Miss Kneese

Miss Kneese boarded the Titanic as a second class passenger at Southampton. She was travelling with a Miss Remesch (Rentsch?).

They disembarked the Titanic at Cherbourg on the evening of 10 April 1912.

The identity of Miss Kneese has not been firmly established. However, it is spreculated the two ladies had been visiting a relative of Miss Kneese in Bournemouth prior to their sailing on the Titanic. 

Mr Heinrich Christian Friedrich Carl Wilhelm Kneese, known as Wilhelm, had been born in Germany, the son of Heinrich and Katherina Kneese of Hastenbeck, Hanover.  He came to England where he worked as a waiter in London.  He became a naturalised citizen in 1895.  He later became proprietor of the Mont Dore Hotel in Bournemouth.¹

On 7 April 1888 Mr Kneese was married to widow Melleora Alice Brown (née King), and the couple had two children, the reverend Rupert Henry William Kneese, later chaplain of Framlingham College [1889-1957], whose marriage late in life to a divorcee caused consternation in the church, and Frieda Karoline Kneese (born 1894).

Melleora, from Shirley, Southampton, had been married (in 1876) to Charles Stephen Brown, and from this first marriage were two children, Louisa Alice Brown and Harold Charles Brown.

Heinrich (Wilhelm) Kneese died on August 29th 1916, at 3, Belsize Square, London at the age of 64. His widow, Melleora, survived him by another 33 years, dying in Bournemouth, on February 13th 1949, at the age of 94.

It is very likely, but not currently confirmed, that the Miss Kneese on the Titanic was Heinrich Kneese's daughter Frieda Karoline Kneese.

On 2 January 1919 Frieda married Captain James Baker Sproston R.G.A. They would have a son James Guyton Blake Sproston (born 17 February 1920) and a daughter Joy M. Sproston (born 1923).

Frieda Sproston later anglicised her name to Freda, she died in Wales 1977. Her husband died in 1981.