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The disappearance of a Corkman in London
By PETER BERRESFORD ELLIS
This column has generally confined itself to the stories of those who left Ireland and made a successful life in this country or in other lands.
Yet for every success there were many failures. Many left Ireland and their families to vanish without trace.
There was such a young man in my family. He came to London at the turn of the 20th century and vanished. As the years went by without contact, he was almost forgotten as his generation died out. It was only a passing remark that made me set about the task of finding out what happened to him.
His name was Nicholas Francis Ellis, born in 1875 at the family home of 11 Douglas Street, Cork City.
The Ellis family had moved into Cork City from Millstreet and Doneraile at the start of the 19th century. William, born there in 1807, set up as a stonecutter, in Douglas Street. He was prominent in the Cork Republican Citizen’s Club in 1844, and was appointed official fundraiser for the defence of the Young Ireland leaders — William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel.
When William died in 1852 he had two sons, David and Nicholas, and both took on the family business as stonecutters.
Nicholas (1840-1912) was the more adventurous one and 1861 saw him in the United States where he joined the 20th Regiment of Kentucky Infantry, becoming a First Sergeant in ‘C’ Company. He fought on the Union side in the American Civil War, at major battles such as Shiloh, Corinth, Perryville, Nelson’s Crossroads, Stones River and Sherman’s march on Atlanta. He was discharged at the end of the war with excellent reports and credentials.
His discharge took place in Louisville, Kentucky, where Colonel Owen Starr had raised the 7th Regiment of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, recruited from former Union and Confederate Irish soldiers.
In 1866, they took part in the Fenian invasion of the provinces of British North America, crossing the Niagara Peninsular and securing a victory over the British forces at Ridgeway. It was believed among the family that Nicholas was one of the thousands of IRB volunteers who took part. He did not return to Cork City until 1869.
He rejoined his brother David in the stonecutting business and married Mary Coughlan, whose parents ran a wine and spirit store and public house at 6 Douglas Street, a few houses along from the stonecutting business.
Nicholas and Mary had four children. The eldest was William, born March 4, 1873, another son, Frank, and daughter, Mary, and his youngest son Nicholas Francis Ellis. Although Nicholas Francis was born on August 15, 1875, at his father’s house, he was not registered until November 6 by one Catherine Butler, of 4 Lloyds Lane, who said she was present at the birth. She was, however, illiterate and signed the register with an ‘X’.
Both Nicholas and Mary were very literate people and one wonders why there was this delay in registering their youngest child with the General Register or at SS Peter and Paul, built in 1866, the church the family worshipped at. No one recalls who Catherine Butler was.
But this was not the only mystery that Nicholas Francis Ellis bequeathed the family. He had been trained in the family business as a stonecutter and around the age of 25 decided to leave Cork and set out to seek his fortune in England.
The family business was doing well but David Ellis (1830-1917), his uncle, was married with a large family while father, Nicholas, was a partner in the stonecutting business. His elder brother would inherit that and eventually also the public house from his mother Mary Coughlan. Nicholas Francis wanted to make his ‘own bones’, as the saying goes.
So young Nicholas Francis Ellis left for London, sailing on a packet ship from Penrose Quay out of Cork City.
So far as anyone remembers, the family never heard from him again.
In Cork, the Ellis’s continued to do well. Nicholas Francis’ elder brother William (1873-1951) was elected to the Cork City Corporation in 1916 and served on it during the turbulent years of the War of Independence and Civil War, becoming Acting Lord Mayor of Cork when the Sinn Féin successor to Terence MacSwiney, Donal O’Callaghan, was forced to go ‘on the run’.
William Ellis left politics in 1935 and become involved in building up Cork’s technical education services. His son, also Nicholas, studied at UCC and became a medical doctor in the City. The family still live in Douglas Street.
My own father, who began his journalism career on the old Cork Examiner, left Cork in 1921, going to South America and France, before coming to London to work in the then famous centre of journalism Fleet Street.
Yet of Nicholas Francis Ellis his very existence seemed to have been forgotten. Then a member of the family wondered what had become of him.
I decided to see what I could do.
It seemed that Nicholas Francis Ellis had married on June 16, 1906, at the Lambeth Registry Office in south London. He gave his occupation as a stonemason journeyman, but his age was incorrectly given as 29 years old when he was nearly 31. He married a Gertrude Maud Fooks, the daughter of a local builder named Silas Fooks. Both he and Gertrude gave their address as 6A Willington Road, Stockwell. The witnesses merely signed themselves as H. and S. Pudney.
Was the fact that they were apparently living together before the marriage, or that Gertrude was not a Catholic and the marriage was in a registry office the reason why Nicholas never contacted his family back in Cork?
Nicholas Francis then disappears from record again until January 1912. He was then described as a ‘foreman marble mason’ living at 35, St. Paul’s Crescent, Camden Town, London.
Nicholas Francis was catching a train at Covent Garden Underground Station when he had a heart attack and died on the platform. His widow Gertrude supplied the details for the death registration, although she did not to know his correct birth date and background in Cork. Nicholas Francis was buried in Finchley Cemetery, in grave 222.
The sad facts leave many poignant questions unanswered. Why did he not keep in touch with the family? There seems to be no children of the marriage so far as one could trace. So what happened to Gertrude Maud Ellis afterwards?
Whenever I pass Covent Garden Underground Station I cannot help but spare a sad thought for poor Nicholas Francis.
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