Irish Aboard Titanic

by Senan Molony

  Cecil and Elsie subsequently had four children – Patricia May, born 23 December 1920; Robert Cecil, born 2 October 1922; Anthony Evelyn, born 13 December 1923; and Anne Moody, born a decade later on 12 August 1933.

  His son Robert wrote: ‘Father was reluctant to talk about the Titanic and was I think rather ashamed to have lost his seaman’s book one night in a pub. I have seen his discharge book, in which it notes that his employment with the White Star Line terminated at midnight on the day the Titanic sank.’ The book’s present whereabouts are unknown.

  Daughter Anne said:

  One day in 1933 my father took my two brothers swimming in the Hogsmill river in Surrey. My brother, Bob, noticed that my father was lying on his face in the water and not moving. He dragged him to the bank where he soon recovered.

  Perhaps he had a similar experience to Officer Lightoller, who told in his memoirs how on one occasion he went to have a cold bath and his wife Sylvia found him lying on his face in the water unconscious. She believed the shock of the cold water brought back the memory of that terrible night and caused him to faint.

  Cecil Fitzpatrick died on 11 July 1964 at Leeds.

  John ‘Jack’ Foley (46) Saved

  Storekeeper.

  From: Youghal, County Cork.

  Queens Road, Southampton.

  Samuel Hemming (US evidence): Mr Lightoller called me and said, ‘Come with me,’ and he said, ‘Get another good man.’ I says, ‘Foley is here somewhere.’ He says, ‘I have no time to stop for Foley.’ So he called a man himself, and he said, ‘Follow me.’

  Jack Foley held the rank of quartermaster on the Titanic, but actually served as its storekeeper. He was originally from Youghal, County Cork.

  He helped load women into boats in the last minutes, and was saved in lifeboat No. 4, the last standard lifeboat (as distinct from collapsibles) to be lowered from the ship. It went off at 1.55 a.m. Samuel Hemming and another seaman lowered No. 4. At the last moment, Hemming, Foley’s pal, jumped down the fall ropes to escape the dying Titanic and swam 200 yards (without a lifejacket) to the nearest lifeboat – the same one he had last helped to lower. ‘I pulled my head above the gunwale and I said, “Give us a hand in, Jack.” Foley was in the boat. I saw him standing up in the boat. He said, ‘‘Is that you, Sam?” I said, ‘‘Yes,” and him and the women and children pulled me in the boat.’

  Foley returned to Britain and signed off the ship’s articles, receiving the balance of his wages, £1 1s. He was given £9 7s 6d witness expenses at the British inquiry.

  He had married Mary Murphy in 1895 and shortly thereafter moved from Youghal to Kinsale, where the 1901 census records the family in three rooms at No. 9 Cork Street. Foley is shown as a 35-year-old merchant sailor. His wife is 31, and they already have three children – Maurice, 5, Norah, 4, and Mary Ann, 2.

  Within a decade the family had relocated to Southampton, where a 1911 population snapshot for No. 2 Queen’s Road, Shirley, has Foley at 45, describing himself as a mariner. The number of children had expanded from three to seven. The initial trio had been joined by Nicholas, 9 (hospitalised with sleeping sickness for many years), Kathleen, 6, Margaret, 1, and newborn John.

  Foley had seen service on the Olympic, the Titanic’s sister ship. A mishearing of Foley’s birthplace is responsible for an error on Titanic’s crew manifest, whereby it was entered as ‘York’, instead of what he was saying – ‘Youghal’. Foley was also aboard for the delivery sailing from Belfast to Southampton, and on these articles his Irish birthplace is named correctly.

  He died of a blood clot on the brain in 1934, while still resident in Southampton. He was 69.

  Patrick Gill (41) Lost

  Ship’s cook.

  From: County Kildare.

  24 Waverley Road, Southampton.

  Gill was born in Kildare and gave his age as 38 years old when he signed on the Titanic – two years younger than he had specified for his age in the previous year’s census. He lived at 24 Waverley Road, Southampton, with his English wife, Mary, six years his senior. They had no children.

  It seems Patrick Gill was from a locality named after his family, Gilltown, in County Kildare, east of Timahoe and north of Prosperous. He was an unmarried labourer in the 1901 census.

