Name: Charles Herbert Davison
Rank: Third Engineer
Date of Death: 15/07/1917
Age: 29
Regiment/Service: Mercantile Marine S.S. “Torcello” (Hull)
Panel Reference: Memorial: Tower Hill Memorial
Additional Information: son of John Smith Davison and Emily Davison; husband of Janet Adrienne Davison (née Barker), of 4 Granby Place, Queen’s St, Scarborough. Born at Hull.
Paul Allen writes:
Albert Davison is one of two men with the surname of ‘Davison’ commemorated on the Oliver’s Mount Memorial. The other is: Third Engineer Charles Herbert Davison.
The son of John Smith, and Emily Jane Davison, and husband of Janet Davison (formerly Barker) of 4 Granby Place, Scarborough, Charles, a former pupil of Scarborough’s Municipal School, lost his life at the age of 29 during the sinking of the Hull registered SS Torcello, a 1,900 tons Ellerman’s Wilson Line cargo vessel. The Torcello was torpedoed whilst on passage from Palermo to Hull by U-48 160 miles SSW of Bishops Rock on 15 July 1917.
Existing records indicate Charles Davison was the ship’s only casualty on 15 July, and his remains have never been recovered from the sea. He is therefore commemorated on the Tower Hill Memorial in London, which remembers over 37,000 British Mercantile Marine seafarers and fishermen who lost their lives in the two World Wars and ‘who have no known grave but the sea’.
Charles had already been a victim of German ‘frightfulness’ when, 2 years previously, on 29 March 1915, he was aboard the Ellerman line’s 3,500 tons SS Flaminian when she was captured and subsequently sunk that day by gunfire off the Scilly Isles whilst on a voyage from Cape Town to Glasgow. A photograph of Charles Davison and the SS Flaminian appeared in the Scarborough Pictorial of Wednesday, 21 April 1915 under the banner ‘A victim of the pirates’.
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