Born in Bridgwater in 1860, Thomas was the eldest child of Thomas Souden Parminter (Thomas senior) and his wife Mary Ann nee Clatworthy. Thomas William was born when his parents were living in rented accommodation on Salmon Parade, overlooking the river Parrett. By the time Thomas was ten he had two small sisters and the family were living in Polden Street.
Thomas senior was working very hard to be able to have his own grocery business, so that he could be independent and have a legacy to pass on to his family. For a while he worked as a grocer’s traveller, so he would have been away from home quite a lot. However, before too long he achieved his ambition to have his own shop in Fore Street, and when Thomas William was old enough, he began to work with his father. Their shop carried a wide range of items, so there was a lot to learn.
Marriage to Laurie
While travelling on business for his father, Thomas William had the opportunity to meet people in different parts of the country. This is how he met Laura Richmond Harrington, known as Laurie. Laurie’s father Edward Cranmer Harrington was a ship builder, and Laurie was born in a house on the quayside at Burnham in Essex. When Laurie was ten she was staying with her uncle Alfred and his sister Lucy Richmond in Ipswich in Suffolk. Laurie’s mother may have already been ill, and she died in 1874. Laurie’s father soon remarried, and moved the remaining family to Ipswich.
By 1886, Laurie was living in a place called Great Bromley in Essex, near Colchester. At this time her father and his second wife were living not too far away in Wivenhoe. Thomas William Parminter married Laurie Harrington in Great Bromley, Essex, on the 29th of December 1886.
Family life in Bridgwater
Thomas brought Laurie to Bridgwater to meet his family, and they moved into 1 Kepler Villa in Wembdon. While living here, Thomas and Laurie had four children, Ernest in 1887, Thomas Richmond 1888, and twins Edward and Lucy in 1891. In September 1889, Thomas was one of a group of Bridgwater parents who were summoned for not getting their children vaccinated against small pox. In his defence, Thomas said that an older child had been vaccinated and had their eyesight badly damaged, and that a medical man had said this was a result of the vaccination. Nevertheless, Thomas was fined five shillings with costs[i].
Thomas bred prize poultry as a hobby, and he showed some of his birds at the Bridgwater Poultry Association in February 1891. Thomas won prizes for a game duck wing cock and a game black red hen[ii]. However, by February 1894, Thomas and Laurie had moved from Bridgwater to Ipswich[iii], and Thomas set up as a grocer there. Thomas’s father died at the end of April 1895, but Thomas didn’t return to Bridgwater to take over the family grocery business in Fore Street.
Ipswich
Thomas and Laurie had another son, Henry, in Ipswich in May 1895. A year later there was a terrible accident. On a Monday morning in March 1896, Laurie was on her own with the three younger children in their house in Cauldwell Hall Road. She brought the twins downstairs in their nightclothes and returned upstairs to fetch the baby. Within a minute or two she heard the children screaming and rushed back downstairs to find five year old Edward’s clothes in flames. According to his twin sister, Edward had stood on the fender to reach a box of matches, and his nightgown caught fire. There was no fireguard. A doctor was sent for and he advised that the boy should be rushed to hospital in a cab. Sadly the burns were extensive and Edward died from shock that afternoon. The coroner carefully reviewed the evidence, and said that there was no neglect on the part of the mother, who had only left the room to fetch her baby[iv].
Such a tragedy would be difficult for many families to deal with, and after this Thomas and Laurie’s marriage broke down. Eventually Thomas moved to the U.S.A where he started a new life and a new family.
A new life in Illinois
Thomas moved to Illinois and found work with the Western Electric Company. He worked in their enormous Hawthorne Works in Cicero, a town to the west of Chicago. The Western Electric Company organised an annual picnic outing for their employees and chartered five Great Lakes passenger steamers to take the employees from the wharves at Chicago across the southern tip of Lake Michigan to Michigan City.
On the 24th of July 1915, Thomas went on the company picnic outing together with his sixteen year old daughter Anna, from his second family. Thomas and Anna would have woken early and dressed hurriedly in order to get an early train to Chicago, in time to board the first ship, the S.S. Eastland at 6.30am.
The weather was cool and damp, so many of the passengers went below decks to get warm, and enjoy the ragtime band that was already playing. By 7.10am the ship had finished boarding 2,572 passengers, and quite a few were still standing on the upper deck when the vessel began to list to port (the left side), away from the wharf. The crew attempted to correct this list by letting water into the ballast tanks.
