People on board

FUSZARD, Beatrice Maud

Beatrice Maud Fuszard was born in 1889 in Melcombe Regis in Weymouth, Dorset to Charles Fuszard and Eliza Maria Critchley, the youngest of their seven children, six of whom survived infancy. Charles Fuszard was a Cabinet Maker / Carpenter and this was his second marriage. He had married Sarah Ann Date in 1864 and they had four children before Sarah died in 1872 aged thirty. He married again in 1878 when he was thirty-seven and Eliza Maria was eighteen. The family has not been found in the 1881 census and it is not known what happened to the four children from his first marriage.

In 1891 the family, five daughters and one son, were living in Charles Street in Weymouth. In 1901 Eliza Maria gave her occupation as ‘Nurse Monthly’ and was a ‘Certified Midwife’ in 1911. Beatrice Maud was named Beatrice in 1891 and Maud in 1901 and 1911. In that year Maud, aged twenty-one, was an ‘Assistant at Boot’s Chemist’.

In April 1917 Beatrice M married Herbert Short in Southampton, a Private in the Sussex Regiment with the 7th Battalion in France and went to live in Winchester. However he was taken prisoner on the 27th of March 1918 and died of his wounds on the 29th at Templeux-la-Fosse in the Somme region, aged just twenty-eight. There was a notice in the Worthing Gazette in July from his parents, but there was no mention of his widow.

Among Herbert Short’s military records there is a letter from Beatrice Short in June 1918 noting a change of address and requesting that her husband’s personal belongings be forwarded to her new address. She said that she “seemed to be quite broken up since hearing of the death of my dear husband” and she had returned to Weymouth “hoping to improve in health”. She gave Farwells Cottage on Charles Street as her new address.

It has not yet been discovered why Beatrice Short had travelled to Ireland in October 1918 or why she was using her maiden name of Maud Fuszard as reported in the newspapers. She was actually named as Tuzard and the Irish Independent gave her address as Charlemont Street, not Charles Street, in Weymouth. Fortunately she was among the survivors of the sinking of RMS Leinster and returned to Weymouth. Her father, Charles Fuszard, died on the 31st of October that year, aged seventy-seven.

In 1920 she was living in Baycliffe Road, Pye Hill in Weymouth according to the Weymouth Chief Constable in reply to a Royal Sussex Records Office query. The following year she married Thomas Joseph McGivney in Weymouth and they had two sons, Patrick born 1922 and John born 1926. In the 1939 Register they were living in Baycliffe Road, where Thomas was a ‘Sewage Station Pump Attendant’. He died in 1956 and Beatrice Maud McGivney née Fuszard died in Weymouth in 1971 aged eighty-one.