Living links
with Knottingley's days of sail, when local sea-captains owned their own
vessels and families shared in the work of operating them, must be rare
now.
One of them -
and possibly the last - was Mr. William Hargrave, of Coronation Bungalows,
who died on Saturday at the age of 70. ‘Billy’ Hargrave, as he was
known to scores of older Knottingley residents, was the eldest son of the
late Captain Hargrave, master of the schooner ‘Elizabeth’ of
Knottingley, which went down in a storm off Farne Islands when Billy was a
little more than a boy.
The family
still posses the nameplate from the ship’s boat in which Captain
Hargrave and his men got away from the wreck, but which capsized with the
loss of all hands. On this occasion Billy happened to stay at home.
Nevertheless,
over the years then and since, he had probably acquired as much knowledge
as any Knottingley man living, of the mariners of Knottingley and Goole
and the coastwise travel of sail when families went down to the sea in
ships.
The family
sea-faring connection was far-reaching, with at least one branch at South
Shields; and at the time when the ‘Elizabeth’ was lost, for example,
Captain Hargrave’s brother was harbourmaster at nearby Seaham Harbour.
The family
tradition was carried on in Mr. Billy Hargrave’s generation by his
brother John who sailed the world with the Royal Navy and was rescued from
the sea when his ship went down at the Battle of Jutland; and in the next
generation by a nephew who was at the Italian landings.
Mr. Billy
Hargrave, after the loss of the family vessel, was apprenticed butcher to
the late Mr. Sam Steele of Knottingley, served in the KOYLI in the First
World War and was gassed and wounded at Cambrai; but spent the greater
part of his working life in the glass industry at Jackson Bros. Ltd.
Including his
brother Albert, who was killed on the Western Front in 1918, he had three
brothers and four sisters of whom two brothers and two sisters remain.
He nursed his
late wife, Mrs Clara Hargrave, during some years as an invalid proceeding
her death three years ago, She and their son and three daughters had all
been connected with the Ropewalk Methodist Church, from which the funeral
was to take place yesterday (Wednesday) before burial at Knottingley
Cemetery.
