Marjorie Pye was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in November 1913, the daughter of William Samuel and Charlotte Pye (née Ives). Both of her parents had originally come from England, and married in Edmonton in 1911. Her father ran a tailoring business in Edmonton, known as Pan-Co-Vests, and the family home was at 10249, 101st Street, in the city.
In the spring of 1915, Charlotte Pye decided to return home on a holiday to England to visit relatives in Brighton and London and leaving her husband behind, she set off at the end of April, by rail, with daughter Marjorie, to join the Lusitania at New York. Marjorie’s father had suggested that they took this liner because, being the fastest ship on the trans-Atlantic crossing, she would not be so susceptible to submarine attack. Consequently, Marjorie and her mother boarded the vessel at Pier 54 as second cabin passengers on the morning of 1st May, in time for her last ever sailing into the North River, and the Atlantic Ocean, just after mid-day.
After a fairly uneventful crossing, the torpedoing, six days out of New York came as a great shock to Charlotte Pye and at first unable to find a life jacket, she was eventually given one by a passenger who also tied Marjorie securely to her.
He also took the pair to a lifeboat in the process of being launched and although Marjorie was untied from her mother to allow her to get into the lifeboat, the infant was then passed to her, as the lifeboat was being lowered into the water.
However, as the Lusitania took her final plunge, a great wave crashed over the
lifeboat and washed Marjorie out of her mother’s arms and into the sea, where she drowned. She was aged only thirty months!
Her broken hearted mother survived the sinking and was eventually rescued and landed at Queenstown, from where she got to England and then eventually returned to Edmonton in 1916.
Just over a fortnight after the sinking, the body of Marjorie Pye was recovered from the sea and identified. It was the 239th corpse to be recovered from the surrounding area, one of the last, in fact, and as no property was recovered from it, it was probably identified by clothing after such a long time in the sea.
By this time, the mass graves in The Old Church Cemetery, Queenstown had been closed and on 25th May, Marjorie Pye’s little body was buried in a private grave in the cemetery, in Row 17, Grave No. 5. In the same grave, at the same time, was buried the body of another unidentified female baby, aged between 12 and 18 months, whose body was the 240th one to be recovered.
Both of their remains still lie there today, although the grave position has now been redesignated as number 545. There is no headstone to mark the last resting place of either of the two young victims!
New York Passenger Lists 1820 – 1957, Cunard Records, Edmonton Journal, Seven Days to Disaster, White Star Journal, 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.