by Senan Molony
The night before Daniel and Bertha left home to board the Titanic all the dogs in the house began howling, making them both distinctly uneasy, as Bertha later told her children.
New York policeman Daniel Moran was 27, his sister Bridget, known as Bertha, a year older. He drowned and she survived. Both were originally from the Askeaton area of County Limerick, although each had been living in America for some time, Bertha working in the Peabody Shirt Factory in Troy, New York. They travelled with Patrick Ryan.
The New York Sun reported on 22 April 1912, that Daniel, a New York city precinct officer, had been home to claim an inheritance of $12–15,000 from the estate of his deceased father. Daniel’s own life, by contrast, was worth only £100 in a 1913 London High Court ruling. He had first emigrated at age 17 aboard the Cunard Line’s Etruria, from Queenstown in 1901. In 1912:
Mr [Michael] O’Mahoney, a Customs officer at Queenstown, saw off three Limerick friends of his safely on board the Titanic and saw them settled down very comfortably. They were Mr D. J. Moran, a New York policeman, his sister Margaret, and Patrick Ryan.
I can find no evidence of either having been saved, but the lists received here are very incomplete.
(The Cork Examiner, 19 April 1912)
Daniel and Bertha appear to have been held back in steerage at the stern. Bertha told her family in later life that they were ‘barred from getting up to the lifeboats until some managed to break through’, finally reaching the boat deck when all but the most aft lifeboats appeared to have left. Bertha was spoken to by the New York Herald in St Vincent’s Hospital as she recovered from her ordeal. She told how she was in the company of English priest Fr Thomas R. D. Byles from Ongar, Essex, who had been acting as a kind of chaplain to the steerage passengers the entire voyage, saying Mass for them that Sunday when the vessel struck. ‘Continuing the prayers, he led us to where the boats were being lowered. Helping the women in, he whispered to them words of comfort and encouragement.’
Daniel was left behind. The boats were full of women, and as a policeman, it is likely that he relied upon instilled discipline to suppress his own fear and help others as best he could. His body was not recovered.
Bertha is thought to have been saved in lifeboat No. 15. Bertha said half a dozen of the fifty passengers on the boat died before the Carpathia came to the rescue.
Report of the American Red Cross (Titanic Disaster) 1913:
No. 319. (Irish.) A policeman, 27 years old, was lost, while returning from a visit to Ireland with his sister, a laundry worker, 28 years old. She lost baggage valued at $300, and was ill from shock and exposure and unable to work for several weeks. An invalid sister was dependent upon her and the deceased brother. Hospital care and clothing and $650 was provided from other American sources of relief. The Committee gave $300 for emergent relief, and later set aside $600 to be used for the benefit of the invalid sister. ($900)
The invalid sister was 33-year-old Mary, known as Minnie Moran. She also applied for funds from the New York American newspaper, which had held a disaster appeal. Money seems to have been a recurring motif in the Moran saga, with the likelihood that a huge amount of inheritance cash was lost when the Titanic went down. Bertha launched her own claim for compensation in the American courts, while an action for the loss of Daniel’s life resulted in the derisory £100 award by Mr Justice Bailhache in June 1913, following a five-day trial.
From the papers of the US District Court, Southern District of New York:
I, Bertha Moran, residing at No. 22 Dow Street, in the city of Troy, N.Y., do hereby make and present my claim for damages, loss and injuries sustained by me by reason of the collision of the steamship Titanic with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean …
Cash – $360; 8 suits – $250; 3 dresses – $84; shoes and slippers – $20; 4 hats, plumes, feathers &c. – $135; silk petticoats – $18; 7 tailored shirt waists – $14; 4 fancy shirt waists – $20; underwear – $39; 4 pairs of gloves – $4; 12 pairs of stockings – $12; 1 diamond studded watch – $65; 1 diamond ring – $200; 1 locket and chain – $15; 2 gold bracelets – $36; 1 mesh bag – $15; 1 pair eye glasses – $5; fur coat – $50; 1 set furs – $80; 1 trunk and suit case – $23. Total $1,445.
