by Senan Molony
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.
From: Rooskey Lower, Castlefinn, County Donegal.
Destination: 1609 Winter Street, Philadelphia.
Neal and Eileen McNamee were newlyweds – and young go-getters. Their lives were taking off, and their move to New York was the latest confirmation of their upward progress in the world.
Neal McNamee was born in Lower Rooskey, County Donegal, on 29 August 1884. Neal’s father, William, was a road worker and had married his wife, Catherine, when both were teenagers. They had two children before either was out of their teens, and two more in their early twenties. The cottage containing the six of them had two windows and three rooms. The family later left the little house in Rooskey, but while some stayed elsewhere in Donegal, Neal was already on his way to Britain, determined to succeed.
Donegal man and wife among the victims
Amongst the passengers who sailed on the ill-fated Titanic were Mr and Mrs Neil [sic] McNamee, the former being the son of Mr William McNamee, Ruskey, Convoy, County Donegal.
He entered the service of Lipton, Londonderry branch, about nine years ago, being then seventeen years of age. He remained in Londonderry for a little over two years, when he was transferred on promotion to London, and was ultimately appointed to the management of several of Lipton’s district branches throughout England.
Recently he was appointed to an important position in connection with Lipton’s business in New York. He got married to a Miss O’Leary just a few weeks previous to leaving. Both he and his wife sailed in the Titanic and their names do not appear in the list of survivors.
The greatest sympathy is felt for his father and mother, and for other members of the family in the Convoy district.
(Tyrone Constitution, 26 April 1912)
The woman who became his bride was Eileen O’Leary, who met Neal when he moved to England. Eileen had previously been involved in a crisis at sea. At the age of two she was aboard a vessel with her parents when it was struck by a cyclone in the Bay of Biscay and left without power or rudder. It was adrift for some time before being taken under tow. Her father, Richard O’Leary, had been on his way to Malta ‘to take charge of the electric light at the fort’.
Eileen worked in a Lipton’s provisioning branch in Hounslow, and seems to have known Neal for some little time. He had become the manager of Lipton’s grocers in Silver Street, Salisbury. The couple had been married only a few months before sailing, tying the knot in Pokesdown, Devon on 17 January 1912.
The couple moved in with the bride’s parents at Kingston House, Walton Road, Salisbury. By now Richard O’Leary was a clerk in the War Office. Within weeks, the McNamees were offered a glittering new life with an important and guaranteed job in booming America. Neal had been asked to take control of the company’s first venture into the United States, a Lipton’s Export store on the east coast. He carried with him to America a letter of recommendation from Sir Thomas Lipton himself, and the Titanic carried 917 lbs of Lipton’s tea in freight.
Neal had a relative in America, Jeremiah McNamee, who was due to meet the couple on their arrival. It has been suggested apocryphally that Eileen was offered a place in the boats but was one of the women who chose instea
d to stay with their husbands. Her body was recovered by the MacKay-Bennett on 22 April, and she was buried at sea the same day in a weighted canvas bag. Her effects were listed and some returned to relatives.
It was recorded that body number 53 had an estimated age of 23 (she was 19) with brown hair. She wore a brown velvet coat and a white blouse with a blue anchor on the front. She had a blue flannel petticoat with the embroidered initials ‘E Mc’ and blue corsets, a blue skirt, black stockings and shoes. Her effects included a wedding ring (turquoise and diamond), and she had a gold bracelet on her right wrist, with two Third-Class tickets in her pockets. A purse containing the sum of one shilling and eleven pence was found on the remains. So too were a fountain pen, keys, cosmetics, and cards with her name and address imprinted.
Jeremiah McNamee, of No. 1609 Winter Street, will go to Halifax to claim the bodies of Mr and Mrs Neil McNamee, of Queenstown, who were on their way to this city to reside with him.
(A rather inaccurate report from the Evening Telegraph, Philadelphia, 25 April 1912)
There is the story that after the disaster two portraits were commissioned of the young bride and groom by their sorrowing families to mark their love for each other, and these same works were the only reminders of a charismatic couple for their grieving kinfolk in Ireland and Britain. The portraits are now with family members in Bangor, County Down.
A plaque and tree exist in memory of Eileen and Neal at Churchill Park, Salisbury, Wiltshire. The inscription reads: ‘In Memory of the young Salisbury couple, Eileen and Neal McNamee, who perished on the RMS Titanic on April 15th 1912’.
1901 census – McNamee, Rooskey Lower.
Parents: William (36), Catherine (32) née Gordon.
Children: Ellen (18), woollen weaver, Neal (17), scholar, Catherine (12), Mary (10), Andrew (8).
