People on board

ROWLANDS, David

David Rowlands was born in Llanfihangel, Anglesey in 1895 to Owen Rowlands and Ann Pritchard. Owen was an Agricultural Labourer and the family moved several times within the area. Ann’s widowed father, William Pritchard, a retired Shoemaker, lived with them. David was the fourth of their nine children, one of whom died in infancy. Owen died in 1905 at the age of forty-five and in the 1911 census his widow Ann was living with her eldest son, a Farm Labourer, and the four youngest who were still at school. David was recorded in that census as being ‘Cowman on Farm’ with the Davies family of Nant Bychan on the north east coast of Anglesey.

David Rowlands enlisted in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in 1914 at Menai Bridge. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion and was in Scotland and London until November 1917 when he was posted to Kinsale in Ireland with the 25th Reserve Brigade. He was returning to Wales on leave when he travelled on RMS Leinster on the 10th of October 1918. There were twenty other members of the R.W.F. on board, fourteen of whom were lost in the sinking, including David Rowlands. His body was not recovered but his name is recorded on the Hollybrook Memorial in Southampton.