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Post date: Oct 24, 2017 7:29:5 PM
The Dora Winters collection, which is held by Friends of Cleethorpes Heritage, features hundreds of photographs taken in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, featuring Dora’s family and friends and recording family gatherings, social occasions and activities and holidays.
Amongst these photographs are a number of the Sams family – George, his wife Jenny and their son Peter. George was born in 1892 in West Ham, the son of Edith Emily Sams, who seems to have had several children out of wedlock and spent a significant part of the early 1900s with them in Dunmow Union Workhouse in Essex. She eventually married Thomas W Archer in 1912 and remained in the Dunmow area until her death in 1940.
George evidently escaped the workhouse by becoming a fishing apprentice. He was apprenticed in the Merchant Navy with the Grimsby Steam Fishing Company in 1908 and became an engineer. In 1916, he enlisted in the Inland Water Transport Corps, part of the Royal Engineers. At the time he was living at 43 Fildes Street and his service record describes him as being 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighing 118 pounds, whilst his physical development is described as ‘poor’, not surprising for a lad who had spent much of his youth in the workhouse.
Just over a year after enlisting George was sent out to Mesopotamia. He went from Sapper to Sergeant and on his return to this country at the end of the war was posted to Southampton before being sent for demobilization at Belton Park near Grantham on 1st May 1919.
Although George made it through the war, his younger brother Frank was less fortunate. Three years George’s junior, Frank followed in his brother’s footsteps, becoming apprenticed to the Grimsby Steam Fishing Company in 1910 at the age of 14. Sadly, only a few months into the war, the Linnet, which was owned by Moodys and Kelly, was lost with all hands, including Frank. Last heard from on 1st November 1914 as it left the Faroe Islands fishing grounds, the circumstances of the Linnet’s sinking remain unclear, although a mine strike seems the most likely cause. At 19, Frank was the youngest of the eleven men lost, whose names are inscribed on the WW1 Memorial at Tower Hill.
Less than a year after his demobilization, on 24th February 1920, George Sams married Grimsby lass Jenny Hague. She was the daughter of Alfred and Sarah Hague
Two years after his death, George’s widow Jenny re-married, her new husband Alfred T W Archer. She died in Grimsby in 1978.
(nee Winters) and the cousin of Dora Winters. In the early years of their marriage, George and Jenny lived at 31 Bath Street in Grimsby, next door to Sarah, who by then had been a widow for many years.
After more than ten years of marriage, George and Jenny finally celebrated the arrival of their son Peter on 20 December 1931. The photographs in Dora’s album suggest that the Sams and the Winters families were close friends, as there are a number of pictures of Peter with Dora, her sister Vera and mother Emma. With George away at sea for long periods, they were no doubt welcome company for Jenny and her son.
When war broke out in 1939, the Sams family were living at 116 Humberstone Road in Grimsby. Two years into the conflict, George was Chief Engineer on board the fishing vessel Ophir II when, on 7th September 1941, it sank en route to the west coast of Scotland after hitting a mine, fifteen miles from Spurn Point. George was one of five men lost that day, along with Harold Henry James Crisp (45), Cyril Denison (35), Harry Ernest Fawcett (66) and Horace Charles Wilson (45). He was 49 years old and the memoriam notices in Dora’s photo albums reveal that his nickname was Smiler
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