On Tower Hill Memorial is the name of First Engineer Thomas Moon serving on S.S. Lady Ann (Sunderland) with the Mercantile Marine who died 16/02/1917.
He was the son of the late Thomas Jobling Moon and Elizabeth Moon, and husband of Mary Elizabeth Moon (ne Kilburn), 34 Grindon Terrace, Sunderland. He was born in London.
Linda Gowans has submitted the following:-
Thomas’s father Thomas Jobling Moon, Master Mariner and Ship Owner, 1820-1870, was born and died in Sunderland. In 1861 he and Elizabeth were at 10 Nelson Street, Bishopwearmouth, with four children and a servant. The family had evidently been in Essex in 1857, when Thomas was born in Barking. By 1871 Elizabeth was a widow: five of her children, including Thomas, were with her at Nelson Street.
In the 1881 census Thomas was still in Sunderland, but on board ship: he was Second Engineer on Sunniside, a 956 GRT steam cargo ship built by W. Watson of Pallion, Sunderland, for Lumsden, Byers and Co. of Sunderland.
Thomas married Mary Kilburn (from Sunderland) in Newcastle in 1890. In 1891 they were at St Leonard Street, and in 1901 Mary was at 34 Grindon Terrace with George, 7, and Norma, 5.
The 1911 census shows both Thomas and Mary at Grindon Terrace with their 15-year-old daughter Norma. Thomas was a Sea Going Engineer, and on this occasion his census entry states that he was born at sea: perhaps the answer is that his mother was on a ship of his father’s then at Barking.
In early 1917 Thomas was First Engineer on Lady Ann, a 1,016 GRT steam cargo ship (collier), ship number 87331, completed in 1882 by S. P. Austin & Son for H. T. Morton. From 1911 she was owned by Lambton & Hetton Collieries.
In the afternoon of February 16th 1917 she was sunk by a torpedo fired by a German U Boat UB 21, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Franz Walther, approximately three miles East by South of Scarborough, when en route from Sunderland to Rochester with a cargo of coal. The captain and ten of the crew were killed, one of whom was Thomas. Survivors were rescued by the motor coble Shepherdess.
The eleven lost in the sinking of Lady Ann, including Thomas Moon, are remembered on the Tower Hill Memorial. All of them had Sunderland connections except two, the Master, Henry Young (Whitby and South Shields) and Walter William Gunn (Stepney, London).
Thomas Moon is remembered at Sunderland on S140.009, S140.010 and in S140.048 part 8 and in our List of Ships’ Crews.
