THEY found his body in the freezing waters, still wearing his blue serge suit. A suit, it would appear, that was filled with as many valuable effects as he could carry, including a $3 silver chain, a silver watch, a ladies’ gold watch, a snuff box, silver match box, silver fob, eight rings, a gold stud, £15.10s, some gold, a union badge, pince-nez glasses and a pencil case.
Who knows what Alfonso Meo was intending to do with his booty? Or even why the man who ended up as corpse number 201 ‘male, estimated age, 55, dark hair and moustache’ was on the Titanic in the first place?
The Porter family of Norfolk believe they have a few answers as to the reason why the Bournemouth-based violin-maker had sailed on the doomed liner. They believe he may have been a bigamist, fleeing to make a new life in the New World.
Richard Porter of King’s Lynn believes Meo may have been his wife Carole Ann’s great-grandfather.
“My wife’s grandfather William James Hemmings was born out of wedlock,” he says. “He lived in Oxford and it appears his mother, Charlotte, married a man who was not his father and abandoned William to be raised by his grandparents.”
The family story, he says, is that William’s father was an Italian music teacher at Oxford. “We commissioned a research team to check at the time of William’s conception as to whether there were any Italian teachers at the universities in Oxford but nothing came to light.”
However, researchers did discover an Italian music and language teacher living close to where Charlotte lived at around the time William would have been conceived: Alfonso Meo.
“He appeared in London in 1901 but then he alone moved to Bournemouth to be with his twin brother, Antonio,” says Richard.
Alfonso and Antonio traded as violin-makers at 95 Old Christchurch Road, but on the 1901 census Alfonso is classed as a professor of music, married to Emily aged 38 and both living at 42 Hogarth Road, Kensington, with a son called Lenzi or Luigi. On the same census his twin was registered at 2 Queen’s Road, Bournemouth.
By 1911 Alfonso was living at 120 Old Christchurch Road, now the Nationwide Building Society, with a wife called Katherine, aged 28, and a daughter.
“It would appear that bigamy may well be involved,” claims Richard.
The next the family knew of their relative was of the recovery of his corpse from the Titanic.
“Was he yet again doing a runner?” asks Richard.
“The contents of his pockets seem to say so, plus he had several antique violins with him on the ship.”
Whatever the reasons they are now lost in time.
And Meo, whose body was later recovered by the Mackay Bennett, was buried at Fairview Cemetery, Halifax Nova Scotia on May 12, 1912.
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