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Liverpool Echo
Liverpool Echo
National
Lee Grimsditch

The Bootle dad of eight on the Titanic whose body was never found

A father from Bootle who was married with eight children, perished in the Titanic disaster.

Thomas Peter O'Connor was born in Liverpool in 1868 and was working as a ship's bedroom steward on the ill-fated liner.

He married his wife, Emily, in the February of 1892 and the couple had a total of eight children with only four living past infancy.

READ MORE: What stood in the city before St Johns Shopping Centre was built

According to his page on encyclopedia-titanica.org, Emily was working as a greengrocer and they lived at number 12, Linacre Lane at the time of the voyage.

Thomas was on board the Titanic for her delivery trip from Belfast to Southampton. When he signed-on again, in Southampton, for the voyage to New York on 4 April 1912.

More than 100 members of Titanic’s crew on her tragic maiden voyage – about nine per cent – were from Merseyside or had close links with the area. Most of her key officers and crew had originally sailed from Liverpool for White Star.

RMS Titanic was the largest ship afloat at the time she entered service and was the second of three Olympic-class ocean liners operated by the White Star Line.

The liner left Southampton on April 10, 1912, calling at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, before heading west.

On April 14, four days into the crossing and about 375 miles south of Newfoundland, Titanic hit an iceberg at 11:40pm ship's time.

The collision caused the hull to buckle inwards along her starboard (right) side and exposed five of her 16 watertight compartments to the sea.

Passengers and some crew members were evacuated in lifeboats, many of which launched only partially loaded with a disproportionate number of men left aboard because of a "women and children first" protocol.

At 2:20am, the ship broke apart and sunk with well over one thousand people still onboard.

Thomas O'Connor died in the sinking and his body, if recovered, was never identified.

Image of Thomas Peter O'Connor, a ship's steward from Bootle who died on the Titanic. Published in the Liverpool Daily Post - Friday April 19, 1912 (Reach PLC/Liverpool Daily Post)

It's estimated between 1,490 and 1,635 people died in the disaster from around 2,208 people thought to be onboard. Approximately 688 who perished were thought to be crew members.

Just under two hours after Titanic sank, the Cunard liner RMS Carpathia arrived and brought aboard an estimated 710 survivors.

The Titanic had more than 100 crew from Merseyside on her doomed voyage in 1912 (Mirrorpix)

Thomas' widow, Emily, placed the following memorial to her husband in the Liverpool Echo on 15 April 1939:

"In sad but loving memory of my dear husband, Thomas O'Connor (Tom), who lost his life in the Titanic disaster, April 15, 1912. R.I.P. (Sadly missed by his sorrowing wife and children)--49, Linacre-lane, Bootle."

12 Linacre Lane, Bootle, now Aden Gulf News (Andrew Teebay/Liverpool Echo)

Emily never remarried and continued to live in Liverpool, later living at 49 Caldwell Road, Allerton where she died on October 28, 1962 aged 93.

T he ECHO has launched a new 56-page nostalgia supplement in print. It's packed with photos from the recent past and the not-so-recent, from shopping, fashion and music to the Albert Dock – plus an elephant on parade in Woolton. You can order a copy here.

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