Voices from the Titanic (70 page)
Read Voices from the Titanic Online
Authors: Geoff Tibballs
(
New York World
, 1 May 1912)
Upturned Boat on Scene of
Titanic
Disaster Mutilation Caused by a Terrific Explosion
A surprising discovery was made on the scene of the
Titanic
disaster by the cable ship
Mackay-Bennett
, which returned to Halifax yesterday from its search for bodies.
An Exchange telegram received yesterday stated that a group of thirty bodies, including those of several women, was found alongside an upturned lifeboat. A woman's red skirt was attached to an oar, and had apparently been used as a distress signal. There were indications that the boat was afloat some time after the
Titanic
foundered.
It will be remembered that before the
Carpathia
reached New York the White Star Company received a wireless message from the
Olympic
reporting that all the
Titanic
's boats were accounted for. This message was read in the House of Commons by the Prime Minister.
The
Mackay-Bennett
recovered 306 bodies, and 190 of them were taken to Halifax. One hundred and sixteen bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. Arms and legs were fractured, and the features in many cases were so terribly cut and bruised that (it is declared) the injuries could not have been caused by the sea or wreckage, but must have resulted from a terrific explosion.
The body of Colonel Astor, which has been embalmed, is to be conveyed on the journey to New York by special train today. His son, Mr Vincent Astor, will travel with the remains. At the sad landing yesterday the proceedings were conducted with impressive solemnity.
Cash to the extent of 16,000 dollars was found in the pockets of dead people. On Colonel Astor's body was found 2,500 dollars, and he was wearing a wire belt with a gold buckle, which is said to be a family heirloom. Many bodies were identified by papers, letters and cards. Most of the watches found had stopped between 2.10 and 2.15. The bodies of the first-class passengers were found in groups.
The corpses taken to Halifax were landed at Government Dock and were guarded by Canadian bluejackets. All shipping was kept outside the Channel for the time being, and very few people besides Government officials were allowed in the dock premises.
Only one woman was admitted, and she was an undertaker. The rest of the undertakers, together with the mourners, gathered outside.
Captain Larnder, of the
Mackay-Bennett
, reports that the bodies were recovered 60 miles north-east of the scene of the disaster in the waters of the Gulf Stream. The searchers swept a square of 30 miles.
The first body discovered was supposed to be that of Mr Widener, but it was later established as Mr Widener's valet, Edward Keeping, who had some of Mr Widener's papers on him.
The captain believes that all the bodies buried at sea were those of the ship's crew. He is satisfied that the passengers were properly identified. The bodies of eighteen women were found but none of them were those of first-class passengers.
Most of the bodies found were just on the edge of the Gulf Stream, and had they not been rescued at the time they were they would in all probability have floated for many miles in the current. One hundred bodies were in one group.
The White Star officials at New York yesterday morning received a wireless message from the
Minia
expressing the belief that if any more bodies of
Titanic
victims are floating they have been swept by the late northerly gales into the Gulf Stream and carried many miles to the east.
Fourteen bodies have been recovered by the
Minia
, of which two are unidentified, and these have been buried at sea.
(
Daily Sketch
, 1 May 1912)
Frederick Hamilton
, a cable engineer on the
Mackay-Bennett
, kept a diary of the ship's sad mission.
A large iceberg, faintly discernible to our north, we are now very near the area where lie the ruins of so many human hopes and prayers. The embalmer becomes more and more cheerful as we approach the scene of his future professional activities. Tomorrow will be a good day for him.
The ocean is strewn with a litter of woodwork, chairs, and bodies. The cutter lowered, and work commenced and kept up continuously all day, picking up bodies. Hauling the soaked remains in saturated clothing over the side of the cutter is no easy task. Fiftyone we have taken on board today, two children, three women, and 46 men, and still the sea seems strewn. With the exception of ourselves, the bosum bird is the only living creature here.
