Maud E.S. Freeman was born in Warwickshire, England, in 1882, the illegitimate daughter of Amy Freeman, who was a domestic servant. She had an older brother, Ernest, born in 1881.
A few months after her birth, her mother married Thomas Moore, who was described as a cycle fitter. Their family home, in 1915, was at 72. Lower Ford Street, Coventry. It is known that Ernest Freeman lived with the family as Ernest Moore, but nothing is known of Maud’s upbringing.
It is not known when she immigrated to the United States of America, but at some stage she married Joseph Mathewson, who was originally from Scotland, and was working at the Bausch Machine Tool Company in Springfield, Massachusetts. The couple rented an apartment at 524. North Main Street, Springfield, and their son, named Joseph, was born on the 5th September 1914.
In 1915, Maud Mathewson decided to return to return to England, to either visit or live with her mother and the Moore family. As a result, she purchased second cabin passage for herself and baby Joseph on the May sailing of the Lusitania from New York to Liverpool.
The Mathewson’s had given up their apartment in Springfield, and her husband had accompanied Maud and baby Joseph to New York City, where mother and child boarded the Lusitania on 1st May 1915, at the Cunard berth at Pier 54 in New York, in time for the liner’s scheduled 10.00 a.m., departure. They then had to wait until the early afternoon before the liner actually sailed. This was because she had to load cargo and take on board the passengers and some of the crew from the Anchor Liner Cameronia which the British Admiralty had requisitioned at New York, for use as a troop ship, at the end of April.
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 foundered in just eighteen minutes. At that stage of her voyage, she was only twelve or fourteen hours steaming time away from the safety of her home port.
Both mother and son perished as a result of this action and as neither of their bodies was recovered from the sea and identified afterwards, neither has a known grave. Maud Mathewson was aged 33 years at the time of her death, although she is recorded as being aged 27 years on the official manifest.
Cunard Records, Springfield Massachusetts City Directory 1915, Boston Daily Globe, Coventry Standard, PRO BT 100/345, UniLiv D92/2/324, Deaths at Sea 1871 – 1968, Graham Maddocks, Geoff Whitfield, Michael Poirier, Jim Kalafus, Cliff Barry, Paul Latimer, Norman Gray.
Copyright © Peter Kelly.