| Description | Work completed by volunteer includes the following information:
William Blyth Rutherford was born in Hampstead, London, on 7 Oct 1894 and baptised in the local Emmanuel Church on December 16th of that year. William was the elder of two sons born to William Henry Rutherford (1863-1945) and his wife Alice (nee Blythe) (1873-1926), a Beverley girl. They had married in Hull in 1893. His father originally came from London and was a joiner/carpenter and builder. For unknown reasons his father had moved to East Yorkshire.
By 1901 William Henry owned the Coffee Tavern at 17 Saturday Market and his wife ran the business. The family lived above. His father also established a fruit and potato merchant’s business on Lairgate. Nothing is known of William's upbringing but St Mary's Boys School was a possible place of education.
William is recorded in the 1911 as being an apprentice “marine engineer”. Interestingly also lodging at 17 Market Place was a Swede, naturalised in 1913, Oscar Janson, who was also a marine engineer. This may have been connected with William’s apprenticeship. The first record of William joining the Merchant Navy is in 1913 when he is in the crew of RMS Franconia, a new Cunard liner sailing from Liverpool to America, Boston being its usual destination. It seems that William continued to work on the transatlantic liner route and also the route from the US to South America and is recorded in 1938 as being a “1st Engineer”.
In WWI it is presumed that William undertook similar transatlantic runs, perhaps later in convoys to protect against the German U-Boat threat. He was awarded the War Medal and the Merchant Navy campaign medal.
William eventually settled in the city of Liverpool, in the West Derby area. He was married in the summer of 1933 to Susan F Parsons. They had two children: Ann in 1937 and Hilary in 1942. William died in Liverpool on 23 Jul 1973. His wife had died in 1967.
Includes information taken from census, military records, newspapers |