* * *
As our train pulled into Halifax early the next morning I felt surprisingly rested after my night in the sleeping car. When I had first climbed into my bunk I wasn’t sure how well I’d sleep, but the rocking motion of the train had soon sent me to dreamland.
“We’ll go to the hotel first and leave our bags there,” Arthur announced as we stepped onto the platform. We checked into the Waverley Hotel on Barrington Street, then took a taxi to the Mayflower Curling Rink on Agricola Street, which had been converted into a temporary morgue. Like many buildings in the city, the rink was draped in black bunting. Outside it stood a line of horse-drawn hearses.
“Sorry, sir, very busy today. We’re having our first interment at Fairview Cemetery this afternoon,” said the man who greeted us. He was sitting behind a desk in a room where spectators usually sat to view the curling matches. Arthur gave him our name and the man scanned through his list and whispered to an assistant, who soon came back with a brown envelope. Inside it was a gold wedding band, a pair of cufflinks and a pocket watch inscribed with the initials J.K.L.
“That’s my father’s watch,” said Arthur. “It was my grandfather’s originally. Those are his initials on it.”
“Perhaps that is why there was some confusion regarding identification,” said the man at the desk. Another person soon came and led us to an upstairs office where there were forms to be filled out. Eventually we were ushered onto the floor of the curling rink, which was divided by canvas partitions that each enclosed three coffins.
A strong medicinal smell filled the air. I realized this must be from the embalming fluid used to preserve the corpses. Inside one of the canvas cubicles, the wooden top to a plain pine coffin was lifted off. I gasped a little when I first saw my father’s body. His eyes were closed and his face looked very calm, though very white. He was wearing the black overcoat that he had put on over his pyjamas in our stateroom. Dried salt still clung to the collar.
“Yes, that’s him,” I said quickly.
Arthur shot a look of irritation at me. “That is indeed our father,” he confirmed in a dignified voice. “I’d like to make arrangements for the remains to be transferred to Montreal.”
“Very good, sir,” replied the undertaker’s assistant as the lid of the coffin was replaced.
We returned to our hotel in silence. There was an utter finality to the sight of our father’s body that was very sobering.
That evening we had a quiet dinner in the hotel and then went to bed. Later that night I woke up because I heard a sound in our room. I sat up and looked around. A crack of light was coming from below the bathroom door. Then the noise came again and I realized it was the sound of sobbing. Through the bathroom door I could hear Arthur trying to stifle his grief, only to have it break out in a low wail, followed by several sharp intakes of breath. Eventually I heard him blow his nose, so I quickly fell back on my pillow as he returned to bed. I wondered if I should say something to try to comfort him. But I knew that he would only be embarrassed if he thought I had heard him weeping.
The next morning Arthur was already dressed and ready to go down to breakfast when I stepped out of bed in my pyjamas.
“Can I tell you something?” I asked, putting my hand on his shoulder as he stood by the door. Before he could answer, I continued. “I want to tell you about Father’s last words to me on the Titanic. He said, ‘Be sure to tell Arthur I love him.’ He also told me not to worry, because, ‘Arthur will take care of things.’ That’s what he said.”
Arthur looked a little startled. His eyes began to fill with tears. He quickly turned his head away and left the room. I had exaggerated what Father had actually said, but I felt it was what he had meant to say.
Arthur never responded to what I told him, nor did I ever raise the subject with him again. But I felt a thaw in his attitude toward me on the trip home and during the days and weeks that followed. Our shared grief over Father’s death could have brought us closer together as brothers — but it didn’t. Talking about feelings and emotions wasn’t something men did very easily in those days. That September I went off to Bishop’s College School and Arthur was soon transferred to a bank in Toronto. He enlisted as an officer when World War I broke out in August of 1914. Exactly three years and one week after the sinking of the Titanic, he was killed in a poison gas attack near the town of Ypres in Belgium.
EPILOGUE
DISCOVERY
September 3, 1985
“I’ve brought you all the papers this morning, Dad,” said my daughter.
