Here are the notes for "Sweet King Williamstown" from the Mick Moloney recording Far from the Shamrock Shore:

This song was written in the early 1900s by Daniel Buckley, a native of King Williamstown in the Sliabh Luachra area of County Cork, now known more by its original name of Ballydesmond. Buckley was a "character" with a precocious talent for singing and song writing, well known and liked in the locality. He decided to emigrate to the United states in 1912, at the age of 22, along with his 16 year old cousin Nora O'Leary who had received an offer to work as a domestic in New York. The ship they sailed on out of Queenstown Harbor was none other than the Titanic. When the ship struck the iceberg Danny Buckley was among those who led the charge from steerage to first class, breaking down the dividing doors in the process. He made it onto a lifeboat but, when officers with revolvers came to order all the men out of boats, Danny's nerve broke. As he lay cowering in the corner of a lifeboat, trying to hide, one of the female lifeboat passengers took pity on him and threw her shawl over him. Thus disguised as a woman, he managed to escape detection and was among those who made it safely to New York. The whole story came out during a U.S. Senate hearing on the tragedy when he was forced to appear and tell of his experiences.   

Indeed there was hardly ever a more reluctant witness subpoenaed to appear before that august body! Afterwards he was known disparagingly among the New York Irish as "Danny Buckley the girl." Probably motivated by a desire to prove his manhood, he enlisted in the American army in World War I. He was transferred overseas in 1918 and in the last week of the war was the last American solder to be killed -- ironically while helping wounded fellow soldiers escape the battlefields of France. "Sweet King Williamstown," his most famous composition, is still sung to the day in his native Ballydesmond where he is buried in the local cemetery right beside his cousin Nora.