Irish Aboard Titanic (27 page)

Catherine was lost in the disaster, and Annie survived wearing only her nightgown. She cannot be attributed to any lifeboat, since she refrained from all later comment about the
Titanic
, even when pressed by her family. Her daughter Mary Kapolnek said after Annie's death in 1990: ‘She wouldn't talk about the sinking. She refused to return to Ireland to see her parents because she was afraid of both the water and flying. She would be scared if we children even went in a rowboat.'

When Annie left hospital, she was wearing a donated coat and a pair of old shoes over her nightgown. She and Annie Kelly travelled together to Chicago, where Dr Mary O'Brien of the Catholic Women's League met them. The League sought money for the two destitute teenagers from a relief fund established by the mayor.

Report of the American Red Cross (Titanic Disaster) 1913:

No. 283. (Irish.) A girl, 17 years of age, travelling with her aunt, who was lost, left without funds or friends, suffered seriously for many months, from shock and exposure. She lost all her belongings, and received, immediately, clothing and $125 from other American sources of relief. She went to Chicago with some girl friends. This Committee interested a Chicago Society in making plans for the girl's training. She is now in a boarding school where she will remain for a year to be fitted for self-support. ($575)

She lived with her two aunts, Margaret McDermott and Sarah Gollogly, after the sinking, attended a Chicago business school and worked for several years before meeting Raymond Straube, a plumbing contractor, whom she married. Annie had by now reverted to calling herself Ann, her given name. They had three daughters – Jackie, Mary and Frances.

Ann Straube finally broke her silence on the tragedy in an interview with grandson Kris Kopp in 1984. It appears Ann, then in her eighties, had imported learned material into her own account, edited here. Yet she also states clearly that the ship broke in two. A year later the
Titanic'
s discovery confirmed the fact, and confounded the conclusions of two official inquiries that she sank intact.

After 72 years, Titanic survivor talks

For 72 years she has kept her memories of that miserable night to herself, always refusing to tell reporters what she saw, what she felt.

‘When I came to Chicago they would pester me and pester me,' she said of the aggressive reporters who pursued her (in 1912). ‘My aunt just wouldn't permit it.' The only people who could coax any information out of her at all were grandchildren writing book reports about the sinking of the
Titanic
.

But now one of her grandchildren is a reporter and 87-year-old Anne McGowan has agreed to make an exception. She emerges from her bedroom carrying a package wrapped in orange tissue paper. Inside are yellowed and ragged newspapers from 1912 with screaming headlines such as ‘Liner
Titanic
Sinks – 1,300 drowned, 866 saved'. The clippings arouse the memories she has struggled to repress all these years, and as she slowly begins to speak, her eyes grow teary.

McGowan was 15 at the time and travelling with her Aunt Margaret [
sic
] McGowan from Ireland to New York on the newest luxury liner. ‘I felt so sure of the safety – everybody did,' McGowan said. ‘Wealthy people had waited on lists to get on the ship.'

McGowan remembers enjoying the lovely flower gardens and other luxuries on board. She also took part in the activities, even the adult dance on Sunday, April 14. (The memory of her naughtiness makes her giggle.) That's where she was when the confusion began.

‘I was at the party, and there were a bunch of drunks there. My aunt wanted me away from the party, but everyone was having so much fun,' McGowan said. She doesn't recall feeling any jolt or bump, but suddenly officers and crew were rushing around and the word spread quickly that the ship had hit an iceberg. She asked a crewmember if the ship could be saved, and he assured her there was no chance of that.

She was in one of the first lifeboats to be lowered. ‘“You take her, you take her” – they just grabbed me the way I was, wearing just a dress and shoes; they would not even let me take my purse,' McGowan recalled. ‘I was just numb and it was so cold out on the ocean.

‘The whole time in the lifeboats the crew just kept telling me, “Don't worry, your aunt is in a lifeboat on the other side, and she'll be all right.”

‘Women wouldn't leave their husbands,' McGowan said. ‘They were screaming, and I could hear gunshots in the background. Apparently, some of the men had tried to dress like women in order to be rescued, and they were shot.'

