Ella Chinnery was born in Stratford, Essex, England, on the 5th August 1883, the daughter of Samuel and Agnes Priscilla Chinnery (née Goodchild). Her father was a plate labourer on the railways, and she had an older brother, Charles Victor, who was born in 1879, but who died the following year, aged 1 year.
On the 25th January 1911, she married Thomas Orr Osbourne at St. Mary the Virgin Church, Leyton, Essex. Her husband, who was from Scotland, was a chief steward with the Anchor Line shipping company.
Ella and her husband had no children, and while her husband was at sea, she sometimes lived with her parents in Leyton, and at other times in her husband’s home in Milngavie, on the outskirts of Glasgow, before they established their own home at 121. Broomhill Drive, Partick, Lanarkshire.
In the spring of 1915, her husband had been working in New York, N.Y., in the United States of America and she had been there to visit him. For her ticket from and to Scotland, she had booked first class saloon passage with the Anchor Line in Glasgow, Renfrewshire, via New York and Liverpool and for her return trip; she was scheduled to sail on the liner Cameronia at the end of April.
However, the Cameronia was requisitioned by the British Admiralty for war service as a troopship and all of her passengers, some of her crew and most of her cargo was transferred instead to the Lusitania, which was scheduled to leave the Cunard berth at Pier 54 in New York on the morning of 1st May.
Once on board, Ella Osbourne was escorted to her room, D43, which was the personal responsibility of First Class Bedroom Steward Edwin Huther, who came from Liverpool.
What must have seemed to be a stroke of good fortune at the time of the sailing, actually turned out to be a tragedy for Mrs. Osbourne when six days out of New York, on the afternoon of 7th May, the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-20, within sight of the coast of southern Ireland and only hours away from her Liverpool home port.
Mrs. Osbourne was killed as a result of this action and as her body was never recovered from the sea and identified, she has no known grave. She was aged 31 years. Photographs taken in Queenstown of the unidentified bodies were sent to her husband, but he was unable to identify her in any of them.
Bedroom Steward Huther who had looked after Mrs. Osbourne in room D43, also lost his life in the sinking.
Ella Osbourne left her estate of £117-12s.-9d (£177.64½p.) to her husband.
Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, 1891 Census of England & Wales, 1901 Census of England & Wales, 1911 Census of England & Wales, New York Passenger Lists 1820 – 1957, UK Incoming Passenger Lists 1878 – 1960, Cunard Records, Milngavie and Bearsden Herald, New York Times, PRO 22/71, PRO BT 100/345, UniLiv D92/2/60, Deaths at Sea 1871 – 1968, Graham Maddocks, Geoff Whitfield, Michael Poirier, Jim Kalafus, Cliff Barry, Paul Latimer, Norman Gray.
Copyright © Peter Kelly.