Posted on 04/15/2016 6:07:39 AM PDT by artichokegrower
LOL
Ten minutes into the movie, I’m going, “Just sink already!”
Yah, me too...sappy love story and I have developed special kind of loathing for “the song”.
I wonder if it is a coincidence that the captain of the California was named "Lord," and that the classic account of the Titanic sinking, "A Night To Remember," is written by Walter Lord. Any relation? Perhaps an appeal to history to not judge the California to harshly? The California, despite being only minutes away from the disaster, picked up only a handful of survivors. The Carpathia steamed 60 miles to the scene and rescued the bulk of them.
Even in today’s world of near instantaneous cellular and internet communications and live satellite feeds, early reporting of breaking news stories are often or wrong or incomplete or get some details wrong early on. Some of that is understandable what with the huge amount of information coming in, sometimes from sources that can’t be vetted or confirmed and with the media’s, especially the cable news channels rush to be the first to report. But that is partly due to people’s expectations that whoever breaks the story first must be correct and therefore they get the ratings (or back before TV, the newspaper sales).
So in that respect nothing much has changed since the sinking of the Titanic.
Another complicating factor was that wireless radio communication had not been around all that long, was pretty much unregulated and there were some problems with it. If I am not mistaken even the shorthand used could be confusing as it wasn’t always consistent between operators.
http://earlyradiohistory.us/sec005.htm
“One of the most dramatic sea disasters was the sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic on the morning of April 15, 1912. The Titanic -- along with the Carpathia, which picked up the survivors -- was staffed by Marconi Wireless operators, and Marconi shore stations along the Canadian, Newfoundland, and U.S. coasts handled most of the communication as the Carpathia slowly made its way to New York City. In addition, many inland stations tried to get information about the disaster, which in this unregulated era resulted in extensive interference and confusion. Included in all this was the American Marconi equipped facility, MHI, located atop the New York Wanamaker department store, where David Sarnoff was station manager. Sarnoff would later vastly exaggerate his importance, in progressively embellished retellings, including completely false claims that he was first in the United States to hear of the disaster, and that President Taft silenced other stations so that Sarnoff could become the sole link for gathering information. However, the operators at the New York Wanamaker station did spend long hours listening for reports and survivor lists. A collection of extracts about the Titanic comes from the Boston American and recountings by David Sarnoff: The Titanic and the New York Wanamaker Station. Marconi management also sent messages to the operators aboard the Carpathia, telling them to limit what they were publicly reporting, until their accounts could be sold to the newspapers. These activities, plus a complaint that the operators aboard the Carpathia were unresponsive to Navy vessels sent by U.S. President Taft, were covered by the New York Herald: Marconi Company and Titanic Disaster Communication. Amateur radio operators were blamed for much of the chaos experienced immediately after the Titanic sank, but it has never really been clear how many of the problems were actually their fault. In 1922, in The Book of Radio (Titanic extract), Charles William Taussig wrote about the next evening after the Titanic sank, as amateur operators, voluntarily responding to the emergency, scrupulously maintained complete radio silence in the New York City area, in order to avoid interfering with the survivor lists being transmitted by the Salem.”
http://www.cybertelecom.org/notes/history_wireless_earlyreg12t.htm
1) Titanic's wireless operator was Harold BRIDE, not McBride.
2) The name of the ship was Californian, not California.
I am wondering if they drowned or if most froze to death. There is a new Titanic...an absolute duplicate of the original (with modern technology), ready to set sail soon. Er...I’ll miss that voyage, thanks.
With any kind of shipwreck, there's almost always a large amount of debris left floating. Those who made it off the ship would probably have been able to seize on something to help keep them afloat. But the cold would have quickly killed them anyway. And there were a lot who died trapped in the bowels of the doomed vessel. I doubt we'll ever know how many.
The tragedy was so epic it has earned its place in infamy.
A few years ago I went to a real-good onboard lecture about cruising. There were interesting questions (nothing like an excellent audience for learning) about how wise it is to be building these mega-ships with thousands of passengers, is it even in the realm of possibility to evacuate everyone? There were also questions about how safe is it if lifeboats have to be used to remove passengers from ships quickly.
Luxury vs safety? Makes one think twice about today's cruise ships, doesn't it?
Thanks. Interesting read.
Long story short or not so short - his father had died in an accident shortly before he was born and his still quite young and from what I understand, quite attractive and highly spirited widowed mother (who once told us about her riding motorcycles as a teenager, just before she got married, with a group of friends that included the famous Norwegian artic explorer Roald Amundsen) neither wanted to live as the grieving widow under her parent’s roof for the rest of her life nor marry the much, much older and very stern man her family was pushing her into marrying.
So, leaving my not quite one-year-old father behind in Norway in the care of her parent’s and her four sisters, she booked passaged on a ship to the US (or as some family members tell it, was given the ticket by a cousin visiting from the US who decided not to return – and yes – we do wonder if she was technically an “illegal” or not – although she did naturalize as a US citizen just after WWII so we presume she was “legal”, but we do know she didn’t come through Ellis Island….).
Once here in the US, in NY, in the Brooklyn neighborhood once known as “Little Norway” to be exact and connecting with and living with some other cousins already here, working for a while as a maid (we think later as her personal secretary) to a very wealthy woman, she eventually met, fell in love with and married another Norwegian expat who had come here some years earlier.
