People on board

STEPHENS, Nicholas Richard

Nicholas Richard Stephens was born near Leeds in 1894 to Richard Stephens and Mary Jane Jerman. Richard, a Coal Miner born in Cornwall, had married Grace Brock in Devon before they moved to County Durham. They were recorded there in the 1881 census with their five year old son, Richard. They then moved to Yorkshire where Grace died in Skipton in 1885, aged thirty-four. The following year Richard married Mary Jane Jerman and they had four children, three girls and Nicholas, the third child. By the 1891 census Richard was no longer in the mines but gave his occupation as ‘Horse Keeper’.

The family was living in Silsden by 1901, the year that Richard Stephens died aged fifty. In the census of that year the eldest girl Mary was a Cotton Spinner and by 1911 all the children were working in the textile industry, sixteen year old Nicholas as a ‘Doffer Worsted’. Their mother Mary Jane Stephens died in 1903 and the children were living with their aunt, Harriet Smith née Jerman, and her family in Silsden.
Nicholas Stephens enlisted in the Yorkshire East Riding Yeomanry some time in 1917. In October 1918 he was with the 2/1st Regiment which had moved to Ireland in April of that year. According to local newspaper reports he was returning home on leave because he had been telegraphed that his cousin was home from France. He travelled on the 10th on RMS Leinster but he did not survive the sinking. However his body was recovered and he was buried on the 14th in Grangegorman Military Cemetery in Dublin.

His name is recorded on the Silsden Memorial and on the Silsden Roll of Honour.