  Bernard Hands (53) Lost

  Fireman.

  From: Killeshandra, County Cavan.

  St Michael’s House, Southampton.

  Bernard was the only son of peddler Bernard Hands and his wife, Mary, née Maguire, of Clondrum, Killeshandra. He was born in 1858, and had five sisters. He is believed to have been unmarried.

  James Heslin (45) Lost

  Trimmer.

  From: Cork.

  Sailors’ Home, Southampton.

  James married Biddy Burns, an Armagh girl, and they lived in the Orchard County at Jonesborough. They had two children, Mary and Thomas, in 1912.

  James’ widow died in 1967, more than half a century after the disaster, at the age of 105. She had no way of knowing whether James’ body was among the unidentified crew bodies recovered and buried either at sea or in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  Violet Jessop (24) Saved

  Stewardess.

  From: Shirley Road, Bedford Park, London.

  William Jessop emigrated from Dublin in the mid-1880s to try his hand at sheep farming in Argentina. His fiancée, Katherine Kelly, followed him out there from Dublin, probably in 1886. They were married shortly after her arrival and their first child, Violet, was born in Buenos Aires on 2 October 1887.

  The family left for Britain after William’s death, but Violet still hankered to see the world and took a job as a stewardess with the White Star Line. Her unique claim to fame is that she was aboard all three sister ships of the White Star’s Olympic-class liners when each of them came to grief. She was working on the Olympic when the vessel had a costly collision with HMS Hawke in September 1911, and half a year later endured the ghastly last hours of the RMS Titanic. She was also aboard the Britannic (third in the planned sequence of vessels, and originally to be called Gigantic, until the Titanic’s fate deflated all claims to omnipotence) when that vessel, serving as a hospital ship, was torpedoed and sent to the bottom of the Aegean in 1916.

  Violet said her thick auburn hair had saved her from the Britannic sinking, because when she had jumped overboard she had been sucked under the keel, striking her head. Years later she was discovered to have suffered a skull fracture.

  In the Titanic escape, Violet said she caught a baby thrown into her lifeboat from the deck. She carried it safely all night until they reached the Carpathia – whereupon a woman rushed up and snatched the baby back. She never found out who either of them were. Her own account gives no clue as to the lifeboat she escaped in. All but one of the eighteen stewardesses aboard were saved. Some escaped in No. 16, but she may have been in No. 13, which left from the starboard side, and into which a baby was tossed.

  Lawrence Beesley was in this boat and wrote in his 1913 book The Loss of the SS Titanic: ‘And so the coat was given to an Irish girl with pretty auburn hair standing near, leaning against the gunwale – with an outside berth – and so more exposed to the cold air.’

  Violet indeed had auburn hair and was proud of the fact that she had never lost her Irish accent. First-Class passenger Lady Lucy Duff Gordon later recalled her ‘merry Irish stewardess with her soft Irish brogue and tales of timid ladies she had attended during hundreds of Atlantic crossings’.

  She returned to sea after the Great War and had a short-lived marriage to a ship’s steward named John James Lewis. Violet reverted to her maiden name and eventually retired to a thatched Tudor cottage in Suffolk after more than four decades on the ocean wave.

  Violet attended a reunion dinner of just four survivors in London in 1958, after they were brought together in the making of the movie A Night to Remember. Lawrence Beesley was one of them. It is fascinating to wonder whether he recognised her ‘pretty auburn hair’.

  The long-lived Ti
tanic stewardess, escapee of two major sinkings, died in 1971, aged 83. Her unpublished memoirs, originally composed under the title ‘Neptune’s Greenroom’ in 1934, were published posthumously in 1997 as Titanic Survivor and became a bestseller.

  James Kelly (44) Lost

  Greaser.

  From: County Meath.

  12 Woodleigh Road, Southampton.

  An engine-room greaser, Kelly was identified as being from Meath in a report in the Irish World, published in New York on 11 May 1912.

  In the 1911 Southampton census, he listed himself as a marine fireman from that county, married eleven years to Mary, who was eight years his junior, from Monaghan. Three sons, James Jnr, 11, Frank, 9, and John, 3, had been born in Bootle while Kelly was working on the Liverpool-based liners.

  William Kelly (23) Lost

  Assistant Electrician.

