Matlock – St. Giles’s Church (Thomas Kirwan)

Thomas Kirwan was the son of Patrick Kirwan and Bridget Kirwan. He married Mary Patricia Kennedy in 1936, at the Roman Catholic Church in Matlock and they moved to 30, Lynholmes Road in the town. He served as a Serjeant in the King’s Regiment (Liverpool) in the 70th Battalion, which was a young soldiers group disbanded in September 1943. Thomas doesn’t appear on the 1939 register, so he was likely already in the military at that point. Thomas and Mary did though have a child, Ann Teresa Kirwan, who was born on 7 April 1939. Unfortunately, Ann Teresa died in the Isle of Wight in 1959, at the age of 21.

Thomas died on 9 April 1945, aged 44 years. I don’t have a sufficient knowledge of military history to understand what happened here, although the King’s Regiment were involved with the attacks on Kiel in Germany. And on the day of Thomas’s death, there was a heavy bombing on Kiel which destroyed the last two major German warships, the Admiral Hipper and the Admiral Scheer.