The St Johnston community is coming together to plan a permanent memorial to four schoolboys who drowned in the River Foyle 100 years ago.
A public meeting recently was held to begin plans to commemorate the tragedy and ideas are being invited as to how best the memories of Arthur James Dowds (9), James Orr (13), George Quigley (13) and Patrick O’Donnell (9) can be remembered.
The quartet drowned on June 30th 1917 while bathing in an area known to locals as ‘The Widgeon Hole’.
A fifth boy, James Burnside, was with them, but he survived having realised that the waters at The Widgeon Hole were too deep.
At around 11am on Saturday, June 30, 1917, the group had passed a man, James Lynch, who was at the shore tarring his boat, but they decided to move to the channel to bathe when disaster struck.
That night at around 11pm, the bodies of Arthur James Dowds and James Orr were recovered by a diver from Derry who was brought in by the boys’ parents. The remains of George Quigley and Patrick O’Donnell were not recovered until later.
At the inquest into the deaths of Arthur James Dowds and James Orr, James Burnside recalled how the horror unfolded.
He remembered how James Orr had proposed that they go to bathe in the channel and how he watched his friends, first Quigley, then Orr, then O’Donnell and, finally, Quigley fell into the water.
The boys had undressed on the shore and had left their clothes on top of the marsh.
Burnside alerted James McLaughlin of Hillhead to what had happened.
Another schoolboy, Hugh McDaid, told the inquest that he had witnessed the group go to bathe in the channel and recalled how he saw the four boys ‘sink, then come up three times’
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