The Sinking of the R.M.S. Leinster
 

People on board

Edith Healey

HEALEY, Edith née Wood

Edith Wood was born in Batley, near Dewsbury in Yorkshire in 1887. She was the third of the four children of Wilson Wood and Selina Blackburn. Living in the heartland of the wool industry it was not surprising that Wilson Wood was a ’Power Loom Tuner’ and his wife worked as a ‘Wool Weaver’. In 1901 Edith was a ‘Woollen Twister’ and in 1911 a ‘Weaver’. In 1912 she married John William Healey from the same area, and in 1913 a daughter, Kathleen, was born.

John Healey was a Law Clerk in a firm of Dewsbury solicitors, and deputy clerk to the Dewsbury Insurance Committee. He enlisted as an Air Mechanic with the Royal Air Force and in 1918 was stationed in Dublin. According to newspaper reports he had been home on leave a few months previously, and on returning to Dublin he had been accompanied by Edith and five year-old Kathleen. They were returning home to Ravens-House Street in Dewsbury on the 10th of October when they travelled on RMS Leinster. Their relatives in Dewsbury received a telegram from John Healey in Dublin to say that Edith was missing after the sinking, but that Kathleen had been saved. Edith’s body was not recovered.

This was the second tragedy that the Wood family faced, as Edith’s younger brother, Joseph Alfred, had been killed in the war in May 1917. It is not known how Kathleen fared in her life after the ordeal. John Healey remarried in 1922.

 

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