Linferd Ware: My missing Great Uncle

 

Linferd Ware was the Great Uncle who most intrigued me and until this week he was also uncompleted, a brick wall. He was the third child of my Great Grandfather George Ware and his second wife, Rebecca Linferd, born on July 1^st 1875.  Like all their children he was born above the Town Hall in the Saturday Market Place Kings Lynn. This was because his father was Police Superintendent based in the Town Gaol next door.

Linferd’s story reads like the life of an over-active butterfly. By the age of 15 he was living in Regents Park Barracks in London as a Bandsman in the First Lifeguards Brigade. The life obviously didn’t suit him so with his father’s help he purchased a discharge for £18 and soon after returning home he joined the Lynn police.  There were suggestions of nepotism when he was soon given more responsibility, so he moved to the police force in Nottingham where he worked as a young detective constable. However by 1895 he was attracted to the military again, this time joining the Royal Dragoons, once again as a musician. He was now aged 21, 5 foot 10 inches tall, weighing 137 lbs. He had hazel eyes and dark hair. This time he remained in the army for 3 years before once more purchasing his discharge.  Later that year Linferd Ware married Katherine Clarke (Kitty), daughter of the Kings Lynn Dock Master. At that time Linferd is listed as a Coal Merchant.

Linferd appears twice in the 1901 census. Once with his wife living in the centre of Southampton, occupation musician and Ship steward and in the other entry he is named as a steward aboard the steam yacht, Erin, lying off Hythe in Southampton water.  The Erin has an interesting history. At the time it belonged to Sir Thomas Lipton, who also owned the Shamrock II one of the entries to the Americas cup. Linferd must have been aboard the Erin on April 30^th 1901 when it towed Shamrock II to New York.

A Model of the Steam Yacht Erin

After that I was unable to find any trace of Linferd though I suspected a death when he was not named in his father’s will in 1911.  Finally, I found a small death report in the Lynn Advertiser saying that Linferd Ware had died in the Memorial Hospital in Bulawayo, in the Eastern Cape in September 1909 aged 34.  I believe his wife Kitty was with him as Katharine Ware is on the passenger list of a ship sailing from Cape Town to Southampton in 1912.