At 7.28am the Eastland lurched sharply to port and suddenly rolled completely onto her side, coming to rest on the river bed, half submerged in water.
It happened so suddenly that passengers and crew tumbled helplessly across the now vertical decks, together with their belongings and heavy ship’s furnishings. Many of those on the upper deck slid into the water, those below deck made a rush for the exits. Hundreds were crammed together and then the ‘grand staircase’ collapsed, removing the main escape route from the lower decks. Heavy items such as pianos, tables and bookcases fell down, crushing some people and trapping others.
The ship was still only a few feet away from the wharf and help was organised quickly. The tug Kenosha was nearby as it had been intended to tow the SS Eastland out onto the lake. The tugboat captain acted very quickly to pull his vessel alongside to act as a bridge for passengers to walk across and onto the wharf. Local people and businesses all rushed to do whatever they could to help. Many other small vessels came to help, and amateur and professional divers risked their lives to try to rescue people in the water and still in the boat.
The Eastland captain, Captain Pederson sounded the alarm too late and did not order an evacuation or issue lifejackets. Now he made things worse by trying to stop welders from cutting holes in the side of the Eastland to rescue those trapped below decks. He complained that the welders were ‘ruining his ship’. The angry crowd turned on him and he was taken into custody by police, which may have saved his life. Dozens of the passengers were rescued by the welders, who had been working nearby and rushed to help, bringing their oxyacetylene torches.
Emergency services also responded magnificently, including the Chicago Fire Department, the Chicago Police Department, the Chicago Health Department and the Coast Guard.
All the responders acted with great bravery, but were deeply distressed by the scenes they witnessed. 844 people perished in this accident, mostly passengers but also two crew members and one rescuer. Thomas William Parminter and his 16 year old daughter Anna were among the dead.
Thomas and Anna were buried in Mount Auburn Memorial Park, Stickney, Cook County, Illinois. Thomas is also memorialised on his parents’ headstone in Wembdon Road Cemetery, Bridgwater.
S.S. Eastland
Built by the Jenks Shipbuilding Company of Port Hurno, Michigan and launched in 1903, her first owner was the Michigan Steamship Company. The brief for her design was that she was to be fast, carry fruit as a cargo and 500 passengers.
Over the next few years there were changes in ownership and modifications made which were intended to increase speed and passenger capacity, but these did reduce stability, particularly when loading and unloading. She nearly capsized in July 1904, on leaving South Haven with 3000 passengers. Her passenger capacity was reduced and other modifications made but there was another severe listing incident in July 1912 while loading passengers in Cleveland.
The tragedy of the Titanic resulted in the Seaman’s Act of 1915, which required additional lifeboats to be retrofitted. These lifeboats, added to the upper deck of the Eastland, made it more top heavy.
After the Eastland disaster, a Grand Jury indicted the steamship company president and three other company officers for manslaughter, and the ship’s captain and engineer for criminal carelessness. The builder Jenks said that the ship was perfectly stable and designed for the purpose initially specified, but it was used differently and modified after it left his yard. The court decided that the company officers were not on board when the accident happened, and the captain and engineer acted within the reasonable course of business and their actions had ‘more of innocence than guilt’. The court reasoned that the Eastland had “operated for years and carried thousands safely” and so the accused were justified in believing the ship to be seaworthy.
Relief for relatives
On the day of the disaster the Western Electric Company immediately allocated $100,000 towards relief for the victims’ families, and practical help was also arranged. The Eastland Disaster Relief Committee was set up and Chicago citizens contributed over $400,000, to be administered by the American Red Cross.
Thomas’s second wife Annie would have needed this help.
Clare Spicer and Jill Trethewey 18/02/2026
References
SS Eastland
- United States Coastguard- https://www.dco.uscg.mil/Portals/9/DCO%20Documents/5p/CG-5PC/CG-CVC/MIR/Readings/Trident-History-1915-EASTLAND.pdf?ver=2020-06-30-195529-750
- Eastlanddisaster.org - https://eastlanddisaster.org/history/what-happened#
Ancestry.co.uk – births, marriages, deaths and census records
Friends of Wembdon Road Cemetery – burial records and photographs of memorials
National Newspaper Archive – digital images of newspaper reports.
[i] Taunton Courier & Western Advertiser 11 Sept 1889
[ii] Taunton Courier & Western Advertiser 11 Feb 1891.
[iii] Thomas summoned Leonard Mullett for assaulting him, but the case was dismissed. Ipswich Journal 24 Feb 1894
[iv] Evening Star 01 April 1896, Ipswich Journal 4 April 1896