the age of sixty-one, she accompanied the family on RMS Leinster as they travelled to Cambridge. All were thrown into the water when the torpedo struck the ship and only Bee Blackburne survived. The bodies of Charles Blackburne and his son Peter were recovered and buried in Dublin, but those of Audrey and Rose de Pury were never found.