Even in her lifeboat, men were begging to get in. ‘Let me in or I'll tip the whole lifeboat, is what one man said,' McGowan said. ‘Of course, we had to let him in.'

While bobbing up and down in the waves, the survivors still could see the ship, and they heard the band still playing. ‘They just kept playing
Nearer My God to Thee
,' McGowan recalled. ‘Then the ship just busted in half, and that's when all the screaming started. It was just so terrible; I guess a boiler had busted.'

By the time McGowan's lifeboat was hoisted aboard the
Carpathia
, her eyes had begun to bleed, apparently from the salt water and wind, and she was shivering violently.

‘By morning we were dripping wet,' she said. ‘We were chilled, but the fright alone was enough to chill our bodies. I didn't know if there was any chance. One ship had already refused to acknowledge the signals before the
Carpathia
came through. You don't know how awful it was.'

Hesitating for a few moments, McGowan brings up the most painful memory of all. She never saw her aunt again. She believes her aunt's lifeboat was sucked into the whirlpool created when the
Titanic
finally sank.

‘I am still upset because I don't know what happened to my aunt,' she said calmly. ‘In the newspapers, when we got back, they had her listed as a survivor, but I can't believe that.'

(
Chicago Sun Herald,
15 April 1984)

Ann died on 30 January 1990, finally succumbing to liver cancer at her home in Chicago. She was buried in All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois. Only Ellen Shine Callaghan, aged 101, outlived Annie McGowan Straube as the last living Irish connection to the
Titanic
disaster. Her family believed Ann to be aged 92 when she died. Her death certificate shows a birth date of 5 July 1897, which placed Annie at only age 14 when aboard the
Titanic
, easily the youngest of the Irish passengers.

It seems instead that she was definitely aged 17, and about to turn 18. The
Titanic
passenger manifest shows her as 18, but the figure of 17 is quoted elsewhere. It thus appears that she was actually aged 95 when she passed from this life.

1901 census – Terry, Massbrook, County Mayo.

Anthony (grandfather), widower (71).

John (30) and wife Maria (30), née McGowan.

Children:
Annie (7)
, Anthony (6), Maria (4), Margaret (2), Thomas Henry (seven months).

Catherine McGowan (42) Lost

Ticket number 9232. Paid £7 15s.

Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

From: Terry, Massbrook, County Mayo.

Destination: 3241 North Ashland Avenue, Chicago.

A letter sent from Ireland by her young niece Annie McGowan, in October 1911, could have sown the seeds of Catherine McGowan's death. It inspired the idea of Catherine coming home to Ireland to see her family for Christmas, at a time when she was readjusting to life in Chicago after several years working in Cleveland, Ohio, and Annie intended to return with her.

The
Chicago Record-Herald
explained what happened in a piece contributed by Mary O'Connell Newell soon after the disaster:

Little Annie McGowan, who was Kate McGowan's niece, wrote to Kate way out in Chicago last October, saying she would be coming over in a month. Now Kate hadn't thought for a moment of going back to Ireland. But she said to herself: ‘If Annie comes out, it may be that I'll never be going back to Ireland again, and what need indeed would she have of it, with her favourite sister in Chicago and her father and mother being dead?'

So, without thinking for as much as one day about it, she sat down and wrote to Annie: ‘Wait. I'll be back in Ireland in three weeks, and we'll come together in the spring.' Then she sold her boarding-house on the North Side, bought a ticket, and was soon back on the Green Isle.

Unsettled Kate may have been feeling her biological clock ticking. Unlike her sisters, she was still unmarried, and her best friend had gone home to Ireland in 1910 – and had walked up the aisle the same year. Kate McGowan's dearest confidante had been Kate McHugh – the pair had spent many years in America together – but the latter had gone home to Mayo to become Mrs John Bourke, a farmer's wife in her home place.

