Delving around in the Hill family tree, my maternal grandmother’s side of things, and I came across an interesting story concerning the husband of a third cousin of mine. His name was William Charles Morse, and she was Hilda May Seaward.

Hilda was born in Plymouth in 1902, the daughter of Walter and Mary Seaward. Walter was a Plate Layer on the Great Western Railway, and they lived on Laira Bridge Road, Plymouth. There was a tangle of Great Western Railway lines in Plymouth at the turn of the twentieth century, so Walter would have been kept busy.

William Charles Morse was born to William Henry Morse and Amy Jane Turner in Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland in 1899. While William’s mother Amy was Irish, from County Kildare, his father was English, from Cornwall, and serving in the British Royal Navy, stationed in Ireland at the time.

The family returned to England in 1905, to Plymouth, and it was there that young William joined the Royal Marines in 1914, at the tender age of fifteen. He saw action in the First World War aboard HMS Erin at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. HMS Erin was a Dreadnought class battleship that had been built in England but destined for the Ottoman Empire. She was captured in 1914 and renamed Erin. The Battle of Jutland was a decisive naval battle in the first war, and William was lucky to survive; one of my wife’s relatives died during that battle and like so many others, his name is on the Royal Navy monument in Plymouth.

William and Hilda married in 1922 and raised five children, all born in Plymouth. I haven’t been able to trace William’s record of service post 1919, so I don’t know which ships he was posted to, but he stayed in the Service and Hilda stayed based in Plymouth.

Then in 1937, as a Corporal in the Royal Marines, William met an untimely death when his bicycle collided with a tram rail that stood proud of the street, on Ebrington Street to be precise, and he died the following day in the Royal Naval Hospital from a fractured skull and the resulting haemorrhage. He was thirty-seven years old.

A cutting from the Western Morning News of Jul 2nd, 1938, details how Hilda successfully sued Plymouth City Council for negligence and was awarded total compensation of £850 (about £75,000 in today’s money).

Her lawyer was none other than Dingle Foot MP, former Lord Mayor of Plymouth and brother of the Right-Honourable Michael Foot MP, who was later to become the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. Dingle Foot was one of the founding partners in the firm of Messrs. Foot and Bowden, lawyers, which still trades today (as Foot Anstey) and has employed both my brother-in-law and my sister-in-law at various times.

Hilda died at the age of ninety-one, in Plymouth, in 1993. I haven’t yet looked at the Morse children, but I’m sure there are some tales to tell with them as well.

See the newspaper clipping here.