People on board

McINTOSH, Joseph Francis

Joseph Francis McIntosh was born in Holywell, Flintshire in early 1891 to Dublin born Thomas McIntosh and Mary Phoebe Myers, who had been born in Liverpool. They had married in 1876 and Joseph was the youngest of their twelve children, only six of whom were alive in 1911. Thomas was a Bricklayer, but the 1911 census showed Joseph as a ‘Student of Teaching’, probably the first in his family to stay in education. He had earlier won the Connah’s Quay Council Scholarship. He did his teacher training in Bangor, where he may have met his future wife, Dorothy Kate Lobe, who was teaching in the town. They married in Guildford, Surrey where Dorothy was from, in the spring of 1918.

Joseph joined the Royal Welsh Fusiliers early in the war as a Private and served in France. He was quickly commissioned Lieutenant, but suffering shell shock and trench fever, he was brought back to Oswestry in Shropshire. Here he was part of the 3rd Reserve Battalion, which was a training unit. It moved to Ireland in November 1917 and was in Limerick in 1918.

Joseph was presumably returning to his new wife on leave when he travelled on the 10th of October 1918 on RMS Leinster, along with twenty other soldiers from the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He did not survive the sinking but his body was recovered and he was buried in the Military Cemetery in Grangegorman in Dublin. His name is recorded on the Connah’s Quay War Memorial.