In June 1908 Captain Weddall had a stoke and died. He was only 62. At the age of just forty Emily who had just become used of being a wife became a widow. She and the sea captain had celebrated their third wedding anniversary a month or so before.

Like her grandmother, Mary McArthur and sister Miriam Betts, she had lost her husband after a few years of marriage. There was little comfort in the same fact. Emily, unlike her widowed relatives had no children to comfort, or them to comfort her. Her closest relative, her sister, Miriam lived in Australia at the other side of the world. She could only offer support by letter, as she had two young children to care for. Once again Emily found herself alone in the world, but was a fact of her life that she had perhaps grown used of. Premature death was the way of the times, as many diseases that nobody dies from these days could not be cured or contained in the early years of the last century.

Captain Weddall, who was a quiet man by nature and quite the opposite of his gregarious wife. Little is known about the sea captain’s latter years on Achill. From the scant records which consist of two newspaper articles, complementing him on his generosity for his support of the St. Patrick’s Day concerts of 1907 and 1908, and a special thanks for supplying the refreshments  for the participants, and those who had traveled a distance to the concert and a story that appeared in the Connaught Telegraph almost fifty years after his death, by writer Sean O’Longain.

Sources

Connaught Telegraph 1830-current, 19.05.1956, page 4