Bertha only received payment at the rate of a few cents in the dollar due to the court’s finding of limited liability. She stated that she received just $92, enough to replace her dresses and gloves, but nothing else. It may have rankled in later life – in 1956 an article in the Detroit News indicated that Bertha would not discuss the Titanic with reporters unless she was paid. The newspaper declined to do so. But Bertha did comment forcibly that steerage passengers were not allowed on deck until almost all the lifeboats were gone.
Bertha married Irishman Richard Sinnott in 1913. They moved to Detroit, Michigan, where Richard worked for the Timken Detroit Axle Company. A son was born on 29 August 1914, whom Bertha named Daniel, presumably after her lost brother. Yet further pain was not far away – her husband was killed in an industrial accident in November 1917 when Daniel Jnr was just three years old, and baby Eileen only a year and a half. A third child was born almost nine months after Richard’s death. Named after the second man to be untimely wrenched from Bertha’s life, Richard Jnr arrived on 6 July 1918.
With three young children in tow, Bertha’s prospects did not look good. But her fortunes changed, she took work as a beautician, and a new relationship developed within just a few years. By the beginning of the 1920s she was married again, to George C. Cooper, and the family of five became six when little Bertha entered the world on 22 February 1923. In fact there were more – Cooper, a butcher from England, had three children of his own from a previous marriage, but they did not live with them.
This husband too died young, leaving Bertha widowed again, but now with five children to raise on her own through the hungry years known as the Great Depression. She coped well, and all five of her children later went on to marry and have children of their own.
In 1953 Bertha Cooper was photographed by the Detroit Free Press at a special showing of the movie Titanic, featuring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck. Her family said she wept through much of it.
In later years she retired to tending her garden at 2236 23rd Street, and looking after her soul with daily Mass and Tuesday night novenas. She taught her grandchildren the sign of the cross in Gaelic, Irish lullabies and the proper way to make tea.
Bertha Moran died on the forty-ninth anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking and her younger brother’s death. She is one of five survivors to die on an anniversary. She finally joined her brother Daniel in death at Mount Carmel Hospital, Detroit, on 15 April 1961. The cause was heart failure, the culmination of the effects of colon cancer which she had suffered for two years. She was 77 years old and was buried in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Oakland, Michigan.
1901 census – Moran. Toomdeely North, Askeaton.
Parents: Patrick (50), boatman. Wife Bridget deceased.
Children: John (24), Mary (22), Daniel (18), Patrick (16), Thomas (12).
Thomas Morrow (31) Lost
Ticket number 372622. Paid £7 15s.
Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Drumlough, Rathfriland, County Down.
Destination: Gleichen, Alberta, Canada.
An Orangeman, Tommy Morrow was leaving Ireland just as the Home Rule Bill was being put to the British parliament. He did not live to see the measure passed that same month of April 1912 – only for the implementation of ‘Rome Rule’, as the Orangemen called it, to be later suspended for the duration of the First World War and eventually forgotten.
Thirty-one years old, Tommy was going to Canada, still a loyal dominion, to join his brother Waddell, who owned a ranch close to the industrial town of Gleichen, way out west in Alberta.
He had been persuaded to try his luck in the New World by a boyhood friend, Robert John Bell, who had returned to County Down to visit his dying uncle. Bell, who now lived in Chicago, talked Tommy into
crossing the Atlantic with him when he went back.
But while both men travelled to Queenstown together, fate intervened. Bell couldn’t get a ticket and Morrow sailed alone.
Newry man amongst the victims
Information has just been received that one of the ill-fated passengers on board the Titanic was Mr Thomas Rowan Morrow, of Drumlough, Rathfriland. The news has been confirmed by the officials of the White Star Line, London.
The deceased was a young man of much promise, and his tragic death has aroused widespread feelings of sympathy in Newry, Rathfriland, and district. He was a prominent Orangeman, and had been Worshipful Master of the Drumlough L.O.L. for many years past.
(Belfast Newsletter, 27 April 1912)
Thomas Morrow was a Presbyterian. His mother had been widowed since the turn of the century, and was aged 61 by the time he embarked on the White Star liner. His sister Sara, aged 25, was by then the only other child left in the house. He had a brother George, who owned a confection shop in Belfast, and Thomas had previously given his occupation as a grocer in the 1901 census.