The tolling of the bell summoned all hands to the forecastle where 30 bodies are ready to be committed to the deep, each carefully weighed and carefully sewn up in canvas. It is a weird scene, this gathering.
Another burial service held, and 70 bodies follow the other. The hoarse tone of the steam whistle reverberating through the mist, the dripping rigging, and the ghostly sea, the heaps of dead, and the hard weather-beaten faces of the crew, whose harsh voices join sympathetically in the hymn tunefully rendered by Canon Hind, all combine to make a strange task stranger. Cold, wet, miserable and comfortless, all hands balance themselves against the heavy rolling of the ship as she lurches to the Atlantic swell, and even the most hardened must reflect on the hopes and fears, the dismay and despair, of those whose nearest and dearest, support and pride, have been wrenched from them by this tragedy.
Among the âremarkable' stories published by London journals concerning men who had been lost in the
Titanic
disaster was one about a fireman named Hart. It was stated that a Liverpool man named T. Hart had joined the ill-fated ship at Southampton, and when the list of the crew was published his mother claimed compensation, on the assumption that her son had been lost. A few days later, however, the son turned up, and it transpired that he had never seen the
Titanic
. He had, however, lost his discharge book, and it was presumed that âsomeone had signed on with her son's name and credentials'. We quote the words of a London paper.
That there was a man named Hart on the
Titanic
there is no doubt. J. Hart, of 51, College Street, attached his signature to the ship's articles, and the inference was that he had sailed under false pretences. The suggestion that he used another man's book has given intense pain to the members of the family, who indignantly deny the statement. Mr Hart has sailed out of Southampton for over twenty years. He served the Union-Castle Company and the R.M.S.P. before transferring to the White Star Line, and we are assured that his discharge book was a good one. There was, therefore, no reason why he should hide behind another man's character, and that he made no attempt to do so is proved by the fact that he gave his College Street address when signing on. Had he assumed the name of the Liverpool man, he must also have given the Liverpool address of that fireman. J. Hart was a member of the British Seafarers' Union, and we have been asked by the members of his family to publish these facts in order that the dead might be vindicated.
(
Southampton Times and Hampshire Express
, 18 May 1912)
The body of Mr Wallace Hartley â Colne's hero, Britain's hero, the world's hero â picked up on the crest of the ocean, thousands of miles distant on the great rolling Atlantic, was borne to Colne on Friday last, to the town of his nativity, and interred the following day in the family vault in the Public Cemetery. It was an impressive funeral. The coffin bearing his remains passed before the eyes of a multitude, saddened but proud, stricken in heart but of manly bearing, grave, yet secretly grateful that a townsman and a friend should have died so heroically.
O Death, where is thy sting?
Grave, where is thy victory?
Colne rose to the highest eminence of its character and traditions on Saturday and girded with warm sincerity and pride and love, paid to the hero a tribute of sympathy, spontaneous, heartfelt, ungrudging, the outpoured sympathy of a people who felt and gloried in the magnificence of a townsman's courage. The keynote of the whole proceedings was Victory, a hero's triumph. Gaunt Death had claimed his poor weak body of clay, but the soul of the man had climbed far above earthly things into the highest thoughts of man, and the splendour of the man's character, the golden worth of the man at heart, had won the plaudits and admiration of two hemispheres.
Probably 40,000 persons did homage to the dead musician. Of these a very large percentage were, of course, people of Colne, and nearly all of these had kinship with the deceased. Many more far-distant sent flowers where they could not attend in person.