Let the 1912
Chicago Record-Herald
take up the story again:

It came about this way. When Kate McHugh went back to Ireland over a year ago, it was little anyone knew that she would soon be changing her name to Burke. Not a word did her sister Ellen in Chicago know of what she meant to do, and there's no telling that she knew herself indeed, but be that as it may, she married John Burke, whom she had known all her life, and never thought to leave Ireland again. Nor would she, but for Kate McGowan's coming home.

Not a thought did Kate Burke and her husband John have of coming to America, not then nor all winter through. But what with the talk of Kate McGowan's sailing and the thoughts of it, and the excitement of it, and all that – Kate and John sold the farm and started with the others from County Mayo.

Catherine's arrival home in Mayo certainly seems to have provided the impetus for many others to join her on the return journey:

From Queenstown, in the Bay of Cork, they sailed the other day, John Burke and his bride of a year, and their hearts were as light and as happy as ever hearts were in song and story.

And with them sailed a jolly crowd of other young folks from County Mayo. Fifteen in all there were that went that day from Mayo … all bound for America to make their fortunes, or finish making them.

For many of these were ‘Yanks'. ‘Yanks' are the Irish lads and lasses who have been to America and come back to Ireland for a look at the old place and the blessing of the old father and mother, before they go back to America to stay for good and all.

Kate Burke, she that was McHugh, was a Yank. So too, was Kate McGowan.

Both Kates must have been seen as good advertisements for that booming country. Catherine was indeed a ‘Yank', having by then become a full citizen of the United States. She had been born and baptised on 30 September 1869 in Terry, Massbrook, the daughter of Anthony McGowan and Bridget Mayock, both dead by 1912. She had made her own way in America and had become a successful property owner. Her relative wealth was indicated by the fact that after her death a $10,000 claim for the loss of her life was lodged with the White Star Line, along with another $900 compensation demand for the loss of her property.

Kate McGowan, her very best friend, and her best friend's husband and sister, all drowned in the freezing Atlantic on 15 April 1912. Niece Annie survived.

Martin McMahon (20) Lost

Ticket number 370372. Paid £7 15s.

Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

From: Cragbrien, Ennis, County Clare.

Destination: 415 West 53rd Street, New York city.

A strange coincidence hangs on the name of Martin McMahon – because two men of this name, from the very same locality, drowned in the sinkings of separate White Star liners within three years of each other.

Martin McMahon of Derragh, Cragbrien, County Clare, died on the
Titanic
on 15 April 1912. Martin McMahon of Ballyveskil, Termaclane, County Clare, died when the White Star's
Arabic
was torpedoed on 19 August 1915. Like the
Lusitania
the same year, the Arabic was sent to be bottom within fifteen minutes by a submarine, in this case U-24. The
Arabic'
s Martin McMahon was one of forty-four fatalities out of 434 on board.

The
Titanic
disaster: young Clare man lost

A telegram received in Ennis during the week confirmed the worst fears that had been entertained as to the safety of a young man named Martin McMahon, from the Cragbrien district, about five miles from Ennis.

It was known that he was a passenger on the ill-fated boat, and though his name did not appear in the list of survivors, it was hoped he might have been rescued, but it is now definitely stated that he has been lost. He was a fine athletic young man and very popular in his local district.

(
Clare Journal,
29 April 1912)

Martin was an agricultural labourer. He had originally booked to sail on the White Star liner
Cymric
, which was due to depart for America on Easter Sunday, four days before
Titanic
. But the service was withdrawn, and the Cymric instead slipped her moorings a few days after her brand-new sister.

Report of the American Red Cross (Titanic Disaster) 1913:

No. 285. (Irish.) A farmer, twenty years of age, was drowned, leaving a dependent mother in Ireland. Emergent relief was provided and the case referred to the English Committee, which later made an appropriation of £25. ($50)

1901 census – McMahon. Cragbrien, Clondagad parish, Lisheen.

Parents: Anthony McMahon, farmer (57); Honour McMahon (46).

Children: Michael (15), Edmond (11),
Martin (7),
Margaret (5).

Neal McNamee (27) Lost

Joint ticket number 376566 (with his wife Eileen). Paid £16 2s.

Boarded at Southampton. Third Class.