Mr Thomas Hope was born at 17 Dryden Street in Liverpool, England on 9 December 1896 and baptised on 3 January the following year in St Martin’s Church. He was the son of William Hope, a carter and later a dock labourer, and the former Mary Jane Hayes. He had at least six siblings.

By 1911 the fourteen-year-old Hope had left school and worked as a shop errand boy; he lived with his family at 76 Ullswater Street in Everton. In April 1912 he was a steward’s boy aboard Carpathia when that ship rescued the survivors of the Titanic disaster.

Thomas Hope appears to not have had a long career as a mariner and by 1939 was working as a bar attendant. He never married and died in Liverpool on 9 June 1971; he was later cremated.