“Yes, they’ve discovered the Titanic,” I said calmly.
“You know?” she asked, somewhat disappointed.
“Heard about it on my clock radio this morning,” I replied.
“Well, the first photos aren’t all that thrilling,” she said, dumping the newspapers in my lap. “They’re kind of blue and fuzzy.”
I stared down at a tabloid with the front-page headline TITANIC FOUND in red, and turned to a spread of colour photographs inside. One of them took my breath away. “Oh my goodness,” I said, “will you look at that. Oh my, my, my … ”
She looked over my shoulder. “What are you seeing? They don’t look like much to me.”
I pointed to one photograph. “That. That’s the fo’c’sle deck up by the bow. Those are the anchor chains still stretched out on the deck from the two windlasses. Oh my. That’s something I never thought I’d see again.”
“But you didn’t get up there, did you?” she asked.
“I was a boy, Marjorie,” I replied. “Johnnie Ryerson and I got into all kinds of places on that ship.”
“You’ve never told me about that,” she said.
“Well … it was a terrible tragedy. Hundreds of people died, including your grandfather. So it didn’t seem right to talk about it. And your grandmother would get very upset when people would even mention the name Titanic.”
“What happened to Johnnie Ryerson?” she asked.
“I wrote him a letter after your grandfather’s funeral,” I said. “But he never replied. If he’s still alive he’ll be an old codger now, just like me.”
“They say the wreck is lying in two pieces,” said Marjorie. “So it’s unlikely they’ll ever be able to raise her.”
“Just as well,” I replied. “They should leave it alone. I saw her break in two, you know. So did Jack Thayer. But most people didn’t believe us. I’m sorry Jack’s not alive to see this.”
“What happened to him?” Marjorie asked.
“Well, we kept in touch a little over the years. But he lost a son in the Pacific during the war and became very depressed. He took his own life in nineteen forty-five.”
Tears sprang into Marjorie’s eyes. She was no doubt thinking about her older brother Hank, who had also been killed in World War II. I had suffered greatly after that, as I’d been close to Hank in a way I never was with my own father. My wife never really recovered from it. I think it contributed to her early death over twenty years ago.
“You’ve experienced so much history, Dad,” Marjorie said. “Someone should write it all down.”
“Well, people have called up wanting to interview me about the Titanic,” I replied. “It just never seemed right to talk about it, to me. But maybe now, I could … ”
As if hearing my words, a reporter from the Montreal Gazette telephoned me only an hour or so later. He was writing a story about all the Montreal connections to the Titanic story and wondered if he could come by and talk to me. He sounded a pleasant fellow on the telephone, so I agreed to see him that afternoon. We spent an enjoyable few hours together and he even told me some things about the Titanic I hadn’t known.
He asked me if I ever dreamed about the Titanic. I said that I had when I was younger, but not in recent years. Sometimes the roar of a crowd at a hockey game would remind me of the cries of all the people after the sinking. “It was the most unearthly sound I’ve ever heard,” I said. “I can hear it still.”
He told me that he just couldn’t understand why more boats didn’t go back to pick up people from the water. I had to agree. That was the one great question about the Titanic for which no one really had an answer.
As he was leaving, the reporter told me that he had interviewed one of Rosalie’s daughters out in Outremont. Rosalie had left my mother’s employment shortly after we returned home in 1912, and had married and had many children. When she died about ten years ago, I attended her funeral. One of her sons told me that the family had kept several different dogs when he was a boy, but that Rosalie always insisted they be Airedales. This had made me smile. I explained to him how fond Rosalie had been of our dog, Maxwell, who had died on the Titanic.
The reporter asked if I had any family photographs or memorabilia to accompany his article. I said that I would have to look through some of the trunks and boxes in the basement. “Living in the same house all your life means you accumulate a great deal of stuff,” I told him.
Since my bad knees made it hard for me to get down the basement stairs, Marjorie came over with my granddaughter, Louise, and they brought up box after box of old family albums for me to look through. I heard squeals of pleasure from down below when Louise discovered some of my mother’s huge old hats still trimmed with ostrich feathers.
