Irish Aboard Titanic

by Senan Molony

  On deck the ship’s sirens started to blow and distress signals lit up the sky. There were hundreds of people about, but no-one seemed to know what had happened. I had £300 in my cabin, so after half an hour I decided to go down and get it. But the water was already halfway up the stairs when I got there and I just couldn’t get near the cabin.

  All Prayed

  On deck I told a sailor what I had seen but he told me to keep quiet in case of panic. I managed to get to the boat deck, which was barred to Third-Class passengers. There the order was ‘women and children first’, and the boats were being lowered.

  Some of the women wouldn’t get into the boats because of the distance to the water, while others wouldn’t leave their husbands. All the men could do was watch, and things looked very grim. Everyone prayed. There were still about 1,500 people on board, including women and children, after the boats had left and the ship was sinking fast.

  The angle of the deck became steeper and men started to climb the ropes supporting the masts. Everybody was making for the highest part of the ship. At this stage there was panic amongst the passengers because everybody knew there was little chance of being saved. When I heard some people shouting around the stern of the ship I made my way there, to see what was happening.

  There was a woman looking over the side at a boat in the water. There was a rope hanging over the side – I think it must have been the ship’s log cable – and it seemed to offer a chance. I said to the woman, ‘It’s only a matter of minutes before the ship sinks. I’ll wind the rope around me, and we’ll try to slip down to the boat below.’ She agreed.

  No Smoking

  We could barely see the boat but we could hear the people in it. It must have been about 30 ft down. We went down the rope gently – our hands bled – and landed right in the centre of the boat. I took the skin off a woman’s shin, but she didn’t seem to mind. The boat had evidently left the ship a half an hour before, but they couldn’t move away from the stern because the sailor in charge had broken his arm.

  We managed to get a hundred yards away from the ship and out of immediate danger. I found I still had my pipe, so I scraped around in my pocket linings for some tobacco dust and then lit up. This offended a First-Class woman passenger who asked me to stop smoking. Possibly she thought I was too unconcerned, but the truth of the matter is I was scared stiff.

  At this stage there were hundreds of people jumping overboard, some with life jackets on, and some without. The forward part of the ship was now submerged and the water was up to the bottom of the first two funnels. People were climbing up the slippery deck to get clear of the water.

  As we rowed further away, the stern of the ship suddenly rose high up in the air and it went down. This was followed by two loud explosions. There were hundreds of people everywhere after the ship went down, all floating about. It was pitiful to hear mothers calling for their children and husbands. This lasted for some time and then everything went quiet. It meant that about 1,500 people had died in the icy waters.

  Calm Sea

  It was a starry night and a calm sea. We had seen several pieces of wreckage, including a keyboard of a piano. We rowed all the time and everybody was drenched with spray. The boat plug was leaking, and I plugged it with my shirt.

  When daylight came we could see the smoke from the funnels of a ship. It was the Carpathia, and the most welcome sight I had ever seen. We rowed towards her for all we were worth and at last came alongside. We were hoisted aboard by bosun’s chair and everybody on deck cheered as we came aboard.

  They rigged us out with warm clothing and gave us hot food. Even the passengers on the Carpathia gave us their berths.

  When I was bidding goodbye to my parents they lit a lamp beside the statue of Christ. The light was kept burning night and day for my safe crossing of the Atlantic. When the ship was actually going down, I thought of the statue. I have this statue still in my home in Hull today.

  (Evening Herald, 14 April 1969)

  The thrust of this account – given when Ryan was 81 – may still place him in boat No. 14, where there was a leak of about eight inches of water which men stopped with their hats. There was also a woman with a broken arm aboard, and some discussion of not using tobacco – Officer Lowe warning against it because it ‘makes you thirsty’.

  There seems a possibility that Ryan was by now mixing stories he had heard. Canadian Major Arthur Peuchen courageously clambered down a rope to boat No. 6, where coincidentally there was an Italian at an oar who was unable to row because of a broken arm. There were complaints about smoking in some boats.

