Lost Horizons

I'm not quite sure why I sometimes prefer dead people to the living.

Perhaps it's because they can't answer back and they have become a fixed, definitive, predictable point in time and space.

Whatever the reason, I found myself wandering amongst gravestones again earlier this week (in the Church Cemetery on Mansfield Road), in search of nothing in particular, when I came across the memorial shown above.

The interesting part (sorry Lizzie and Claud) of the inscription reads as follows:

...OUR DEARLY BELOVED ELDEST SON
AND OUR FONDEST BROTHER
GEORGE JAMES BOSTOCK,
WHO WAS MISSING ON THE HOSPITAL SHIP
BRITTANIC [sic] NOV. 16TH 1916, AGED 24.

The Britannic was one of three 'Olympic-class' liners built for the White Star Line. The other two were Olympic and Titanic (you may have heard of the latter).

Britannic was launched shortly before the start of the First World War and was almost immediately requisitioned as a hospital ship, commencing service on 23 December 1915.

On 21 November 1916, a German mine caused the Britannic to sink.

Remarkably, 1,036 of the 1,066 people on board were rescued. Many of those lost were in two lifeboats that had been lowered without permission and were sucked into the ship's still-turning propeller, with predictable consequences.

George Bostock had been married to Ada Nelson on 29 December 1915 at St Matthias' Church in Sneinton. 

George and Ada seem to have had a son, named after his father, who was born in 1917, but died at the age of 1 in 1918.

It's never necessary to travel too far in order to be reminded of the injustices of life and to obtain a sobering reality check.