Titanic Article
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Martina Devlin Like most people, I knew the Titanic story as a gripping mosaic of disaster and survival – a roll call of what ifs and might have beens told and re-told in film and book form for almost 100 years. Endlessly fascinating, endlessly open to interpretation, endlessly emblematic of mankind’s vanity and ambition, but also of our ability to behave with courage and honour in the mouth of the abyss. What I didn’t know is that I have a family connection with the Titanic. And when I stumbled across it – quite by chance – it was as if a switch flicked on and history stepped out of the shadows. Three years go, quite by chance, I discovered that my grandmother’s uncle was a passenger on the Titanic. And he was eloping to the US to start a new life. He perished on the maiden voyage of the vessel known as the Wonder Ship and his body was never recovered – but the woman he loved survived and had his posthumous baby. It was almost a cliché. But it was also extraordinarily moving. And it had happened to a man just three generations removed from me. I found his photograph and gazed at it, mesmerised. I’d always heard it said writers need look no further than their own families for stories – and here was the proof. I fancied, staring at that grainy black and white image, that I could detect a family resemblance on my mother’s side. He reminded me of uncles and cousins. I could hear his voice speaking with their rich Munster intonation. I tried to read the expression in his eyes and decipher what manner of man he was – gentle, impulsive, light-hearted? Above all, I had the strongest sense of blood calling to blood. So I made up my mind to tell his story – not as history, not as fact, but as fiction. The version of events my imagination suggested, since this man had lived and died 90 odd years ago and there was no-one alive who remembered him. I decided to write Ship of Dreams and dedicate my novel – our novel – to him. My great-grand uncle. There were two other people’s stories I wanted to set down: Hannah Godfrey, the woman with whom he eloped, and Marion O’Brien, their baby. She was present on the Titanic in embryo form. But she grew up without a father because a ship dubbed unsinkable steamed too fast through the iceberg region on her maiden voyage, without extra lookouts being posted to take account of ice warnings. That mistake – one of hubris, perhaps – on the part of her owners the White Star Line and the Titanic’s captain EJ Smith had made widows and orphans of many. I couldn’t tell all their stories but I could give voice to Tom, Hannah and Marion’s. This is what I knew. Tom O’Brien from the townland of Bonavie in Co Limerick worked in a creamery. He was one of a family of eight, the son of a tenant farmer. In 1912 at the age of 26, he decided to emigrate. It wasn’t an unusual decision: all the young and able-bodied were bailing out; it was said of the Irish that we reared our children for the export market. Tom had four sisters in Chicago and one of them acted as sponsor for him. It’s a safe assumption the dollars for the journey came from the US too, that vital link in the process called chain emigration whereby members of a family followed each other out. The sisters, one of them my great-grandmother, were eagerly looking forward to his arrival. But Tom neglected to mention he wouldn’t be travelling alone. Whether it was a spur of the moment decision or had been planned for some time we don’t know, but he eloped with a girl from a neighbouring townland. Together they made their way to Cobh, then known as Queenstown, and bought a steamship ticket to New York for £15 and 10 shillings. And here’s where chance or fate or just plain bad luck intervened. The liner Tom and Hannah were due to travel on had its sailing called off – it was a time of cancelled crossings because the steamships relied on coal and the Welsh miners were striking for minimum pay. The couple’s ticket was transferred to the next available crossing: the Titanic. She was sailing amid fanfare and widespread press attention, carrying everyone from statesmen to millionaires to starlets in the fledgling moving pictures industry, as well as hundreds of emigrants in steerage. She set off from Southampton in April 1912, stopping at Cherbourg and finally Queenstown to collect passengers, cargo and mail bags. Two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic she struck ice and Tom went down with the liner. His chances were never good as a third-class male. But Hannah was more fortunate and escaped in one of the last lifeboats to be launched. As for the Titanic, this marvel of marine engineering built at the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast split in two and sank to the ocean floor, where she was to lie undiscovered until 1985. I like to believe that what remains of Tom O’Brien lies with her, and that the Titanic’s deathbed is his too. Tom never reached the US but something of him did. Five months later, in September 1912, Hannah gave birth to his daughter Marion in New York. I said earlier