  Whether Ryan was the ‘woman’ exposed by Lowe in No. 14 remains arguable, but the likelihood exists. Nonetheless it also seems clear that a number of men impersonated women that night or were thought to be women – from Dannie Buckley having a shawl put over his head by a woman in one lifeboat, to Nellie O’Dwyer’s description of Chinamen who had let their hair down their backs and put their blankets about themselves to resemble females, down to a story about John Jacob Astor putting a girlish hat on a 13-year-old boy and then declaring: ‘Now he is a girl, he can go.’ Ryan’s comment about walking ‘past the officers’ and ‘passing out’ could be significant, however, since boat No. 6 departed early when such measures were not required.

  The whole area of ascribing passengers to lifeboats is fraught with difficulty. The British and US inquiries disagreed on the timing and order of boat departures, while many survivors persuaded themselves theirs was the last boat:

  Irishman’s leap for life

  Further details of what happened during the fateful half-hour before the Titanic plunged beneath the sea were furnished to the Brooklyn Eagle of April 23rd by Fr Michael Kenny, an associate editor of America, a Catholic weekly of New York, who questioned some thirty of the survivors of the Titanic at St Vincent’s Hospital …

  Edward Ryan, a Tipperary man, told me at the hospital of a remarkable leap for life he made with a fainting woman in his arms. Ryan was helping to fill the boats of the promenade deck when the woman, a first cabin passenger, became hysterical and fainted.

  It had been his turn to enter the boat now being lowered. Ryan seized her and jumped into the boat after the officer in charge had ordered it to be lowered. Fortunately he landed in the boat without injury either to the woman or himself after dropping a distance of more than twenty feet.

  (1912 Irish Independent reprint of a report in the Brooklyn Eagle)

  Ryan was on his way to join his sister Mrs Bridget Welsh in Troy, upstate New York. On the Carpathia, Ryan told immigration officers that he was a 24-year-old chauffeur. He moved to Hull, England, after some few years in the US, and worked as a maintenance engineer with the firm of Rose, Downs & Thompson on Humberside.

  Born on 28 January 1888, Edward Ryan died on Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November 1974. He was aged 86, and succumbed to a heart attack at his retirement home in Pearson Park, Hull. The only man to admit using the pretence of being a woman to get into a lifeboat, Ryan had wrung sixty-two years out of a single towel and a stiff walk.

  1901 census – Ballinaveen, Emly.

  Parents: Daniel (57), farmer. Alice (50), wife.

  Children: Bridget (17), Lena (15), Ned (13).

  Patrick Ryan (29) Lost

  Joint ticket number 371110. Paid £24 3s.

  Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

  From: Toomdeely North, Askeaton, County Limerick.

  Destination: 1503 Hoe Avenue, Bronx, New York city.

  Cattle dealer Patrick Ryan must have been struck with awe by his old schoolfriend’s description of life in the United States. He met with Daniel Moran when the latter arrived home to conclude some legal business following the death of his father. Dan’s tales of life as a policeman in New York deeply impressed Pat Ryan, who may have impetuously desired to become a cop in the big city as so many Irish had done before.

  Certainly the temptations were enough to persuade him to abandon what had been a good job by Irish
standards of the time, one paying a decent wage of £2 a week – which was substantially more than some of the skilled crew on the Titanic were paid.

  Pat resolved to travel to America with Daniel Moran and Dan’s sister Bertha, and all three travelled on the same ticket. It would have cost each of them £8 1s, were it to be split three ways. Also in the group travelling from Askeaton to Queenstown was Margaret Madigan, who seems to have been a particular friend of Bertha Moran. The quartet found lodgings at Queenstown in the McDonnell rooming house at The Beach.

