HMS Captain 1870         

 

Information and Memories from Descendants (cont)
 

Up John Collier Peter Baldwin T G Beenham John Bremner Thomas Butcher C W Dyer J Ellis George Fisher Wilfred Glanville John Gribble Albert Grover George Habens Walter Hedger Robert Herd John Hermitage Tom W Ivey Thomas Kernan RJ Magawley William May Robert Mayne Francis Merryman GH Payne Edmund Powell Alfred Ripley Anthony Spiller Arthur Tregaskiss John Walker

 

Tom W Ivey

My interest in HMS Captain is as follows -

Whilst researching my family tree I came across a letter written in 1973 to my late father from a great aunt with information on his great-great-grandparents, John and Louisa Ivey, of Portsea.

A passage in the letter states that Louisa Ivey died in 1871 and “I can remember vividly a framed death recording on the bedroom wall, in one of those morbid settings. It was a monument (depicted) saying In Memory of Louisa Ivey, died of a broken heart 1871, through the death of her only son Tom Ivey, who drowned in the Bay of Biscay off Cape Finisterre in the HMS Captain, who, on her maiden voyage (sic) turned turtle in a storm with the loss of all lives.”

              

I have discovered that Tom Ivey was her youngest child and only son, and would have been 17 or 18 when he drowned.

The letter also mentions that my great-great-aunt had been reading a biography of Napoleon 3rd and his wife Eugenie, and their flight to England at the time of the 1870 revolution. They found the only boat (a yacht) that would take them belonged to an Englishman, who agreed to take them to England, the date 7/9/1870 and it was a terrible crossing due to a storm.

The yacht owner told the royal pair that a relation of his was the captain of HMS Captain, which we now know went down on the same date.



Mary Frances Bertrand (New Zealand) - great-great-great-granddaughter of parents of young man lost in tragedy.

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Later note by website author - in the autumn of 2002, I managed to locate Louisa Ivey's grave in Portsmouth, but there  was no headstone. It was later thought that the plaque may have been in the nearby church of St Mary's, but investigations by a local  lady, known only as Sara, failed to find any trace of it.