Sadie Eileen Fish, always known as Eileen, was born in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, on the 24th February 1905, the daughter of Joseph and Sarah Mary Fish, (née Rogers). Her father was a contractor, who immigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1909.
In 1912, Eileen accompanied her mother, and younger sister, Marion, to Toronto to be re-united with her father, who was now employed as an automobile salesman. The family resided at 441. Sackville Street, Toronto. In late 1914, her sister, Joan Elizabeth, was born.
In January 1915, her father had joined the Canadian Army, and in June 1915, he was due to travel to Europe to fight on the Western Front.
Perhaps because of this, her mother decided to take the family back to Bristol. As a consequence they all left Toronto at the end of April and travelled by rail to New York, where they boarded the Lusitania on the morning of 1st May, as second cabin passengers.
Also in their party for the voyage to England were Eileen’s uncle Richard Rogers and her aunt Elizabeth Rogers.
When the liner was torpedoed, six days out of New York and only hours away from her Liverpool destination, although most of the family survived, Eileen‘s baby sister Joan and her uncle Richard perished. On their arrival back in Bristol, her mother told of their escape to a reporter from local newspaper The Western Daily Press. The account stated: -
When the torpedo struck the doomed liner, Mrs. Fish and one of her daughters were having lunch. The other child was somewhere on deck and it is an astonishing fact that although all was chaos, the passageways and gangways being thronged with passengers, the mother and child hurrying upstairs met the other daughter coming down.
Recollections of the terrible experience which followed are not, in this moment of grief, clear, but Mrs. Fish remembers with gratitude that a gentleman - quite a stranger - came to her and proffered a lifebelt. Mrs. Fish told one of her children to fasten it on, but the brave little girl would not take it from her mother. Thereupon, the gentleman took off his own and gave this to the child.
One of the girls still had no lifebelt, and to her the mother clung as the great ship went down, dragging them far below the waves. They at length came to the surface, and for over an hour struggled in the sea. Reaching an overturned boat to which several passengers were clinging, her appeal for her child was answered and she herself was later taken into a collapsible boat, in which, strange to say, her other daughter was. Then a tug picked them up and took them to Queenstown.
From there, the family survivors eventually made it back to Bristol via Rosslare, in County Wexford and the ferry to Fishguard in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
Her parents’ marriage broke up, and Eileen was brought up in Somerset by her mother before becoming a telephonist with the London Telephone Company. She never married.
Eileen Fish resided at Flat E43. Du Cane Court, Balham, London, and died on the 12th November 1983, aged 78 years. She left an estate valued at £40,000.
Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, 1911 Census of England & Wales, 1939 Register, Canadian Passenger Lists 1865 – 1935, Cunard Records, Western Daily Press, Bristol Press, Probate Records, Graham Maddocks, Geoff Whitfield, Michael Poirier, Jim Kalafus, Cliff Barry, Paul Latimer, Norman Gray.
Copyright © Peter Kelly.