I had discovered the little I knew by chance. I was doing some research on the Internet for a different book about emigration and stumbled across the passenger list for the Titanic. Idly running my eye down it, Tom’s name and address leapt out at me. My grandmother, Josie English née O'Brien, also came from Bonavie. It's such a small townland (near the Tipperary border) that I assumed they must be related. "Did Granny have a relation on the Titanic?" I asked my mother. Her forehead pleated. "That’s ringing a vague bell," she admitted. "I don’t know anything much about it, just that there’s a family connection. We knew never to talk about it as children. It upset your Granny too much." Why was he never mentioned? I learned there was a question-mark over whether Tom and Hannah had married – no record of a ceremony was found in Ireland – but surely this wasn’t enough to explain the silence. Then I read my Irish Independent colleague Senan Molony's non-fiction book The Irish Aboard Titanic. It told how Tom’s sisters offered Hannah a home in Chicago but she refused, saying she’d be reminded all the time of Tom. There was also a copy of a letter from Hannah to Tom's sister Mary O'Brien Hunt in Chicago (my great-grand aunt). And the mystery was explained. Contact had been broken off between Hannah and Tom’s family in a row over the compensation from White Star. Both Hannah and the dead man's mother in Ireland claimed damages as next of kin. Hannah obviously produced proof because the money went to her – as it should, in any case, with a child to raise alone. This letter caused so much consternation that Mary forwarded it to Ireland for her mother Margaret to shake her head over. In it, Hannah accused the family of only being interested in the money. "You need’nt worry about me. My Baby and myself will be alright. I knew ye were all trying to get some money. I produced my marriage certificate, and I had the nearest claim. So you nor the lawyer needn't bother," she wrote. I was amused by Hannah – by her chutzpah and her determination to make her way in the New World. I wondered what had happened to her afterwards but heard conflicting accounts. And then I set aside the hunt to trace hers and Marion’s story because by now I had embarked on the novel. Where I knew facts I’d be obliged to use them. Not knowing gave me freedom. I took as my starting point a pregnancy, an elopement and a death by drowning aboard the world's most famous ship. The more I read about the sinking, the more interested in the aftermath I became. If you survived the Titanic, what then? Would your glass be half-full or half-empty? Would you feel blessed or blighted? And how had the steerage emigrants, some with no more than the clothes they stood up in, managed once they reached the US? So I decided to write my novel about a group of Titanic survivors. Ship of Dreams was a labour of love in that I wanted to reclaim Tom O’Brien for the family. I returned again and again to that thumbnail photograph of him and speculated on what ran through his mind as the ship foundered. Did he know he was to be a father? Did he worry about what would happen to Hannah and their baby? When I finished my novel, chance or fate or just plain good luck intervened. Shortly before Ship of Dreams was published I finally made contact with the descendants of Tom and Hannah in the US and received answers to some of my questions. I spoke to their 70-year-old granddaughter Catherine Hanlon Fisher, who lives in Manchester, Tennessee. Marion was her mother, and she told me about Hannah’s and Marion’s lives in New York. When Marion was two or three, Hannah married a Co Kilkenny man named Jim Quinn but she died just six years after the Titanic sank, in the flu epidemic of 1918. The orphaned Marion was raised by her stepfather, who burned all her mother’s papers after the funeral – so she had no way to contact her paternal Irish relatives. In time she became a telephone operator in Brooklyn and married an Irish emigrant, civil engineer Willie Hanlon, also from Kilkenny and related to Jim Quinn. They had three children and a happy life together in Albany, upstate New York. In her lifetime she avoided boats, was nervous of the ocean, rarely talked about the Titanic and resisted joining any Titanic societies. Indeed, she only told her daughter about the family link when Catherine was a young woman towards the end of the 1950s. Later she visited Ireland and met some of her maternal relatives, but never made contact with any of her father’s people. She thought we didn’t want her. I still find that sad. Marion died in 1994 at the age of 81. Most poignant of all was to learn that although Tom O’Brien never set foot on US soil, he had three grandchildren and has nine great-grandchildren and fifteen great-great grandchildren scattered around the States. His descendants settled and prospered in the country he did not live to see. In that, he achieved a version of immortality – despite his premature death in a seafaring disaster that echoes through the generations. :: Ship of Dreams by Martina Devlin is published by Poolbeg |
