People on board

WARD, Maud Elizabeth

Maud Elizabeth Ward was born on the 12th of June 1874 in Birmingham to Joseph Ward and Jemima Jane Terrell. Her mother died while Maud was a young child and in 1881 she was living with her widowed father, three of his siblings and his widowed father in the village of Bickenhill in Warwickshire. Joseph’s occupation was a Waiter, while his father, also Joseph, was a School Master and his youngest sister was an ‘Assistant in School’. An older brother, Thomas, was then at London University and later became Principal of Peterborough Teacher Training College.

Maud’s father Joseph died in 1889 and in the 1891 census she was still living with her grandfather and two of her aunts in Bickenhill. She went on to attend High School and College in Birmingham and then a Teacher College in France. She taught for a short time in a private school in Hampstead before her appointment to the Diocesan Training College in Derby, where her special subject was French. In the 1901 census she was ‘Governess’ to seven trainee teachers, and in 1911 she had the title ‘Lecturer in Training College’, but she was still supervising the lives of five students.

In December 1913 Maud changed career, becoming the private secretary to the Proby family of Elton Hall, near Peterborough, whose title was Carysfort. The family also owned Glenart Castle in Arklow.

The Dowager Lady Carysfort had died in January 1918 and it is thought that it was for some related business that Maud Ward had travelled to Arklow and was returning to England on RMS Leinster on the 10th of October.

She did not survive the sinking but her body was recovered and taken to the mortuary in St Michael’s Hospital in Kingstown. There it was identified by Col. Douglas Proby who arranged her burial in Deansgrange cemetery. Maud’s family in England arranged for a simple granite cross to be erected on the grave. The Diocesan Training College in Derby erected a stained-glass window in her memory in 1921, which unfortunately has been lost in redevelopment.