  A customs official called to the address the next day to see his cousin – Patrick Ryan. Their cheerful reunion and backslapping was also a goodbye, however – for both knew they were unlikely to see the other again by reason of the vast, intervening Atlantic. The Cork Free Press of 18 April 1912 reported that Michael O’Mahoney, the helpful 24-year-old customs officer, originally from Limerick but now boarding at Roche’s Row in Queenstown, had gone out of his way to accompany the Askeaton party onto the ship from a tender and had asked White Star officials for their very best treatment for these well-connected personages:

  Mr M. O’Mahoney, HM Customs, interested himself on their behalf, saw the whole party on board the great ship, introduced them to one official on board who promised to look after their comfort and otherwise make them feel at home on the passage. Needless to say, he was shocked to hear of the disaster, and is still more grieved to find that their names are not given amongst those who have been saved.

  (Cork Free Press, 18 April 1912)

  Ryan’s elderly father, Thomas, contacted solicitors soon after the disaster. He made a statement of claim and a writ against the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company was issued on 3 July 1912. Thomas alleged he had suffered damage from the defendants’ negligence in carrying his son Patrick Ryan on their steamship Titanic on a voyage from Queenstown to New York in which the said Patrick Ryan was drowned ‘in consequence of the said ship colliding with an iceberg and foundering in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912’. Thomas deposed that his son was his sole support, and that by his death he had lost all means of support and living. The grounds of the alleged negligence included the improper speed of the Titanic, failure to heed ice warnings, failure to maintain a proper lookout or to supply lookout men with binoculars, and the failure to provide adequate lifeboat accommodation.

  The Ryan lawsuit became the Titanic test case in Britain. It was amalgamated with a claim for the life of Daniel Moran – his fellow passenger from Askeaton, whose family had followed Thomas Ryan’s example – and it went to trial before a judge and civil case jury in the High Court. The action was tried from 20 to 26 June 1913.

  The jury found that the navigation of the Titanic had not been negligent in respect of proper lookouts, but that the speed had indeed been negligently excessive. They decided that there was not sufficient evidence that a crucial Marconi-gram, containing an ice warning from the Mesaba, had been passed to a responsible officer. The jury also found that the defendants had not done what was reasonably sufficient to give Ryan and Moran ‘notice of the conditions’ (alerting them to the real gravity of the situation, or the lack of boats).

  The jury assessed damages at £100 per life – and Mr Justice Bailhache ordered this amount paid over, with full legal costs, to Thomas Ryan. It was the equivalent of one year’s annual salary for his son.

  Patrick Ryan was one of those booked to sail on the Cymric from Queenstown four days before he boarded the Titanic. That service was withdrawn – otherwise Pat Ryan might have been swinging a nightstick in New York for decades to come.

  1901 census – Ryan. Toomdeely North, Askeaton.

  Parents: Thomas (63), farmer. Ellen (56).

  Children: Ellen (26), Johanna (24), Michael (20), Patrick (18), Honora (16), Thomas (14), James (12).

  Matthew Sadlier (19) Lost

  Ticket number: 367655. Paid £7 14s 7d.

  Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

  From: Clooncoe, Lough Rynn, Mohill, County Leitrim.

  Destination: Lakewood, New Jersey.

  Matthew Sadlier’s house was built on the stones of misery. It was little surprise, therefore, to some prognosticators of doom at least, when misfortune reached through the generations to inflict more anguish.

  The Sadliers were land stewards on the Rynn estate in Leitrim, formerly the domain of a savage landlord. The notorious Lord Leitrim (William Sydney Clements) carried out a series of tyrannical evictions in the wake of the Irish Famine when his tenants could not pay punitive rents which had been arbitrarily increased. The new Sadlier house was built of the best stones of the knocked cottages, one cornerstone to this day bearing the initials and date of John Mulligan, a tenant who had built his frugal home in 1838, only to be forced into exile like thousands of others.

  Lord Leitrim was finally assassinated – after many attempts – in 1878, and crowds in faraway Dublin, such was his infamy, would attempt to intercept the coffin and throw him in the River Liffey while on his way to the family vault. The estate then passed to a second cousin, since Leitrim hated his own kin, and by 1903 the Wyndham Land Act finally reformed tenant rights and dashed the old landlord system forever. The new owner, Henry Clements, left the one-time feudal seat and turned to book collecting in London.

