People on board

RUMMING, Victor Belmont

Victor Belmont Rumming (sometimes Rummings) was born in Bath, Somerset in 1900 to Albert Wheeler Rumming and Lily Crook, the third of their five children. Albert Wheeler was a Tram Driver at the time of his marriage in 1895 having enlisted in the Wiltshire Regiment in 1883. In 1901 the family was living in Walmsley Terrace in Bath, moving to Highmere Grove where Albert died in 1910, aged forty-five. They then moved to 11 Larkhall Terrace.

The eldest son, Stanley, enlisted in the Royal Engineers and was attached to the 2/1st Wessex Engineers according to a piece in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette in November 1916. No record of Victor Rumming enlisting in the army has yet been found. However a railway ticket has come to light, stamped ‘Scottish Horse’ and dated the 8th of October 1918. This was a ‘Special Leave Railway Ticket for Soldiers in Uniform’ and was one-way for one person from Limerick Station to Larkhall Station, Bath. In April 1918 the 2/1st Scottish Horse, a second-line regiment, had moved to Ireland and was stationed in Limerick. It would appear that eighteen year old Victor Rumming had enlisted in the Scottish Horse and was sent to Ireland for training.

On the 12th of October, two days after the sinking, Mrs Rumming received a telegram from Limerick stating: ‘Private Rummings rescued ex SS Leinster and now at Rest Camp Dublin – 2/1 Scottish Horse’. The next record for Victor Rumming (index only) is of an attestation in the Royal Artillery at Bath in 1919, Service Number 1046782, but also giving his ‘Former Service Number’, presumably for the Scottish Horse, as 291334. Finally there is his army discharge, but with no date.

The family was recorded in the Electoral Registers in 1920 at 11 Larkhall Terrace in Bath. In 1926 Victor Rumming married Muriel Edith Sawyer in Chippenham, Wiltshire. They had three children, Joan, Albert and Raymond and they lived in Bath. In the 1939 Register they were in Upper Dover Street where Victor gave his occupation as ‘General Labourer (Heavy Worker) Water Works’. He died in 1981 aged eighty-one.