All of the 40,000 were fully acquainted with the deathless story of a story of death. The loss of the
Titanic
is an occurrence that can never die or fade from the memory of the men and women of today. The ghastliness of it, the unbelievable horror of it, the scarce-comprehensible significance of it, the awful dread which the picture of the ship taking its last plunge and with it a heavy freight of brave, powerless humans, conjures up, has impressed the event on the human heart beyond eradication. But while we mourn we glory in what we have learnt of the capabilities of the soul, and we are proud of our race and our destiny. For while we shall ever recoil from the horrors of the disaster we shall never fail to feel a glow of pride in the magnificent heroism which inspired men to puff the smoke from cigarettes in the face of Fate while the crew rescued the women and children, which prompted stokers and engineers to battle with the elements unflinchingly, which kept the brave Phillips at his wireless instrument, and which upheld Wallace Hartley and his comrades as they played on, on, into another world.
We know that all aboard answered the captain's command to âBe British'. And none more faithfully than the orchestra. Can we picture the scene? Indescribable confusion on board in the lowering of boat-loads of people down the mountain-sides of the ship, the cries of the weak, the frantic despair of the coward, the ravings of the bully, and the quiet Christian confidence and equanimity of the true British gentleman wielding his baton or fingering his violin, who snapped his fingers in the face of Death and died a fighting hero, succouring the weak and cheering all â playing the violin soon to be the angel's harp. The bandsmen received word that the ship must go down and they with it lost in the intoxication of light music and around them all the luxury that their profession could desire. They heard of the approach of death, and the tune changed. No longer the merry whirling American ragtime music. Now it was the slow, impressive appeal to God by hymn, âNearer, my God, to Thee'. A dumb horror gripped the hearts of the players, yet they never faltered under the firm lead of Wallace Hartley. Outside, men and women were hastening away back to life; the bandsmen were left to cheer those whose doom was sealed. None could help them; theirs was to do and die, and they died.
Wallace Hartley put into practice a resolution he had expressed to a friend, that if ever disaster overtook the ship on which he was aboard he would stick to his violin and play the hymn he loved, âNearer, my God, to Thee'. With the water creeping, creeping slowly but surely over his body he played and played â he was nearer to Him â he was with Him.
The heroic band-leader died on April 15, and a fortnight later his body was found attired in the evening dress in which he had played and with his music-case strapped to it.
(
Colne & Nelson Times
, 24 May 1912)
The following story was typical of accounts which appeared in local newspapers the length and breadth of the British Isles during the months of May and June.
The funeral of a
Titanic
victim took place yesterday. The deceased was William Carbines, whose embalmed body had been brought across the Atlantic that it might rest near the old home at Nanjivey on the outskirts of the Cornish borough. When death overtook him, in the worst of all shipping disasters, young Carbines, just entering manhood, was setting out hopefully on a new career. His brothers, John and Robert, were copper mining in Michigan, and the intention of the St Ives boy was to join them. The remains of the deceased were picked up from the ocean by the steamer
Mackay-Bennett
which sailed to the region of the catastrophe for the purpose of recovering bodies, and were landed at Halifax, where the brothers received them. Afterwards the corpse was placed on board the
Oceanic
for conveyance to England, John and Robert Carbines being passengers by the same ship. From Southampton the deceased was taken by rail to St Ives, and removed thence to Nanjivey to await interment. In the cemetery chapel the simple service was read by the Rev. W.A. Chettle (Wesleyan). After the coffin had been committed to the grave, Mr Chettle delivered an address. Every man's life, he said, was like a diary, in which he intended to write one thing, but wrote another. Why? Because he was not his own. Their departed brother planned yonder â should they say a home and a career? â and there intervened that sudden stroke so terrible in its mystery to them.
(
Western Daily Mercury
, 31 May 1912)
Dr Pain's Last Act Made Possible The Romance of
Titanic
In the midst of all the bitter disappointment and sorrow which have come into the lives of Mr and Mrs Albert Pain, of this city, through the loss of their son, Dr Alfred Pain, by the sinking of the
Titanic
eight weeks ago, there has been a ray of sunshine through the numerous letters of sympathy from friends on two continents. One of those especially discloses a lovely little act of romance which the thoughtfulness of Dr Pain made possible, and a happy young couple in the far Western States will ever bless the memory of Dr Alfred Pain.
