Titanic Victims and Survivors

The Daily Mirror dated Wednesday 17th April 1912

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I try not to be too predictable but on this day of all days the post has to be about the Titanic. The ship hit an iceberg and sank in the early hours of the 15^th April 1912. The news was read in the UK morning papers of the 16^th. Unfortunately there are many reprints of The Daily Mirror for the 16^th so I have never tried to add one to my collection.  This is The Daily Mirror for the 17^th and concentrates on naming the more note-worthy (i.e. rich) survivors and lost.  

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Certainly a sign of the times when ‘women and children first’ can be referred to as ‘White Man’s 

Law’.

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Note the 13th name on the list of 2nd Class survivors - Edith Brown. She was one of the longest surviving people rescued from the Titanic and died at the age of 100 in 1997 in Southampton. My daughter, a Funeral Director, arranged and conducted the funeral.

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One crew member, Violet Jessop, survived a collision between Titanic’s sister ship the Olympic and a Royal Naval vessel HMS Hawke, the sinking of the Titanic and the 1916 sinking of the Britannic, the third ship of the class.

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That’s a big boat. And it was fast. Apparently the Memorial cruise that went from Southampton this week took 6 days to reach the site whereas Titanic only took 4.

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Pictures taken at Queenstown (called Cobh since 1922) in County Cork on Ireland’s southern coast. Titanic was too large to get into the harbour so moored off shore and tenders were used to transfer passengers and goods.

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In 1910 Frederick Henry Seddon had a wife, five children, and a lodger. She was Eliza Barrow and Seddon spent the following 18 months fleecing her of money, property and stocks. In August 1911 Eliza Barrow became ill and in September died.

Seddon became her sole executor and claimed for himself her remaining assets, but Eliza’s cousins, who had expected to inherit, became suspicious, managing to get the police to exhume her body, which was found to contain arsenic poisoning.

Seddon was arrested, tried and sentenced to death. He was hanged at Pentonville on the 18^th April 1912. 

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In 1911 Harriet Quimby was the first woman to get a pilot’s license in the United States and the first woman to make a nighttime flight. On the 16^th April 1912, she flew across the English Channel in 59 minutes flying a 50hp Bleriot monoplane.

On the 1^st July 1912, she was performing at the Third Annual Boston Aviation Meeting with the show’s organizer as a passenger. The plane suddenly nose dived at an altitude of 1500 feet and they both fell out of their seats to their deaths.

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‘Rust-Proof Corsets’ - not a phrase I ever imagined I’d be typing.

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Picture the moment at the What-Shall-We-Name-Our-Product meeting when young Fanshaw (who’d only been with the Company for 6 months but was the MD’s nephew) suddenly shouted, “I’ve got it – Spungola!” Oh, how they cheered!