Rimmer, Thomas

Carpenter’s Mate

No. R 243464, Merchant Navy, SS Empress of Australia

Died as the result of an accident on Tuesday 24 October 1944 (aged 20, death certificate; aged 24 Merchant Navy record)

Biography

This Merchant Navy casualty is included on this website because he was serving aboard a Royal Navy troopship when he died in Bangor Military Hospital during the Second World War.  Whilst his death was not directly attributable to enemy action, his name was included in a list of war casualties published in the Manchester Evening News newspaper.  His death was reported in the Liverpool Evening Express newspaper under the headline Killed Aboard Ship.  It was noted there that he had been serving in the Merchant Navy for 12 months.

Thomas Rimmer, late of 72 Princes Street, Southport, died on 24 October 1944 at the General Military Hospital, Bangor.  He died from ‘laceration of the brain following fracture of the skull caused by accidentally falling from the stringer plate of a vessel’.

[a stringer is a horizontal stiffener fitted along the ships’ side to provide strength and rigidity; a stringer plate is the outboard strake of plating on any deck]

An inquest was held on 26 October 1944.

A bachelor, Thomas Rimmer was serving as a Carpenter’s Mate aboard the SS Empress of Australia, a passenger liner requisitioned in 1939 by the Royal Navy for use as a troopship.  She was sold for scrap in May 1952, purchased by the British Iron and Steel Corporation, and broken up at Inverkiething.

In one Merchant Navy record it is recorded that Thomas Rimmer was born on 31 August 1920 at Southport.