by Senan Molony
Two days before he boarded at Southampton he had escorted a young lady to George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman in the West End and wrote that it was ‘rather improper in places’. Another flame was on his mind aboard the Titanic. Colley wrote a letter on ship stationery, dated 11 April 1912 (taken off at Queenstown), in which he belatedly congratulated his first cousin Norah Webber on her marriage to an officer of the 30th Lancers in the Punjab.
‘My dear Norah’, he began, before launching into the expansive style that won him so many female admirers:
I am a No. 1 sized elephantine pig and I shouldn’t have let the fact of your being faithless to me + marrying ANOTHER have the effect of coolness. As a matter of fact, it’s not coolness at all, but I’ve been putting it off ’til I could send you a wedding present, which I have been unable to do. The Bank are not treating me well, + I’m afraid a cheque might be treated with dishonour. But I will some day, + meantime you have my broken heart at your shell-like feet …
I hear that all you married Webbers are absurdly happy. I don’t think you + Adie [her sister Adelaide] ought to be really, when you consider you each of you broke my poor tender little heart. But then I was always too tender hearted where BEAUTY was concerned!!
Goodbye little Norah + write like a decent cousin to Eddie Colley. My love to you and my regards to my cousin-in-law, whom everyone tells me is too nice for words. Love from Eddie.
A day earlier, on 10 April, Colley wrote to his sister-in-law Edith. The missive reveals more of the man’s intriguing struggles with affairs of the heart. It has been edited here:
This is a huge ship. Unless lots of people get on at Cherbourg and Queenstown, they’ll never half fill it. The dining room is low-ceilinged, but full of little tables for 2, 3 and more in secluded corners. How I wish someone I liked was on board, but then nice people don’t sit at tables for two unless they’re engaged or married. I wonder my blue blood didn’t tell me that?
They also have a restaurant where you can pay for meals if you get bored with the ordinary grub. Our most distinguished passengers seem to be W.T. Stead, Chas. M. Hays and E.P. Colley. Oh, and the Countess of something, but her blood is only black blue (give me good red corpuscles. I seem to know more about them. And they circulate faster.)
We nearly had a collision to start with. Coming out of Southampton we passed close to a ship that was tied up alongside the Oceanic, and the suction of our ship drew her out into the stream, and snapped the ropes that held her, and round she swung across our bows!
She had no steam up, so had to be pulled back by tugs, and we have to reverse. The name of her was the New York in case you see it in the papers. It proves conclusively the case of the Hawke and Olympic …
Don’t you think that it is I who am common and second-rate and not my friends? I always prefer my funny friends to your pretty people. The blue people find me dull and the red ones don’t.
I think my best plan is to make love unplatonically to A__ who owns the books. She has manners that would go down anywhere, dresses like an English girl, and knows all the better people in Victoria (did you know there were some?). She is not beautiful, but very nice, and in fact she would do charmingly but wouldn’t please my relations. I am not a snob and you would be the first to call me one if I did more than draw attention to the fact.
But Edie you have never met any of my supposedly dreadful friends, and I have lost all confidence in my power of choosing anyone for fear of family disapproval, that I can’t face it. You can have this letter printed if you like, and circulated, and the proceeds of the sale given to the society for aged and infirm chaperones.
I hope to meet Mr and Mrs Kane, and her sister’s child, in New York. She will be the ideal chaperone at any rate.
Goodbye Edie, you’re a darling and wish you had a sister. I’d hypnotise her into thinking I wasn’t common by inclination!
Love from Eddie [Letter auctioned for £15,000, September 2006]
On board the Titanic, Colley was reported by fellow passenger Colonel Archibald Gracie to be a smiling Irishman, one of a group of six rich gentlemen who offered their services as escorts to Mrs Helen Churchill Candee, a wealthy writer and socialite who survived the sinking in lifeboat No. 6. Colonel Gracie said the group comprised ‘our coterie’, which was determined to keep Mrs Candee amused and accompanied at all times. One writer later described Colley as a ‘roly-poly Irishman who laughed a lot but said little’, apparently quoting the lady herself.
