Albert Palmer Jnr. was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on 28th February 1915, the son of Albert and Frances Annie Palmer (née Oakes). Albert had a brother Edgar born in 1908, and a sister Olive, born in 1911. The family had originally come from Smethwick, Staffordshire, England. Albert’s father was a millwright in Toronto.
In the spring of 1915, the family decided to return to Staffordshire and consequently booked second cabin passage on what became the Lusitania's final voyage. Having left Toronto at the end of April, the family party joined the ship at her berth, at Pier 54 in New York port on the morning of 1st May 1915 in time for her scheduled 10.00 a.m. departure. This was then postponed until the early afternoon whilst the liner loaded cargo and took on board passengers and crew from Anchor Liner the S.S. Cameronia which the British Admiralty had requisitioned as a troop ship at the end of April.
Six days later, however, the whole family was killed when the liner was sunk off The Old Head of Kinsale, in southern Ireland by the German submarine U-20 only about fourteen hours sailing time away from her Liverpool destination. On 12th May 1915, five days after the sinking, baby Albert's body was discovered by a local policeman, Sergeant Phelan, on the beach at Schull, in County Cork, strapped to that of his dead mother with a British Army officer's Sam Browne belt.
It was landed at Queenstown and taken to one of the temporary mortuaries set up there, where it was given the reference number 179a and described as: -
A Baby boy, aged 6 months, found attached to a woman and a pair of gold rimmed spectacles in a case, The Robert Simpson Co. believed to belong to the body of woman No. 179. The maker’s name on woman’s jacket “Te Comede made by T. Eaton & Co. Ltd. Toronto and Winnipeg”
Once his mother’s body had been identified, however, Albert was eventually buried on 15th May 1915 in the same coffin as his mother, in The Old Church Cemetery, Queenstown, in Mass Grave B, 5th Row, Lower Tier, where he lies to this day. He was only two months old.
It is possible that the Sam Browne belt that had bound mother and son together had belonged to fellow second cabin passenger Lieutenant Robert Matthews of the 60th Battalion, of the Canadian Infantry on his way to England to be commissioned into the British Army. He was
cabin and may have tried in vain to help Albert Palmer and his mother to survive. He, like them, however, perished as a result of the torpedoing! When his body was recovered from the sea, however, he was found to be wearing civilian clothes, and not his Army uniform, but it is still possible that he had got his Sam Browne from his cabin specifically to bind Annie and little Albert Palmer together!
Cunard Records, Lusitania, PRO BT 100/345., UniLiv.D92/1/8-10, UniLiv D92/2/139, Deaths at Sea 1871 – 1968, Graham Maddocks, Geoff Whitfield, Michael Poirier, Jim Kalafus, Cliff Barry, Paul Latimer, Norman Gray.
Copyright © Peter Kelly.