I found a few treasures of my own. One of them was a 1912 photograph of me in my Winchester College uniform with that ugly straw hat. Another was the now-yellowed Marconigram sent from the Titanic to Arthur with the message: Greetings from Titanic. In NY Wed. Arrive Montreal Thurs. Father.
But the thing that pleased me most of all was a crumbling copy of an April 1912 newspaper with Lewis Skidmore’s drawings of Jack Thayer’s description of how the Titanic sank. In the margin, you could still see the rough pen drawings I had made, correcting some of Skidmore’s mistakes. I wasn’t sure if this would interest the fellow from the Gazette, but he became quite excited about it.
“You’re sure this is authentic?” he asked me.
I simply smiled. “Of course.”
To my surprise, this old newspaper with my crude drawings made news all around the world. Teenaged Boy Saw Titanic Break in Two But Was Not Believed Till Now was an often repeated headline. It was a big scoop for the Gazette reporter, who sent me several envelopes of clippings after his story was picked up in places like Japan and Saudi Arabia. CBC radio called and interviewed me for a program about the Titanic. Before long, I had to get Marjorie to install an answering machine for me, since my phone rang almost constantly with requests for interviews from journalists and TV shows. To my surprise, I discovered that there were even organizations for people interested in the Titanic. As the last Canadian survivor, I was invited to attend some of their memorial dinners and conventions. At my age, it’s difficult for me to travel, but all the attention did provide an old man with some diversion.
Marjorie put all the newspaper and magazine clippings into a shiny new album and presented it to me proudly. As I looked through its pages I thought back to my last words to Johnnie Ryerson. “In a month or two, everybody will have forgotten about the Titanic, anyway!”
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Hardly a day has passed in the last seventy-three years when I haven’t thought about the Titanic. How could so many seemingly random occurrences have come together to cause such a tragedy? Why was I saved from that icy black water when over fifteen hundred others were not? I find myself unable to answer these questions. But every day they remind me of how fragile human life is — and how precious.
HISTORICAL NOTE
A century after its sinking, the Titanic continues to fascinate the world. Although most people know that the giant liner hit an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage, far fewer are aware of how the ship came to be built in the first place.
The plan to build the world’s largest liner was hatched during a dinner party at the London mansion of Lord William Pirrie in the summer of 1907. Pirrie was the chairman of Harland and Wolff shipbuilders, and his guest that evening was J. Bruce Ismay, the director of the White Star Line. Much on the two men’s minds was a fast and elegant new ship called the Lusitania that was owned by White Star’s chief competitor, the Cunard Line. After dinner, Pirrie and Ismay decided that they would build three new ships that would be larger and even more luxurious than the Lusitania. Within a year, Harland and Wolff had drawn up plans for two giant ships, and by mid-December of 1908, the keel plate for the first liner, the Olympic, was laid down. On March 31, 1909, the same was done for a sister ship, to be called the Titanic. A third, the Gigantic, was to be built later.
On the morning of May 31, 1911, a crowd of more than a thousand people gathered at the Belfast shipyards of Harland and Wolff for the launching of the Titanic. At five minutes past noon a rocket was fired just before the 23,600-tonne hull began to slide into the River Lagan to cheers and the blowing of tugboat whistles. Soon the Titanic’s hull gently rocked in the river while the newly completed Olympic waited nearby. That same day the Olympic left for Liverpool to prepare for her maiden voyage from Southampton on June 14, 1911. Although the two liners were built to be almost identical, the Titanic, when finished, would be slightly heavier than the Olympic, making it the world’s biggest ship.
Following its launch, the Titanic’s hull was towed to the outfitting basin, where over the next ten months the upper decks and funnels were added and all her fittings and furnishings installed. After midnight on April 4, 1912, the new liner arrived in Southampton, where some final painting and finishing would be done in preparation for her maiden voyage on April 10.
