Etienne de Thomaz de Bossierre was born in Saint Gerard, Arrondisement de Namur, Namur, Belgium on the 17th May 1886, the son of Alphonse de Thomaz de Bossierre and his wife, Baroness Louise de Marcq de Tiége. Both of his parents were of old aristocratic stock, and his father had been a mayor of Ottignies – a town in Belgium. The Thomaz family were originally of southern Dutch nobility, and were authorized to add ‘de Bossierre’ to the family name in 1889 when they were granted recognition of hereditary nobility in Belgium.
Etienne was an automobile mechanic and machinist and in 1915, he had been working in San Anselmo, California, in the United States of America.
Perhaps because of the military situation in Europe and the occupation of most of his homeland by the German Army, in the spring of 1915, he decided to return home. It is likely that he had been informed of the death of his older brother, Gaston, who had been killed in action while serving with the Belgian Army in October 1914.
Consequently, for the first part of his journey, he booked as a second cabin passenger on the May sailing of the Lusitania from New York to Liverpool. Having left California by rail sometime in April 1915, he arrived at the Cunard berth at Pier 54 in the city on the morning of 1st May 1915 in time to board the liner 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. Then, six days later, on the afternoon of 7th May, the Lusitania was torpedoed by the German submarine U-20, twelve miles off The Old Head of Kinsale in southern Ireland and sank only eighteen minutes later. At that stage of her voyage, she was a mere twelve or fourteen hours away from her Liverpool destination.
One of the second cabin casualties was Etienne de Thomaz de Bossierre who lost his life as a result of the enemy action. As his body was never recovered from the sea and identified afterwards, he has no known grave. At 28 years, he was one of three Belgian nationals on board and one of the two to be killed. Red Cross fund raiser Madame Marie Depage also lost her life and Philippe Yung, who came from Antwerp, was the only one to survive.
Etienne de Thomaz de Bossierre is commemorated on the gravestone of his older brother, Gaston, in Ottignies Communal Cemetery, Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve, Arrondissement de Nivelles, Walloon Brabant, Belgium.
Cunard records give his name as Etienne T. De Boissierre, but this is erroneous.
U.S. Border Crossings from Canada to U.S. 1895 – 1960, 1914 San Francisco City Directory, Cunard Records, Findagreve.com, PRO BT 100/345, Deaths at Sea 1871 – 1968, Graham Maddocks, Geoff Whitfield, Michael Poirier, Jim Kalafus, Cliff Barry, Paul Latimer, Norman Gray.
Copyright © Peter Kelly.