On the night of the sinking, the coterie and Mrs Candee attended a concert in the First-Class reception area on D deck, forward, until just after 11 p.m. Colley retired for the night after a visit by some members of the party to the Café Parisien on B deck aft, starboard side, at 11.20 p.m. Twenty minutes later the Titanic struck the iceberg.
Edward Colley was born on an estate at Lucan, County Dublin, on 15 April 1875. The Colleys were a distinguished family. Henry was a magistrate and landlord, married to Elizabeth. They had four sons and six daughters. Edward’s sister Constance, a pioneering doctor, contracted TB from a patient she was treating in Edinburgh, and died early in 1912 – the event that brought Edward home from Canada.
Major Colley’s Journey
I have learned, on the most reliable authority, that our respected and popular Resident Magistrate is about to proceed to British Columbia to look after the estates of his brother, Major Edward Pomeroy Colley, who was one of the heroes who sacrificed his life for others in the terrible Titanic disaster.
His brother was an extensive mining engineer, having interests abroad as well as in Dublin and Limerick, and when the sad news that he had paid the penalty of his heroism with the foundering of the monster liner was made known, all creeds and classes in Tipperary and the surrounding district tendered their sympathetic condolences to a popular gentleman in a most trying time.
(Tipperary Star, 25 May 1912)
His uncle was Sir George Pomeroy Colley, a career soldier who rose to prominence in the British army and became governor of Natal. He fought in China, India, Afghanistan and South Africa – until shot through the forehead by Boers in an assault on Majuba Height in 1881.
When Edward Pomeroy Colley boarded the Titanic at Queenstown, he was following in the footsteps of his distinguished uncle who had boarded the troopship Punjaub for his first overseas posting from the same port fifty-eight years earlier. On that journey, which took fifty-nine days to reach Table Bay, Sir George had time to compose a prayer at sea – which his family respectfully memorialised after his death. It reads in part:
And when grim Death in smoke-wreaths robed / Comes thundering o’er the scene
What fear can reach the soldier’s heart / Whose trust in Thee has been?
And if ’tis Thine immortal will / My spirit hence to call
‘Thy Will be done’, I’ll whisper still / And ever trusting, fall.
Thomas Henry Conlin (31) Lost
Ticket number 21332. Paid £7 14s 8d.
Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Arvagh, County Cavan.
Destination: North Fairhill Street, Philadelphia.
Thomas Henry Conlin (31) was returning to America after a brief visit home. He had first emigrated from Ireland in the late 1880s. Described as a general labourer on embarkation records, he was travelling back to his sister Rosa in Philadelphia, where another sister, Annie, also lived.
The Irish World, published in New York on 11 May 1912, contained this assessment of him:
Thomas Conlin, Jr, thirty years old, of 2238 North Fairhill Street, this city, is counted among the victims of the Titanic disaster. He was seen on the ill-fated boat by survivors who knew him and was not among those rescued by the Carpathia.
He was born in Ireland, came to this country when very young and attended the St Edward’s School. He was a member of the parish total abstinence society, the B.V.M. Sodality and the Holy Name Society. He was an agent for a machine company and had gone to Ireland to visit his old home.
Those aboard Carpathia who knew Tom Conlin were the Murphy sisters, Kate and Margaret, and it is recounted that Conlin took off his coat and threw it to these girls, who were dressed only in their nightclothes, as they were about to descend in a lifeboat. He knew he would not need it. It also appears that Tom and the Murphy girls were cousins.
One story around Cormore, County Cavan, claims that Thomas Conlin was engaged to an American woman named Lena Keyes, who later moved to Dobbs Ferry in New York, where she worked as a housekeeper. She never married and died in her nineties.
Michael Connaughton (31) Lost
Ticket number 335097. Paid £7 15s.
Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Tang, County Westmeath.
Destination: 965 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn, New York city.
Born at Lisaquill, Tang, adjoining Ballymahon in neighbouring County Longford, Michael was a trolley car operator (horse-drawn) in Brooklyn at the time of his death. He was returning from his third trip to visit his relatives, and was much mourned by married sisters Kate Horan and Mary Conlon, who revered their brother as the person responsible for bringing them to New York. Kate lived at his stated destination.
