Faces of the Titanic: Patrick Dooley died on 15th April having come home to visit his dying father

Dooley, a kind and generous man, had visited his home in Limerick and was heading back to Chicago

Visit our Titanic Centenary Commemoration section here

PHOTOS - photographs of some of the Irish on board

Profile taken from Senan Molony's book "The Irish Aboard the Titanic"

Ticket number:370376. Paid £7 15s.

Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Patrickswell, Knockainey, Lough Gur, County Limerick.
Destination: 142 East 31st Street, New York city, for onward to Chicago.

A postcard written by Patrick Dooley (38) from Queenstown declared: ‘I am sailing today, Thursday, on Titanic on her maiden trip to New York, her first trip on the Atlantic. Good bye. Love, Patrick Dooley’. The postcard showed a man standing in a roadway, cap in hand. Titled ‘The Irish Emigrant’, a poem beneath ran:

I’m bidding you a long farewell, my Mary kind and true But I’ll not forget you Darling, in the land I’m going to; They say there’s bread and work for all, and the sun shines always there, But I’ll never forget Ould Ireland were it fifty times as fair, were it fifty times as fair.

Patrick J. Dooley, by all accounts, was an extremely generous and considerate man:

Much regret was felt by the people of Bruff and Loughguir districts when it was learned that Mr Patrick Dooley, son of Mr Edmond Dooley of Patrickswell, was amongst the number who went down with that ill-fated vessel.

Mr Dooley was home on holidays from Chicago, chiefly for the purposes of seeing his aged father, and left in good spirits.

He was a fine type of our exiled countrymen and on several occasions won distinction in American athletics. Mr Dooley was also one of the truest Irishmen that ever emigrated to the Great Republic of the West and never kept his purse closed when the cause of Ireland needed it.

(The Cork Examiner, 16 May 1912)

Dooley had been living in Chicago for nine years, having emigrated in early 1903, and worked in a hotel. He was on the verge of coming home for good and was only travelling back to the United States for a short time. A letter found in his estate administration papers suggests this strongly, and was written by a solicitor acting for Dooley’s elderly father, who is presumably the source of the lawyer’s information:

1st July, 1913.

Dear Mr Travers,

I enclose papers for Grant of Administration intestate herein. The deceased was drowned on the Titanic and the only property he left was a deposit receipt in the Munster & Leinster Bank for £104 deposited a few days before he sailed out. He may have taken some little money with him, but he was not to remain long over. Have I the place of death described correctly? If not, please return to be amended.

​
Nster.com