People on board

MURPHY, Matthew

Matthew Murphy was born on the 18th February 1890 in Demesne, Cloyne, close to Midleton in East Cork. His father Michael was a farmer, later becoming a J.P. and a Councillor and Chairman of Midleton Rural Council. Michael had first married in 1871 and had at least two children before his wife, Margaret O’Sullivan, died at the age of twenty-three. He remarried in 1878 to Kate Cronin, Matthew’s mother, and there were at least seven sons and one daughter in this marriage. Kate died in 1898 at the age of forty-four and Michael married for the third time in 1901, to Johanna Foley, and three more boys were born.

In 1911 Matthew Murphy was living in Haddington Road in Dublin where he was a ‘Medical Student’. According to the files of the Royal Army Medical Corps he enlisted in November 1914. It is not clear if he had completed his medical studies at that date, as his name does not appear on the Medical Register, but he was clearly very effective as he had been promoted to Captain by 1918. He served in a Stationary Hospital during the Battle of Mons in his first month on the Front. He was later with the 72nd Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery.

He was presumably returning to England after leave in Midleton when he travelled on RMS Leinster on the 110th October 1918. He was one of eighteen members of the R.A.M.C. on board that day, only four of whom survived. Matthew Murphy did not, but his body was recovered. His sister Mary travelled to Dublin and with her cousin, Thomas Wall, searched the hospitals and found him in the morgue at City Hall. Years later in 1982 a younger Wall, Mervyn, then aged nine, wrote a novel, Hermitage, in which one of the characters lost his life on RMS Leinster. The scenes at Kingstown and in the morgue were vividly and accurately portrayed.

Matthew Murphy was buried in the graveyard of St Colman’s Cathedral, Cloyne beside his mother Kate Cronin. His father Michael died in 1934, aged eighty-nine.