People on board

MURPHY, Bernard

Bernard Murphy was born on the 5th of January 1895 at 4 Long’s Cottages, Adelaide Road and baptised in Glasthule church. His father Bernard was a Carpenter with an address at Erne Street in Dublin city at the time of his marriage in 1888. His mother Margaret was a widow, née Farren, whose first husband, James Mathews, a Stone Cutter, had died in 1887. When she married Bernard Murphy her address was Killiney View in Glasthule and that is where their first child, Catherine, was born. Bernard Jnr. appears to have been their only other child.

Bernard Snr. died in March 1897 and in the 1901 census Margaret was living in 3 Adelaide Cottages in Glasthule, and her occupation was ‘Laundress’. With her were Kate and Bernard, then aged six, and a fifteen-year-old son, Patrick Mathews, from her first marriage. By the 1911 census she had moved to 1 Adelaide Cottages and living with her was another son, Edward Mathews, aged twenty-seven, a Stone Cutter. Margaret had reverted to the surname Mathews. Meanwhile Bernard, aged sixteen, was working as a ‘Dairy Boy’ on the nearby dairy farm of Thomas Duffy on Albert Road. He was a member of Glasthule Mitchels GAA Club.

It is not known when Bernard Murphy started work with the City of Dublin Steam Packet Co, but he appears on the 1918 Crew List as a Fireman. That was his job on RMS Leinster on the 10th of October 1918. He did not survive the sinking of the ship, and his body was not recovered. His name is recorded on the Tower Hill Memorial in London and he received the Mercantile Marine and British War medals.