People on board

MARSH, Charles

Charles, known as Charlie, was born in the village of Rushbury, near Ludlow in Shropshire and was baptised on the 4th August 1878. His parents, Adam Marsh, a Shoemaker, and Margaret Cleeton, a Dressmaker, had married in 1869 and there were five other children. Charlie was the third child and the eldest son. As well as being a Shoemaker, Adam was a ‘Letter Carrier’, in later censuses named a ‘Postman’.

Charlie cannot be found in the 1901 census but he married Mary Jane Phillips in 1903 in the Ludlow district and by 1911 they had three children, two boys and a girl. In the census of that year he gave his occupation as ‘Groom Gardener Domestic’. The family were living in Corely near Tenbury, some miles south of his birth place. A fourth child, a girl, was born in 1914.

The military records for Charles Marsh are incomplete, but it is known that he enlisted in Shrewsbury with the Shropshire Light Infantry, but not when, or what action he was involved in. At some stage he transferred to the Royal Defence Corps and was with the 462nd Protection Company in Ireland in 1918. He was presumably returning on leave to his family when he travelled on RMS Leinster on the 10th October. Like almost all the other twenty-nine R.D.C. personnel on the ship, Charles Marsh did not survive the sinking.

His body was recovered and is buried in the military cemetery in Grangegorman in Dublin where he was interred after a military funeral. His name is listed on the Shropshire Roll of Honour.