Thomas Morrow must have been lonely as the sole passenger from Ulster in the Third-Class section of the Titanic. The English-speaking steerage was made up of many of his southern countrymen who were ardent Home Rulers. He appears to have kept himself to himself, and no survivor speaks of him on board.
A great grandnephew in California, Robert S. Morrow, says Thomas ‘had with him two or more rifles, which required special handling, among other pieces of luggage’.
Lawrence Beesley, writing in his book The Loss of the SS Titanic, illustrates the isolation of an unknown passenger who seemed strangely at odds with his steerage shipmates, standing on the poop deck, above the after well deck, where the Irish held dances and games:
Standing aloof from all of them generally on the raised stern deck above the ‘playing field’ was a man of about twenty to twenty-four years of age, well dressed, always gloved and nicely groomed, and obviously out of place among his fellow passengers; he never looked happy all the time.
I watched him, and classified him at hazard as the man who had been a failure in some way at home and had received the proverbial shilling plus Third-Class fare to America: He did not look resolute enough or happy enough to be working out his own problem.
This passenger seems too young to have been Thomas Morrow, whom we know was successful and socially well connected. But it suggests perhaps the loneliness that Morrow could have felt amid all the gaiety – and his regret at the failure of his friend to board.
While Morrow was the worshipful master of an Orange lodge rather than a masonic lodge, it is interesting to note that one of the survivors in a boat spoke of hearing, after the sinking, when hundreds were struggling in the water, the coded calls of fellow-masons in distress.
Katie Mullen (21) Saved
Ticket number 35852. Paid £7 14s 8d.
Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Rhyne, Killoe, County Longford.
Destination: 231 East 50th Street, New York city.
It was the worst shipping disaster the world had known, but Katie Mullen was saved. Thirty years later her own boy was not so lucky – son John drowned when a US vessel he was aboard as a soldier was torpedoed off the North African coast during the Second World War.
Catherine Mullen was born on 29 May 1890, the daughter of Thomas and Mary Mullen, who farmed a smallholding in a poor area of County Longford. She boarded the Titanic claiming to be 20 years old and signed aboard as ‘Mullin’. She roomed with her close neighbour Katie Gilnagh, with whom she had set out for Queenstown, and also with the Murphy sisters, Margaret and Catherine. They occupied cabin Q161 on E deck.
Katie’s daughter Peggy recalled:
She used to say that they were having a party in the [Third-Class] lounge and then she and the other girls went down to their room. A man from their county, Jim Farrell, then knocked on their door and told them ‘something must be up’ because the engines had stopped.
One of the girls then said ‘Maybe we’ve landed’ and they had a little laugh. But then when they tried to go up on deck they found they were blocked. They couldn’t get through.
Walter Lord, author of A Night to Remember, wrote of Katie being prevented by a crewmember from ascending to the upper decks and the prospect of a lifeboat. She was with her friend Katie Gilnagh and Catherine Murphy when a seaman refused them further progress:
Suddenly steerage passenger Jim Farrell, a strapping Irishman from the girls’ home county, barged up. ‘Great God, Man!’ he roared. ‘Open the gate and let the girls through!’ It was a superb demonstration of sheer voice-power. To the girls’ astonishment, the sailor meekly complied.
However, Katie’s grandnephew Brian Wall insists the story is rather different. He says she told him that Farrell used an axe, intended for firefighting, to smash the barrier and then fought with the crewmember.
It is most likely that Katie was rescued from the Titanic in the company of Katie Gilnagh, who was the last person admitted to lifeboat No. 16 by her own account. Katie Mullen told her daughter that the last she saw of James Farrell was of him ‘kneeling beside his suitcase saying the Rosary’. Rosary beads were later found on his body.
Longford folklore tells that Katie was most reluctant to enter a boat and had to be pushed in, while one version has her actually thrown into the water and later picked up, but this is embroidery. Her daughter declares: ‘They had to jump into the lifeboats. Some missed it and fell into the sea.’
