People on board

LANGFIELD, Samuel

Samuel Langfield was born in Oldham, Greater Manchester in 1884 to Abel Langfield and Eliza Stanley. He was the eldest of their eight children, three of whom had died by 1911. All the family, including Abel, worked in the cotton mills once they reached their teens; in 1901 Samuel, then aged seventeen, was a ‘Cotton Piecer’.

In 1910 Samuel married Nancy Holding in Oldham and they had a daughter, Marian, in 1916. His limited available military records show that Samuel enlisted in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in Oldham, but not when. In October 1918 he was with the 3rd Garrison Battalion in Ireland. He was returning to England on leave when he travelled with twenty other R.W.F. members on RMS Leinster on the 10th of October. Samuel did not survive the sinking, nor was his body recovered. His name is recorded on the Hollybrook Memorial in Southampton.

In August 1922 his widow Nancy, then working as an Office Cleaner, married Edward Nichols and a daughter Joan was born in 1923. In July 1926 Nancy and her two daughters sailed from Liverpool to Quebec, their tickets paid for by Edward. 1926 was also the year of Samuel’s father Abel’s death, followed by his mother in 1933.