John McLoughlin was lost on the Armoured Cruiser HMS Natal when it exploded in the Cromarty Firth in December 1915.
He had been born in Stockton in 1886 to Christy or Christopher McLoughlin, a labourer from Neath in Ireland, and his wife Mary from Antrim Ireland. He moved to Hartlepool with the family as a child and in 1901 they lived in Sarah St. Christopher McLoughlin was a labourer and 14 year old John was a fire lad in the paper mill. Christopher had been a beer house keeper ten years earlier in Stockton. John had at least three brothers and two sisters.
in 1906, John married Phyllis King in Hartlepool and the 1911 census shows that she too was born in Stockton. The couple lived in Marmion Road in 1911 with their three young sons, Henry, James and John.
John McLoughlin is remembered on the Chatham Memorial. naval records give his year of birth as 1883, but it is more likely 1886.