  From: 1 Claude Road, Drumcondra, Dublin.

  William had followed his older brother, Peter, into electrical engineering. His qualification brought joy to his proud parents, William and Annie, from County Tyrone, who had moved back to Ireland after years in Scotland.

  Peter, William and Rose had all been born in Glasgow, with the arrival of William Jnr on 19 June 1888. Peter was already aged three, and Rose was born a year later. Two more children were born before the turn of the century when the family had moved to Dublin.

  William Snr was a merchant tailor with a shop at 14–14a North Earl Street in Dublin city centre. Working also as a hatter and outfitter, he earned enough money to send his sons to the Christian Brothers. The family were devout Catholics – a faith perhaps forged stronger for the parents by Glasgow’s sectarian divide – and William Jnr was encouraged to devote some of his time to the Church.

  He was further educated at a commercial college before serving a three-year apprenticeship with the electrical engineering firm of T. E. Brunker Ltd in Dublin. In January 1912, he made the fateful decision to join Harland & Wolff, working on the final outfitting of keel number 401, the Titanic.

  He went aboard as an assistant electrician. It was the first time he had ever been to sea.

  One of the electricians employed on the Titanic is a son of Mr W. Kelly, tailor, Earl Street, who is almost prostrate with anxiety and grief.

  (Irish Independent, 17 April 1912)

  The Rev P. J. O’Hara, OP, preaching in St Saviour’s church, Dublin, on Sunday morning, in asking the prayers of the congregation in connection with the disaster, made special mention of one of their choir members, Engineer Kelly, a native of Dublin, who was drowned.

  (Irish Independent, 23 April 1912)

  1911 census – Claude Road.

  William, merchant tailor, and wife Annie. Both 50; married 26 years.

  Children: Peter (25), elec. eng; William P. (22), elec. eng; Rose (21), general clerk, Annie M. (14), Adrian J. (11).

  Ernest Waldron King (28) Lost

  Assistant Purser.

  From: Clones, County Monaghan.

  Ernest had been delighted when a family effort helped to secure him work at last – even if it meant going away to sea. He had been unemployed for much of the past year, and at the age of 27 it was no joke to be without a job.

  His parents had always been encouraging. His father, the Rev. Thomas Waldron King, was the incumbent Church of Ireland rector at Currin, Clones, County Monaghan. He was 53, four years younger than his wife, Caroline, who had borne him seven children in thirty-five years of marriage. Three of those children had died young, severely testing the faith of their parents. But Ernest, born in Galway, was one of the lights of their lives, even if his younger brother Charles, aged 21 in 1912, promised to be more successful in life, winning a coveted place in Trinity College Dublin, for undergraduate studies.

  Ernest W. King had been aboard the Olympic in September 1911 when she collided in the Solent with the cruiser HMS Hawke, having to put back to Southampton with a large hole in her starboard quarter caused by the warship’s ram. He gave his address as Currin Rectory, Clones, when signing aboard the Titanic.

  His body was eventually found by the search vessel Minia, from Halifax, with Captain W. G. S. DeCarteret cabling the White Star Line on 1 May 1912:

  Today Tuesday, northerly gale, misty. Found body T.W. King, purser’s assistant, Lat 41.30, Long 48.15, being forty-five miles east of that found yesterday, showing how widely scattered and difficult to find with no reports from passing steamers to help me. Icebergs numerous as far south as 40.30 in 48.30.

  King’s was the only body he had found that day. The day before, in another cable, DeCarteret had expressed his belief that late northerly gales had swept bodies into the Gulf Stream and had carried them many miles east. A little earlier, one of his crewmembers, Francis Dyke, had written to his mother during a stint on watch in the wireless room. ‘There has been a lot of wind + bad weather since the accident so the bodies are much scattered, some we picked up over 130 miles from the wreck as they go very fast when in the Gulf Stream – very likely many will be washed up on the Irish coast, as they are all going East.’

  The body was catalogued as number 321. Still floating more than two weeks after the sinking, only five more were recovered. King’s age was estimated as 25, but no listing has been found for his clothing and effects. Returned to the morgue in Halifax, a permit for burial in Fairview Cemetery was issued on 9 May 1912, three and a half weeks after the wreck.