Titanic survivor: another Longford survivor relates her experience
Miss Kate Mullen, daughter of Mr T. Mullen of Rhyne, has written to a friend in this country the following account of her experiences in connection with the dreadful Titanic disaster:
‘Don’t you think I went through enough on my first trip across the Atlantic? I was the last person put into the last boat just fifteen minutes before the Titanic disappeared. I saw her going down. It was dreadful to see and hear the cries of the poor people on board after the last boat had left. When the funnels disappeared beneath the waves, the ship rose up a tremendous height, and with a roar like thunder disappeared forever in the depths of the sea. There were fifty people in our boat. We were like eggs in a box, but felt glad we had escaped with our lives. We tried to warm ourselves as well as we could, but it was difficult owing to the boat being quarter-full of water and ice. We got into the boat at 12.30 at night and until 9 next morning we were surrounded by huge icebergs, with hardly anything but light clothes on.
‘The cold was intense, and when the Carpathia arrived we were in a dreadful way from exposure and hunger. We were well treated on board the Carpathia and supplied with clothes.’
(Longford Leader, 18 May 1912)
In later life Katie remarked on the calm of the sea, although reluctant to discuss the tragedy in any detail. ‘The sea was like glass. There wasn’t even a ripple on it.’ The American Red Cross later aided her with a payment of $100, listing her as case No. 321.
She had intended to work as a domestic in New York, but soon met Martin J. Kearns, the Galwayman who later became her husband. They married on 2 January 1916, at Our Lady of Good Counsel on East 90th Street in Manhattan. Their daughter Margaret (Peggy) was born before the end of that year. John was next to arrive, followed by Mary and Eileen. A lasting sorrow came with the Second World War and son John’s drowning with 496 others in the sinking of his troopship on 20 April 1944. A member of the Medical Air Corps, he lost his life exactly thirteen months after he had entered service, aged only 19. No remains were ever recovered.
In later years, the family moved to an apartment building at 65th Street, Woodside, Queens, NYC. They were happy but John’s death had taken much out of Katie. She became especially alarmed when her daughter Peggy took a trip to Ireland aboard the America in December 1948. ‘She was in an awful state,’ said her daughter. ‘But she let me go.’
Photographed by the New York Daily News in
1962 for a feature commemorating the fiftieth anniversary, ‘Mrs Katherine Mullen-Kearns’ declined to comment on the calamity except to thank God for her survival. She didn’t want to be reminded of what had happened that night, she said. She died at the age of 80 on 1 November 1970, and was buried in St Raymond’s Cemetery, the Bronx.
1911 census – Rhyne, Killoe.
Thomas (65), farmer. Wife Mary (64). Married 40 years, nine children, seven surviving. Thomas (23), Bridget (24), Kate (19). Granddaughter Lizzie K. Murray (5).
Mary Mullin – see denis Lennon
Bertha Mulvihill (25) Saved
Ticket number 382653. Paid £7 15s.
Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Moydrum, Coosan, Athlone, County Westmeath.
Destination: 12 Inkerman Street, Providence, Rhode Island.
Bertha was one of the most colourful characters on board the world’s most luxurious liner. She was returning to Providence to get married, and was weighed down with wedding presents – including one unusual item, a portrait of the Irish patriot Robert Emmet. She told the Daily Sketch of 4 May 1912 that she watched from a lifeboat as the Atlantic finally closed around the doomed leviathan. ‘As the ship went down, all she said was “Goodbye Robert”.’
This report came from the Providence Journal, Saturday 20 April 1912:
Miss Bertha E. Mulvihill of this city, among the survivors of the Titanic tragedy, told a thrilling story of the last moments aboard the great stricken liner yesterday at the home of her sister, Mrs E. J. Norton at 12 Inkerman Street.
Miss Mulvihill, who was in a state of hysteria when she landed at the Cunard Line pier in New York on Thursday night, had regained a certain measure of composure when she reached her sister’s home here, but she gave way to sobs as she recalled some of the more tragic scenes of the great disaster.
Among the very last to leave the ship, Miss Mulvihill’s story of the disaster was a vivid one. She heard the shrieks of the steerage passengers, saw the armed officers of the ship keep the men back from the lifeboats until the women had been saved and watched as if fascinated the lights of the Titanic as the water crept higher and higher and then went out.
