NORTON SCIENTIFIC
LATEST COVERAGE - The passengers on the Titanic
joking at dinner about chipping ice off passing icebergs for their whisky.
The baby handed in desperation to
strangers on the deck who warm his toes in the icy air.
The engine room stoker who, after
the collision, shivering in his singlet on deck, ruefully thinks of his soup
left to heat on the red hot boiler below.
These are some of the stories
told in the book Titanic:Last Night of a Small Town (OUP) by Dr John Welshman
of Lancaster University, who says there are several connections between
Lancashire and the Titanic.
Henry Threlfall Wilson, who
helped found the White Star Line which built the ship, was educated at
Lancaster Royal Grammar School.
And the Titanic’s Second Officer
Herbert Lightoller was born in Chorley in 1974 and attended Chorley Grammar.
The Titanic’s shipwreck was one of four he survived during his adventurous
career, which included a stint in the Gold Rush in Canada, a fire at sea and
shipwreck on a desert island.
He refused a place in the Titanic
lifeboats and jumped as the ship went down, but was sucked into a submerged
airshaft.
“I was drowning, and a matter of
another couple of minutes would have seen me through.
“I was still struggling and
fighting when suddenly a terrific blast of hot air came up the shaft, and blew
me right away from the air shaft and up to the surface.”
He later sailed to Dunkirk to
rescue soldiers in World War Two and he was played by Kenneth More in the 1958
film A Night to Remember.
Second class passenger Lawrence
Beesley was married in Lancaster but his wife Cissy died of tuberculosis so he
decided to visit his brother in Toronto.
A teacher at Dulwich College, one
of his pupils was the future crime writer Raymond Chandler.
Beesley survived the sinking but
was drawn to the filming of the 1958 movie.
He faked an Equity card and
dressed up in costume in order to sneak aboard the replica Titanic during the
filming but was spotted by the director who ordered him to disembark.
Dr John Welshman said: “Growing
up in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, I was aware of the Titanic from an early
age because of the story of its designer Thomas Andrews who died in the
disaster.
“We are all still fascinated by
the Titanic because we imagine what we would do if we found ourselves in that
predicament. The silver slipper left in the cabin, the hot soup on the stove,
this is the human detail of the real people that I’ve tried to breathe life
into again a century later.”
He has uncovered previously
untold stories.
One of these concerns the couple
emigrating from Finland – Elin and Pekka Hakkarainen – who claimed the third
class passengers were locked in.
Dr Welshman even discovered that
he is related to one of the first class stewardesses, Elizabeth Leather from Liverpool,
who was seen by witnesses rowing the number 16 lifeboat on the night the ship
sank on April 15, 1912.
Able seaman Ernest Archer helped
the passengers into no 16 and said he told Elizabeth she did not have to row
“but she said she would like to do it to keep herself warm”.
Elizabeth gave evidence to the
subsequent enquiry, describing how she had gone to bed and did not get up for
up to 45 minutes after the collision because she did not realise how serious it
was.
She went up to B deck where she saw
the other stewardesses putting blankets and eiderdowns around the lady
passengers so she returned to her cabin.
After being rescued by the
Carpathia – whose captain Arthur Rostron was born in Bolton – she spent the
rest of her life in South Africa.
More of these stories will be
told in a talk by Dr John Welshman about the last hours of the doomed ship at
Harris Library, community history department, on Saturday, April 21, from
2-3pm.
