b. 24/06/1893 Shankill, Belfast, Ireland. d. 04/08/1935 Belfast, Ireland.
DATE OF EM ACTION: 02/08/1935 Belfast, Ireland.
Ernest R Powell EM
Ernest was the son of David Powell and an unknown mother, born in the Shankill area of Belfast, Ireland on 24th June 1893. Little is known of his early life before he enlisted in the Royal Irish Rifles on the outbreak of World War I. He rose to the rank of Sergeant before being demobbed in 1919. He then became an employee of a handkerchief manufacturing company and rose through the ranks and by the time of the incident which would ultimately cost him his life, he was managing director. At the time of his death, he left a widow, Ruby (nee McKibbin) and five children.
EM CITATION:
On the 2nd August, 1935, a fire broke out in the ground floor premises of the building at 2, Amelia Street, Belfast, in which Mr. Powell was employed as managing director of a firm of handkerchief manufacturers. The ground floor was occupied by a firm of wholesale confectioners and instead of first giving an immediate alarm the staff on this floor endeavoured vainly to extinguish the flames, which had obtained a good hold before the workers on the upper floors became aware of the danger. When the danger became known, several women and girls escaped from the first and third floors by means of the main staircase and about forty women and female young persons on the second floor also proceeded to escape in the same way. A number succeeded, being assisted by Mr. Powell who was in his office at the commencement of the outbreak and who was subsequently seen on two occasions assisting women down the stairs and out of the building.
In the meantime the heat and smoke had much increased and the remaining women were unable or unwilling to descend by the front stairway. Efforts were made to induce them to try the back stairway, but without success. A few were assisted through a window to the flat roof of an adjoining building, and the others, more or less panic-stricken, made for the front windows which the Fire Brigade officers were then preparing to enter.
Mr. Powell was in the street at this juncture, but observing the plight of the women at the windows, he again groped his way up the smoke-laden stairs to the second floor, endeavoured to calm them, and shepherded them one by one through the windows to the firemen who, by means of a portable escape, conveyed them to the street.
During these rescue operations Mr. Powell sustained severe burns to eyes, face, scalp, neck, hands, arms and legs, and he died two days later from shock following these injuries.
From special enquiry and the evidence of eye witnesses it is clear that Mr. Powell risked his life consciously and deliberately to save the lives of a number of employees of the firm and that the injuries which he sustained were cumulatively acquired in long-sustained and repeated exposure to death in one of its most terrifying forms.
BURIAL LOCATION: UNKNOWN.
LOCATION OF MEDAL: UNKNOWN.
