March 25, 2026, 4:05 a.m. CT
It was Sunday morning, March 30, 1947, when the body of British Naval officer William J. Coffee was found floating in Bayou Chico at the foot of J Street near today’s Corinne Jones Resource Center.
Coffee was a recipient of the Order of the British Empire for his efforts to help save his ship after it was torpedoed by a German submarine on Oct. 26, 1941, during World War II.
Yet he ended up in an unmarked grave in Pensacola, though for years his family had thought he had died, and was buried, in Texas. It was only recently Coffee’s grandson, along with the grandson’s wife, found out that Coffee’s 54 years of life came to end in a foreign, far away city he didn’t know.
Now a grandson he never knew, Charles “Charlie” Coffee, along with his wife, Marjorie “Marj” Coffee, both retired police officers living in the historic Scottish Borders in Southeastern Scotland, are hoping to bring some recognition, and an inscribed grave marker, to this British war hero.
The family story, though he wasn’t talked about often, was that Coffee had died and was buried in Texas.
It was only recently, while searching for his name and information about him, that Charlie and Marj learned that Pensacola was the place where his body rests.
“I did not know an awful lot, basically,” said Charlie Coffee, 66, who was born 12 years after his grandfather died. “He was in the war and the story basically got told that later on he had fallen off a dock near Galveston and that was basically it. I never really had a conversation with my dad about it because he was quite young, in his 50s, and I was still at the age then, you know, where you didn’t sit down for lengthy conversations.”
His wife, Marj Coffee, said that her husband’s grandfather deserved a better final fate than resting in an unmarked grave site covered with grass and nothing else. So, they plan on doing something about it.
“The family would like to pay to have a grave marker put up in the cemetery,” she said. “The sadness of this is (Coffee) was a war hero. He was awarded the OBE by the British government during World War II. We believe he deserves to be recognized.”
Coffee was buried at historic St. John’s Cemetery, established in 1876, under what is now just grass, near graves that are marked. Officials at the cemetery said that the only record of Coffee was an undertaker’s record that the body was buried there.
William J. Coffee, was a native of Seacombe, England, just across the River Mersey from Liverpool. He was born on March 4, 1893. But as an adult, he became a British Naval officer, reaching at least the rank of lieutenant commander.
In spring of 1947, Coffee was chief engineer of the SS Corrales, a British steamship anchored in Pensacola Bay, not far from Bayou Chico.
His body was found by local residents about 9:25 a.m. in the morning on April 3, though he had been missing since March 24.
His body was identified through fingerprints and an autopsy concluded that he had died from drowning, with no evidence of foul play and no inquest to be held.
“Nobody really talked about him and we don’t know why, so it was a mystery,” Marj Coffee said. “I was intrigued by this and my husband and I were both police officers for 30 years, so as we are now retired, we decided to finally discover the truth about his death.”
There are no mentions of the SS Corrales in the Pensacola News Journal in 1947, other than in reports about Coffee’s death. But there is no indication of why the ship was in Pensacola after the war.
And Charlie and Marj Coffee don’t know why a proper gravestone wasn’t paid for.
“Why his wife Winifred never arranged to have her husband’s grave marked is again, unknown,” she said. “They were quite a wealthy family and very well-educated. They were a well-known family within the area.”
During World War II, Coffee’s ship, SS Ariguani, was torpedoed by the German submarine U-83 while escorting a convoy about 600 miles southwest of Portugal. That submarine was responsible for sinking five ships, but not the Ariguani, which the crew immediately abandoned only to return once they realized the ship would not flood and sink. It was for his efforts in helping tow the ship largely intact to Gibraltar near the tip of the Iberian Peninsula that he was awarded the Order of the British Empire. The ship, previously a passenger cargo ship before being requisitioned by the British Navy, would eventually return to civilian service.
“I think he’s sort of deserving of something—a plaque or whatever just to give brief details of him, who he was and what he did,” Charlie Coffee said of his grandfather.
We all hope to make a mark. The fact that his grandson whom he never met is now searching for information on him, and hoping to honor him with a testament, a statement of “I Was Here,” shows that William J. Coffee did leave a mark.
We’ll keep you updated.