  His impressive black granite headstone records ‘in loving memory’ that he ‘died on duty, SS Titanic, 15 April 1912’. A verse at the base adds: ‘Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.’

  William H. Lyons (25) Lost

  Able Seaman.

  From: Meat Market Lane, Cork.

  27 Orchard Place, Southampton.

  Young William Lyons almost managed to save himself. He was dragged alive into lifeboat No. 4 having jumped from the Titanic in its final throes and swimming through frigid seas that ‘cut like a thousand knives’, according to surviving Officer Lightoller. But the effort was too much. Exhausted, Lyons succumbed to the ravages of exposure and lapsed into a coma on board his means of salvation. He was later pronounced dead when taken onto the rescuing Carpathia.

  Ironically, he could have survived – had Quartermaster Walter J. Perkis not peremptorily thrown away into the deep a bottle of brandy brought aboard No. 4 by another of those rescued, storeman Frank Prentice. Crewmen were forbidden alcohol. ‘It might have been the means of saving life,’ Prentice ruminated later, ‘as we picked up two firemen who had been in the water a long time, and one afterwards died in the boat as the result of exposure.’

  Fireman Thomas Patrick Dillon told how he recovered consciousness in lifeboat No. 4 after similarly swimming to safety ‘and found Sailor Lyons and another lying on top of me dead.’

  Stateroom steward Andrew Cunningham gave a flavour of death and comradeship in No. 4 when he told the US inquiry on its eighth day of evidence of his desperate leap overboard from the Titanic with fellow steward Sidney Conrad Siebert:

  ‘I had a mate with me. We both left the ship together.’

  Senator Smith: ‘Did he have a life preserver on?’

  Cunningham: ‘Yes, sir … I waited on the ship until all the boats had gone and then I took to the water. I went into the water about two o’clock, I should say. About half an hour before the ship sank. I swam clear of the ship about three-quarters of a mile. We saw the ship go down then. Then we struck out to look for a boat.’

  Senator Smith: ‘Did you see one?’

  Cunningham: ‘No, I heard one and I called to it.’

  Senator Smith: ‘Did that lifeboat come toward you, or did you go toward it?’

  Cunningham: ‘I went toward it … It was No. 4 boat. They picked us up. There was my mate, who died just after he was pulled in… ’

  According to evidence given by Carpathia’s Captain Arthur Rostron, Lyons was alive but unconscious when taken aboard his ship at 8 a.m. on 15 April, dying some hours later. He i
s believed to have been finally pronounced dead at midnight. His remains were buried from that vessel in weighted canvas sacking with three others in a foggy 4 a.m. ceremony on Tuesday morning, 16 April. The other bodies are believed to have been those of Abraham Harmer (Third-Class passenger), William Hoyt (First-Class passenger), taken dead from No. 14, and Sidney Siebert (bedroom steward), whose body was removed from lifeboat No. 4.

  A picture of William Henry Lyons appeared in The Cork Examiner of 23 April 1912:

  W.H. Lyons, Market Lane, Cork, who was unfortunately amongst the victims. It seems that young Lyons was saved from the wreck but afterwards died through exposure in one of the lifeboats. The above photo was taken when he was only sixteen, during his apprenticeship.

  The Cork Constitution recorded:

  Cork Dramatic Society

  At a special meeting of the Cork Dramatic Society held on Saturday, Mr D. Corkery in the chair, Mr C. O’Leary proposed, and Mr D. P. Lucey, BA, seconded, the following resolution –

  That we, the members of the Cork Dramatic Society, desire to express our sincere sympathy with Mr J. F. Lyons, BA, on the loss of his brother in the Titanic disaster.

  (Cork Constitution, 22 April 1912)

  The chairman was renowned English professor Daniel Corkery, who had founded the dramatic society with Terence MacSwiney, later lord mayor of Cork, who died on hunger strike. Corkery composed a poem on the tragedy, published in the Irish Review in May 1912. Entitled ‘In Memoriam’ and dedicated ‘to my friend John F. Lyons, on the loss of his brother William H. Lyons of the crew of the Titanic’, it contains these lines:

  Because of one whose voice I never heard,

  Whose face, whose eyes, to me were never known,

  My heart, despite the clodding years, is stirred

  And stabbed by every ruthless rumour blown