People on board

HACKETT, Anna Jane née Kennedy

Anna Jane Kennedy was born in Bengal, India on the 14th of October 1858 to John Gordon Kennedy and Mary Ann Powderly, the eldest of their four children. In 1879 Anna married Henry Monck Mason Hackett in Bengal. Born in Dublin, Henry was ordained in 1875 and was working as a missionary in Benares and Allahbad. Their married life then took on a pattern of alternating periods of between three and five years of working in India and working in parishes in England. Five children were born in India, two in England, and the youngest in Canada, where they went in 1898. There Henry was Principal of the Montreal Diocese Theological College.

In 1903 Henry was the Dean of Waterford Cathedral and they had a large, eleven room house beside the Bishop’s Palace, which apparently was in very bad repair when they arrived from Canada. During his time in Waterford Henry was prominent in the Temperance movement. In 1913 they moved to London where he was Vicar of St Peter’s in Belsize Park. All five of their sons enlisted in the war, the eldest as a chaplain. The youngest, Henry Robert aged nineteen, was killed in the Dardanelles in November 1915 with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.

The Waterford Star reported on the 18th of November 1918 that Anna Hackett had spent six weeks in Waterford visiting family and was returning to London on the 10th of October. Apparently Henry went to meet her at Euston Station, only later hearing about the sinking. Anna survived the sinking and sent a telegram that evening with the one word ‘Safe’. She was treated in St Michael’s Hospital in Kingstown before returning to London.