People on board

EADE, Arthur

Arthur Eade was born in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, on the 2nd of August 1893 to Joseph Eade and Mary Breakspeare. He was the eighth of their nine children, six of whom were alive in 1911. When Joseph and Mary married in 1879 he was a Gunner in the Royal Artillery at Woolwich but in 1891 they were living in Waltham and he was a General Labourer. However by 1901 Joseph was a ‘Storeman at Royal Gunpowder Factory’, the large complex at Waltham Abbey. His seventeen year old son was a ‘Labourer at Guncotton Factory’, while his fourteen year old son was a ‘Labourer at Cartridge Factory’. In the 1911 census Arthur, then aged seventeen, was a ‘Clerk Nobels Ammunition’, presumably in the same complex.

Joseph Eade died in early 1911 at the age of sixty-six and Arthur enlisted in the Royal Navy in January 1912 and chose to join the medical department. He began as a Probationary Sick Berth Attendant, subsequently serving on HMS Vivid, Gibraltar and Adventure, with periods at Plymouth Hospital in between. He was posted to Haulbowline Hospital in Cork in August 1917 which was attached to HMS Colleen, the shore-based administrative centre for the navy in Cork.

Joseph Eade was going home to England on leave along with three others from HMS Colleen on the 10th of October 1918 when they travelled on RMS  Leinster. None of the four survived but Eade’s body was recovered and he was buried in Grangegorman Military Cemetery in Dublin. His name is recorded on the Waltham Abbey War Memorial.

His brother, Charles Bertram, fought with the Genadier Guards while another brother, Ernest was with the Royal Field Artillery, while his youngest brother James served in the Royal Air Force. The address of his mother that was given after Joseph’s death was the Almshouses, Waltham Abbey.