People on board

VEREKER, Frederick W.

Frederick James Wellington Vereker, who usually went by his initials F.W., was born in Limerick on the 18th of June 1866 to Henry Vereker and Sally Pain. He was the youngest of their four children, with the eldest Kathleen dying at the age of sixteen. Henry Vereker, an Accountant in the Provincial Bank, was from a Limerick family of bankers and doctors while Sally Pain was the daughter of George Richard Pain and niece of James Pain, both distinguished architects in Limerick in the early 1800s. Sally Vereker died in 1878 aged forty-five.

Frederick Vereker trained as a Civil Engineer and was accepted into the Institution of Civil Engineers in November 1892. It is not known where he was subsequently employed and he has not been found in the 1901 census. However in March 1910 he married Margaret Berry in Curry Rivel, near Taunton in Somerset. His older brother Henry had been settled in this village as a Surgeon and Physician since the 1890s. Frederick and Margaret moved to Ireland where a daughter Joan was born in August 1911.

In the 1911 census they were living in North Main Street, Bandon, Co Cork where he was working as a Civil Engineer. In 1913 he was the Permanent Way Engineer on the Bandon Railway. Margaret gave her place of birth as London City. Frederick’s father Henry Vereker was living in Leeson Street, Dublin with the Mulpeter family where he had also been lodging in 1901. He died in 1916 at the age of eighty-five.

It is not known why Frederick Vereker was travelling on RMS Leinster on the 10th of October 1918 but he survived the sinking. The Skibereen Eagle reported on Saturday the 19th that he and fellow Bandon gentleman, Cattle Dealer Tim Horgan, had been rescued from rafts by a destroyer. It said that Mr Vereker had been in the water for three-quarters of an hour, which must be an underestimation.

Frederick and Margaret lived in a large house on Kilbrogan Hill in Bandon but after she died in August 1925 at the age of forty-two he sold up and moved to Montenotte in Cork city. In April 1930 he married Vera Sealy Sandiford, daughter of another Civil Engineer. She was thirty-six and he was sixty-four. Frederick Vereker died in the Victoria Hospital in Cork in 1946 aged eighty.