He was the son of the late George Hunter Harland and Susannah Harland. Born at Whitby.
Linda Gowans has submitted the following:-
George Hunter Harland (junior) was born at Whitby in 1898. In the 1901 census he was at Ward’s Yard, Baxtergate, Whitby, with his mother Susannah, Wife of Merchant Seaman, sister May Ann, born 1895, and in-laws. His mother Susannah died at Whitby by mid-1901, aged 38, and his seaman father George died in hospital at Algiers on January 25th 1908. At that time his father’s home address was given as 22 Co-operative Terrace, Sunderland. He had been Second Mate on the ship ‘T. R. Thompson’ of Sunderland.
In 1911 Mary Ann, Bake House Girl, was living with relatives at 22 Co-operative Terrace, but George Hunter Harland, scholar, was at The Orphan Asylum, Sunderland. Despite his father’s fate, he evidently decided to go to sea as well, and in 1913 at Sunderland he was indentured as an Apprentice.
In 1915 he was on the 4,349 GRT steamer ‘Okement’, newly built by William Pickersgill & Sons for James Westoll of Sunderland, with Henry M. Westcott of Sunderland as Master. On February 1917 ‘Okement’, carrying coal and general cargo, was sunk by U-boat U 64 140 miles off Malta. Master Westcott was lost with ten others. We do not know if George was on board at that time, but if so, he was one of the survivors.
On April 18th, 1918, he was serving on ‘Bamse’ of London, a 1,007 GRT cargo ship completed in 1875, built and operated by Thomas Turnbull & Son of Whitby as ‘Syra’. Subsequent changes of owner (including at one time Fred Olsen) saw her renamed ‘Klondyke’ in 1897 and ‘Bamse’ in 1905. By 1918 she was operated by the UK Shipping Controller. She was sunk on April 17th 1918 by a torpedo fired by German submarine UB 80 approximately 15 nautical miles West by North of Portland Bill, while en route from Rouen to Swansea. Four of the 17 crew members were drowned, including Second Mate George Hunter Harland. Ironically, less than three weeks earlier the ship on which his father had served ten years before, the ‘T. R. Thompson’, had also been torpedoed and sunk.
George Hunter Harland is remembered in Sunderland on S140.009, S140.010, S140.048 part 10, S140.097 and S140.116 and on our List of Ships’ crews