Ironically they were from the same town in Norway but would have most likely never had gotten together if they had stayed there as her family was upper class and he was, although well-educated and a skilled engineer, was from a lower working class family. Old world barriers and customs would have kept them apart in the “old country”, but not so much here. After settling here and both of them having good jobs and buying a modest house, she returned to Norway to retrieve my father and bring him back with her to America (another long family story involving his natural father’s sister and a court battle she initiated to try to keep him in Norway and get custody) ... anyway….
My father told me that while on the ship, at one point the horns blew and then ship’s bells rang many times, an announcement was made and everyone stopped still and bowed their heads in prayer. He asked his mother why and she told him it was because they were crossing the point (approximately I guess) where the Titanic had sunk. But he didn’t understand, being too young at the time to know or understand what that meant.
A few hours later that evening the ship came to a near stop and the ship’s bells rang again and everyone was instructed to put on their life vests as a precaution as they were crossing through a field of icebergs. The ship made a very slow go for the next day or two.
The ship made it out of that OK but then about two days later they encountered some very heavy seas.
My father told me that he remembered how he was playing with a toy truck, sitting on one end of a hallway on the ship (wearing a life vest again) and that his toy truck would roll from one end of the long hallway to the other and back again because of the motion of the ship crossing the heavy waves. He thought it was great fun at the time. He also said he and his mother often dined at the captain’s table as he was a family friend. I don’t know if they were booked as 1st class passengers, but knowing my grandmother, she probably expected to be treated as one. : ),
When the ship finally made it to New York Harbor they were 4 days late. My father’s stepfather (although my dad would not learn that he was his stepfather and not his natural father until many, many years later – another long family story) had been nearly frantic. Even in 1928 communications were not all that good and while he learned about the delay, he had no good way of communicating directly with his wife and the details were very sketchy and confusing at first and he had trouble finding out what had happened to them or the ship for a time and was very concerned and he told me not long before he died, that he stayed and slept at the port terminal until they finally arrived.
Keep in mind that this took place only 15 years after the sinking of the Titanic. The memory of that tragic event had to have been rather fresh in his mind. To put that into perspective - 9/11 happened less than 15 years ago.
During WWII, my dad served in the US Army in the South Pacific and spent a lot of time on naval ships island hopping. I guess his Norwegian blood made him immune to sea sickness unlike a lot of his fellow soldiers. He told me the story about how one morning after his troop convoy had barely skirted a major typhoon and encountering very heavy seas, that he was the only solider to come to breakfast first thing that morning and very well rested and very hungry. A couple of sailors told him – “You’re in the wrong branch son - you should be a sailor.”
On another Titanic related note; last year I was asked by our credit manager who was spearheading the effort to clean out old files and getting rid of old file cabinets in preparation for some renovations and better file storage, to help out identifying old and no longer needing to be legally retained PR and HR files that could be sent for offsite destruction. Located in the basement of our building (the oldest part having been built in the mid 1800’s), there were some very old file cabinets that were slated to be destroyed also and we were asked to take one final look through them. Among the old and completely empty file cabinets already marked “OK to Destroy” and moved to a designated area was one just marked “Misc”.
We opened the very old and somewhat now rusty file cabinet (the basement had been flooded during Tropical Storm Lee and we had lost a lot of records) but we didn’t see anything worth keeping until I saw at the very back of the top drawer, easily overlooked, a very yellowed manila file folder labeled in faded cursive ink - “Titanic”.
Curious, I pulled it out and looked inside and found a series of letters to and from the original manufacturing company located here in Lancaster County PA and The White Star Line; the earliest dating around three months after the ship’s sinking and regarding an inquiry as to mail and other cargo (“manifest items”) that were lost when the ship went down along with letters regarding how to file an insurance claim. As old as they were, they were in remarkably good shape, probably had been in that cabinet for years completely untouched and being so high up, were fortunately not damaged in the flood.
The credit manager and I put big red stickers all over that file cabinet that said “Do Not Destroy!!!” as it needed to be gone through more thoroughly to make sure there were not any other files of any company history or of general historic interest, but we didn’t have the time or resources to do it that day. And I also suggested that the Titanic letters needed to be more carefully preserved – stored in acid free papers, etc. I offered put her and our company CFO in touch with a local museum curator for whom my great niece had interned for in their Archives Department while getting her BA in history, not necessarily to have them donated to the museum but for some advice on proper preservation. But they didn’t seem interested or all that concerned and blew me off. Last I heard the President had them and was going to get his secretary to put them in to frames to hang in his office. I was concerned that improper framing and handling could irrevocably damage them but I kept my mouth shut. Sad.
Wow, that was an amazing post. Thank-you for sharing your interesting family history.
Those “Titanic” letters you mentioned in your last three paragraphs sound fascinating.
I would have asked my boss if I could keep some of the letters in those file cabinets, especially the Titanic letters, which have an historical value in addition to a handsome monetary value as well.
Even the non-Titanic letterheads could be of value. I would have offered to work overtime for free if they would have let me take any obsolete letterheads that I wanted, especially considering that they were going to destroy many of them anyway.
Again, great post!
As to the letters, they belong to the company which is part of a much larger corporation based in the UK BTW, not me. I don’t think any of them were destroyed but I was concerned about their handling.
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