  Matt Sadlier, the youngest child of a family now turned to farming, also wanted to get away. The baby of seven children, he simply saw no future on the lake-dotted land around Mohill. But he had no future on the Titanic either. Matthew Sadlier was drowned before he could reach his twentieth birthday.

  He was due to stay in Lakewood, New Jersey, with his brother Tom, eleven years his senior, whose address was only given as a poste-restante number. His parents didn’t wish him to leave, his mother being particularly attached to her youngest, having already seen offspring William, Thomas and Fanny take the American boat.

  On the morning he was to leave, a cockerel came to the doorstep and crowed three times. His mother, seizing on superstition for her own ends, declared, ‘That’s enough now!’, grabbing Matthew’s suitcase from his hand. It was unspoken knowledge that a cockcrow at the door meant sad news. Matthew patiently retrieved his case from his mother’s grasp, said farewells and went about his journey.

  Days later, according to oral tradition, a Mr Easterbrook was cycling home when he met the ghost of a sister of Matthew’s, who had died before the Titanic disaster, walking along the estate avenue. Water was running down the hair of the ghost, which vanished with Easterbrook’s balance as bike and rider crashed to the ground.

  The worst feared

  Up to the present no word has been received of the young man, Matthew Sadlier, of Cloncoo, Lough Rynn, Mohill, being saved.

  Fears are now entertained by his parents and friends that he is amongst the seventeen hundred victims that perished in the wreck. He was going out to two or three brothers in the States, much against the wish of his parents, it is stated.

  (Longford Independent, 20 April 1912)

  1911 census:

  Matthew (56), shepherd. Wife Catherine (59).

  Married 30 years; nine children born, seven surviving.

  Catherine (19), Matthew (18), agricultural labourer.

  James Scanlan (21) Lost

  Ticket number 36209. Paid £7 14s 6d.

  Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

  From: The Bodhreen, Rathkeale, County Limerick.

  Destination: The Plaza, New York city.

  Reputed to have been born in a workhouse, James Scanlan had a tough start in life, even by the dirt-poor standards he saw all around him. His father, John, was a labourer, with a wife ten years older, and James was the second eldest of their offspring.

  His sister Kate, two years younger than James, had been the first to emigrate to America. Now she had an impressive-sounding address at a place called The Plaza, and the streets seemed to be paved with gold in New York. She had sent home for James to join her in New York.

  Boarding the Titanic at Queenstow
n, James described himself as a 20-year-old farm labourer. But he was fated never to see his sister at the pier on the Hudson.

  County Limerick Victims: Abbeyfeale, Sunday

  The list of survivors published Friday contains no reference to the names of Mr Patrick Colbert, Kilconlea, Abbeyfeale, Mr James Scanlan, Rathkeale, nor of other young men and women said to have been on board from East and North Kerry.

  (The Cork Examiner, 22 April 1912)

  1911 census:

  John (45), labourer, Catherine (45).

  Married 20 years, ten children, six alive.

  William (24), labourer, James (20), labourer, Patrick (11), Edward (9), Cornelius (7).

  PaTRick Shaughnessy (28) Lost

  Ticket number 370374. Paid £7 15s.

  Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

  From: Tynagh, County Galway.

  Destination: 1509 Lexington Avenue, New York.

  ‘Pake’ Shaughnessy was lost for the sake of a horse. He delayed travelling to the United States because he was owed money for a steed he’d sold. Pake was promised the cash – it could have been £10 – and decided to wait.

  When he didn’t receive the money after repeated assurances, he gave it up as a bad job and prepared to take the Titanic. His unhappiness at his lot in life was expressed in a letter written to brother Willie on the other side of the Atlantic divide. In it Pake complained that ‘there is nothing around Tynagh’ and that he had ‘most of the fellows around here bet’ – meaning beaten.

  An Apparition in Galway

  A young man named Tynagh, in the Banagher district, it is stated, decided upon emigrating to America in opposition to the wishes of his mother, whose only son he was, and on the morning on which he left home for Queenstown she refused to shake hands with him. The parting scene was a very sad one.