As the Titanic moved alongside the pier shortly after noon on sailing day, it approached two smaller ships, the Oceanic and the New York, moored together at the dock. The passing of the huge new liner caused the New York to snap her mooring lines and swing out into the Titanic’s path. Soon there was only about 1.2 metres separating them. A speedy order for full astern from the Titanic’s bridge activated the portside propeller, causing a burst of water which allowed the giant ship to slide by safely. The tugboats then attached lines to tow the New York away. This near-collision delayed the Titanic’s departure by an hour, causing her late arrival off Cherbourg that evening.
It was after dark when the Titanic departed from Cherbourg, having taken on 274 more passengers who had been brought out to the ship by tender. Among them were some of the Titanic’s wealthiest travellers, including John Jacob Astor and his young wife, Madeleine; Arthur Ryerson and his family; and British aristocrats Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon. That evening as the lookouts went on duty in the crow’s nest high up on the foremast, they noticed that the binoculars they had used for the Belfast to Southampton trip had gone missing. This was reported, but no one thought to replace them.
At approximately 11:30 the next morning, the Titanic arrived off Queenstown (today called Cobh) in Ireland. Seven passengers disembarked there, including Francis M. Browne, an enthusiastic photographer and a candidate for the Jesuit priesthood. His photographs of the Titanic would become among the few surviving pictures actually taken on board the liner. Two tenders from Queenstown ferried out 120 passengers, most of them Irish immigrants travelling in third class, as well as 1385 sacks of mail. As the Titanic headed across the Atlantic, a young Irishman named Eugene Daly said goodbye to his native land by playing “Erin’s Lament” on his bagpipes.
Over the next three days, the Titanic made excellent time through calm seas, and J. Bruce Ismay, who was on board for the maiden voyage, was very pleased with the new ship’s performance. At 9:00 a.m. on Sunday, April 14, the Titanic received a radio warning of “bergs and field ice” ahead. Similar messages from other ships came in throughout the day. Apart from altering the ship’s course to take a more southerly route, Captain Smith did not slow down or take any other special precautions. It was common practice at the time for ships to simply steer around icebergs when they were sighted.
At 11:39 that evening, lookout Frederick Fleet suddenly spotted a
dark shape ahead. He rang the warning bell three times and telephoned the bridge to report, “Iceberg right ahead!” First Office Murdoch quickly ordered the engines to be stopped and then reversed. The helmsman had already turned the ship’s wheel sharply to avoid the approaching berg. Slowly, slowly, the ship began to turn. But then the officers felt a jolt and heard a grinding noise along the Titanic’s starboard side. Down in boiler room No. 6, icy water immediately shot through the punctured hull. The stokers there had to run for their lives as the watertight door to their boiler room began to close.
Captain Smith asked one of his officers to make an inspection tour of the ship. When he was told that the mailroom on G deck was flooding, he went to have a look for himself and there met Thomas Andrews, the ship’s chief designer. Andrews knew that the Titanic was divided into sixteen watertight compartments and that it could float with any four of those breached. But he soon discovered that the first five compartments of the hull were filling with water. Since the walls between those compartments only went 3 metres above the waterline, Andrews knew the water would flow from one compartment into the next. He estimated that the Titanic had about an hour and a half left before she sank.
At about 12:27 a.m. Captain Smith asked the senior radio operator, Jack Phillips, to send out a call for assistance. Three ships would respond to the distress call, the nearest being the Carpathia, which was 93 km away. Smith knew it would take the Carpathia hours to reach his ship. He also knew there were not nearly enough lifeboats for the more than 2200 people on board. Outdated regulations required the Titanic to carry only sixteen lifeboats. Even if all of these had been loaded to capacity, they would only have been able to carry approximately half of those on board. Most of the first lifeboats would leave the ship only partially filled, since “women and children only” was the order, and many women were reluctant to leave their husbands. They could also see the lights of another ship on the horizon that they thought would surely come to their rescue.
Deadly Voyage Page 11