It is thought that Michael could have been rooming with his fellow Athlone man, Eugene Daly, in compartment C-23 on F deck, starboard bow, very close to where the iceberg impacted. In a letter home, Eugene’s cousin Marcella, notes that ‘that boy Connaughton … perished’.
Kate Connolly (23) Saved
Ticket number 370373. Paid £7 15s.
Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Curtrasna, County Cavan.
Destination: 309 East 88th Street, New York city.
Kate Connolly saved a boy as the Titanic slipped to her grave. She carried the toddler, aged only two or three, into a lifeboat and kept him warm all night. After rescue by the Carpathia, the child was reunited with his mother who came down into the steerage area of the Cunard liner and took him back, rather ungratefully, according to the Irishwoman.
Kate was saved in lifeboat No. 13 on the starboard side. ‘Kate jumped ought [sic] into the boat,’ wrote her fellow survivor, Julia Smyth, who followed her. The escape came in the midst of chaos. Julia talked of a huge crowd, ‘thousands’, in front of the women, each one anxious to escape. One of their cabin mates, Mary McGovern, also saved, spoke of sailors desperately linking arms to create a human chain while armed officers held the crowd at bay. This happened around collapsible D, all the way forward on the port side, and possibly earlier, further aft, as steerage passengers surged up from the stern.
Even as 23-year-old Connolly was saving herself however, a 35-year-old namesake, also Kate Connolly, was being condemned to death by freezing immersion.
The surviving Kate Connolly was born in Curtrasna, Drumlymmon, County Cavan, on 14 June 1888, and baptised the same day. By 1901 the family consisted of father James (57), a farmer, mother Catherine (46), née Fagan, and children James (28), Catherine herself (13) and Mary (3). An older sister, Nellie, had emigrated to America, becoming Mrs John McGuckian. In 1912, Kate Connolly was on her way to join her sister at East 88th Street, Manhattan.
Kate met her fellow passenger, Julia Smyth, at Ballywilliam train station in Cavan as both waited for a locomotive to bring them on the long journey south to Cork. The pair became firm friends and shared a cabin on Titanic. Kate, her new acquaintance Julia, and fellow Cavan girl Mary McGovern all roomed together on board, along with another Irish girl, Mary Agatha Glynn from Clare. All four were saved.
Afterwards, however, Kate was in need of the assistance of the American Red Cross, as instanced in its 1913 report: ‘No. 85. (Irish.) Domestic servant, 21 years old, injured. $100’.
Kate Connolly became a live-in maid at a New York city brownstone. In 1914 a near neighbour followed her to the States. Two years her junior, William Arkins had lived only a mile from Kate’s homestead in Cavan. They were married in St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1916. William worked in a New Jersey shipyard during the First World War. In 1919 their first child, James, was born, followed by John the next year. Peter arrived in 1925, but a fourth son, Thomas, died after just a month of life in 1926. By this time the family had progressively amassed enough money to own several apartment buildings. Kate took care of the tenants and collected rents – and tried to forget about the Titanic. She died from a stroke at 9.45 p.m. on 3 July 1948 at her home in 147th Street, Whitestone, New York. She had just turned 60.
‘She never liked to talk about the Titanic, but might comment on anniversaries,’ said her son John. ‘She said the sailors were mainly British and treated the Third Class like dirt. They prevented them from getting to the decks. During the sinking, she said, two or three of the young men found other ways to get up to the deck and came back and directed the young ladies.’
Local lore in Cavan suggests that Kate Connolly was the first to wake in her cabin and pulled the other girls out of bed ‘by the hair of their heads’ because they were unwilling to take the reported accident seriously.
Kate Connolly (35) Lost
Ticket number 330972. Paid £7 12s 7d.
Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Bank Place, Tipperary town, County Tipperary.
Destination: Bound to stay with J. Bunbury, Dobbs Ferry, New York.
