Eric Tharratt
Trawlerman’s son
GEORGE ERIC Tharratt, who has died at 104, was the son of a former skipper of Hull’s Viola trawler, who missed out on his own nautical career after being sent by an orphanage to work on a farm.
Mr Tharratt, who was known as Eric, went from farming into pharmaceuticals and spent 46 years with the Hull firm of Smith & Nephew.
But he never lost his love of the sea and, with his daughter, Pat, made the first public donations to the campaign to bring Viola, the world’s oldest surviving steam trawler, back to Hull from the Falklands Islands.
Mr Tharratt became an enthusiastic supporter of the Viola Trust, which wants to raise more than £4m to repatriate the vessel, built in Beverley in 1906.
He became involved after meeting the historian Dr Robb Robinson, who established the link between Viola and Eric’s father, George William Tharratt, who was born at Sunk Island in Holderness and became skipper of the vessel before the First World War.
When the hostilities began he was sent to skipper a minesweeper at Newhaven and was awarded the DSC for bravery. But when he died in 1928 he was buried in a pauper’s grave. With no state assistance, Eric’s mother decided she would have to put her four youngest children into an orphanage but Eric, then 11, volunteered to go in place of his youngest sister, Violet, who was just two.
He had been born in Portsmouth in June 1917. The family moved to Grimsby before crossing the Humber to Hessle, where they took a flat above De Boer’s butchers.
Mr Tharratt’s wife, May, died in 2015, a week after celebrating their platinum anniversary.