People on board

ELLIS, Reuben Jnr.

Reuben Ellis was born on the 30th of March 1904 in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. His father, also Reuben, was a soldier in the Military Barracks in Clonmel and his mother, Ellen Drew, was from the town. A second child, Mary, was born in 1905. Reuben Snr. whose father was also in the army, enlisted in the Army Service Corps at Aldershot in 1898. He was promoted to Lance Corporal in 1900 and to Sergeant in 1905 and extended his service to twelve years the following year. However, because of being absent without leave in 1906, he was demoted to Private and was discharged in January 1908.

Reuben was not with his wife and family in the 1911 census, when she was with her widowed mother and siblings in Clonmel, with her own five year old daughter May. Her son, Reuben Jnr. was with his Ellis grandparents in the Military Barracks in Cork. It is not known if young Reuben lived with his mother in the coming years, but he was with his grandfather, Reuben Ellis Snr., on board RMS Leinster on the 10th of October 1918. Neither survived the sinking but their bodies were recovered. In the Nenagh Guardian on the 19th they were identified as ‘Father-in-Law and Son of Mrs Ellis, Ballinaclough, Nenagh’. They were buried in Mount Jerome cemetery in initially unmarked graves, though a Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone has since been erected over Reuben Snr.’s grave.