The loss of the Titanic is still the topical subject of discussion here, and all news of the terrible disaster to the ill-fated monster is eagerly devoured.
Great regret is expressed locally that despite all the hopes cherished by reason of the unhappily uncorroborated messages, Miss Katie Connolly, of Bank Place, must have gone to a better land, either with the doomed vessel, or as a result of the terrible exposure to which delicately nurtured women were no proof against in most cases.
Stereotyped expressions of sympathy are but farcical in cases of such national and universal catastrophe.
(Tipperary Star, 27 April 1912)
Kate’s widowed mother, a 67-year-old shopkeeper had been hoping against hope that her daughter had lived. A mistaken report that she had indeed been rescued must have brought elation and relief – the later confirmation of her death, over a week later, only crushing sorrow.
The newspaper reports indicate the roller-coaster of emotion experienced in late April 1912 by mother Kate Snr and her family of Margaret (37), a music teacher, Edward (33), who made piecemeal money as a blade sharpener, and Richard (29), who had been running a cycle business, but was now a porter.
First The Cork Examiner of 20 April 1912:
There were two Kate Connollys amongst the passengers. One has been saved, but it is impossible to say which.
Then this wrong report in the same newspaper three days later:
Tipperary lady saved
Major Pomeroy Colley, Resident Magistrate, Tipperary, proceeded to Dublin to make enquiries regarding the fate of his brother, Edward Pomeroy Colley, on board the ill-fated liner.
On Friday he found that the name of Kate Connolly, Bank Place, Tipperary, was on the list of the saved, and with great consideration and kindness he wired the fact to the relatives.
Miss Connolly was returning to America after a visit to her aged mother and her brothers here, and much satisfaction prevails at the news.
In fact, Kate Connolly had drowned – apparently because she trusted too much in the security of the big ship, even when alerted to the collision with the iceberg, as her fellow traveller Katie McCarthy told in a letter carried by The Cork Examiner of 11 May 1912:
About 12 o’clock on Sunday night, Roger Tobin called us to get up, but told us not to be frightened as there was no danger. To make sure however of our safety, he told us to get lifebelts. There were three of us in the room: Katie Peters, Katie Connolly and myself.
When Roger Tobin called me I wanted them to come up on deck, but they would not come. They appeared to think there was no danger. That was the last I saw of them.
The American Red Cross later aided the Connolly fam
ily:
No. 86. (Irish.) A daughter was drowned while coming out to this country to get employment in order to help her family in Ireland. The family consisted of the mother, 70 years old, a sister 50, and two brothers, 44 and 38 years respectively.
The sister has tuberculosis and earns only $2 a week giving music lessons. The elder brother is a knife sharpener and the other is a porter, both earning small wages. The daughter’s passage, amounting to $39, was paid by her second cousin, who lives in this country.
He at first requested that this amount be refunded to him, but later gladly accepted the suggestion that it be sent instead to the mother in Ireland to meet her immediate needs. The English Committee later gave the family £40.
Patrick Connors (66) Lost
Ticket number 370369. Paid £7 15s.
Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Charleville, County Cork.
Destination: 361 West 12th Street, New York city.
Although travelling in Third Class, Patrick Connors (birth name O’Connor) was as rich as Croesus compared with the rest of steerage. Indeed, he had more money on his body when found than the average Irish passenger was worth in total assets. He could certainly have afforded to travel Second Class – where access to the lifeboats was easier, although it is statistically true that a greater percentage of men were saved in Third Class than in Second. But Mr Connors prided himself on having pulled himself up by his bootstraps and on knowing the value of a dollar. He had been living in the United States for four decades, but was returning from a visit to his home place in Charleville (Rath Luirc), County Cork.
Charleville man one of the victims
News has been received in Charleville that Patrick O’Connor, a native of that town, is to be counted with those who went down with the SS Titanic. The deceased gentleman had been 38 years in America, where he had amassed a considerable fortune, and had last June decided upon paying a visit to the old land.
He stayed in Charleville at the house of his sister, Mrs M. Shanahan, for ten months and presented a splendid appearance of robust health.