And so we come to the end of January, the month that faces in opposite directions, the keeper of the door between the past and the future. There is hope in a new year with new beginnings, new phases of life to experience, but there is also the darkness that follows us from the old year, and one month of January is enough time for developments that flip our plans over and take the year in an unexpected direction. In Gàidhlig we call this month am Faoilleach, the month of the wolves. So beware and pass by these wolves in hope.
Patrick Toner was a glazier from Glasgow. However during the first world war, he was in the Royal Navy, stoking on an armed cargo ship called the HMS Mantua. The evidence for that was in his marriage certificate in which he gives the ship as his address. Recently I found the logs of the Mantua for that period on a very nice website called Naval-History.net. The logs are transcribed and scanned in here . This page records the day Patrick and Ellen got married and, sure enough, the Mantua was in the dock in Glasgow. There is a family legend that my grandfather Patrick survived a torpedo attack during the war but I can't find the incident in the Mantua logs. I'll try and find his military service records and add some more detail but the log of the HMS Mantua is a fascinating read for now.
Comments
Post a Comment