by Senan Molony
Officers were yelling and cursing at men to stand back and let the women get into the boats. In going from one lifeboat to another we stumbled over huge piles of bread lying on the deck.
When the lifeboat was filled there were no seamen to man it. The officer in command on No. 14 called for volunteers in the crowd who could row. Six men offered to go. At times when we were being lowered we were at an angle of 45 degrees and expected to be thrown into the sea.
As we reached the level of each deck, men jumped into the boat until the officer threatened to shoot the next man who jumped. We landed in the sea and rowed to a safe distance from the sinking ship. The officer counted our number and found us to be 48. The officer commanded everyone to feel in the bottom of the boat for a light. We found none. Nor was there bread or water in the boat. The officer, whose name I learned afterwards to be Lowe, was continually making remarks such as, ‘A good song to sing would be, Throw Out the Lifeline’, and ‘I think the best thing for you women to do is take a nap.’
The Titanic was fast sinking. After she went down the cries were horrible. This was at 2.20 a.m. by a man’s watch who stood next to me.
At this time three other boats and ours kept together by being tied to each other. The cries continued to come over the water. Some of the women implored Officer Lowe, of No. 14, to divide his passengers among the three other boats and go back to rescue. His first answer to those requests was, ‘You ought to be damn glad you are here and have got your own life.’
After some time he was persuaded to do as he was asked. As I came up to him to be transferred to the other boat he said, ‘Jump, God damn you, jump!’ I had showed no hesitancy and was waiting only my turn. He had been so blasphemous during the two hours we were in his boat that the women at my end of the boat all thought he was under the influence of liquor.
Then he took all of the men who had rowed No. 14, together with the men from the other boats, and went back to the scene of the wreck. We were left with a steward and a stoker to row our boat, which was crowded. The steward did his best, but the stoker refused at first to row, but finally helped two women, who were the only ones pulling on that side. It was just 4 o’clock when we sighted the Carpathia, and we were three hours getting to her.
On the Carpathia we were treated with every kindness and given every comfort possible.
It is remarkable that Daisy makes mention nowhere in her account of what became of her brother William, who evidently accepted his fate. The sea yielded up his corpse nine days later:
No. 230. Male. Estimated Age: 60. Hair, Grey.
Clothing – Black suit and overcoat.
Effects – Pocketbook; papers; gold watch, ‘Dr W.E. Minahan’; keys; knife; fountain pen; clinical thermometer; memo book; tie pin; diamond ring; gold cuff link; nickel watch; comb; check book; American Express; $380; 1 collar button; £16 10s. in gold; 14 shillings; nail clipper.
Name – Dr W.E. Minahan.
William’s body was brought to the Morgue in Halifax by the rescue vessel MacKay-Bennett and later buried in his native Wisconsin.
Gypsy told doctor he would lose life in a sea disaster
Fond du Lac, Wis., 17 April – Dr William Minahan, the Fond du Lac surgeon who met his death in the Titanic, was told five years ago by a soothsayer that he would meet his end in a marine disaster.
Minahan with a number of friends visited a gypsy camp and all had their fortunes told. The fortune teller told Dr Minahan he would die while on a steamer on his second trip abroad.
The physician went to Europe shortly after, spending a year there in medical research. Last January he went again. Friends joked with him about the prediction of death made by the fortune teller, but he ridiculed the idea. However he arranged all his affairs before he went, taking his wife and sister with him.
He carried life insurance to the amount of $100,000 and $60,000 accident insurance. He was one of the foremost surgeons in Wisconsin.
(Denver Post, 17 April 1912)
Incredibly, shortly after the discovery of the Titanic wreck by Dr Robert Ballard in 1985, cultists broke into the Minahan mausoleum and stole his skull. The grotesque trophy was later recovered by police and reinterred in solemn ceremony.
After the Titanic, Daisy Minahan survived just another seven years. She died at the age of 40 on 30 April 1919 – and her officially certified cause of death was chronic TB.
Lillian Minahan, William’s widow, lived for another half century, dying at the age of 86, after a total of four husbands, on 13 January 1962.
Second-Class Passengers Embarked
at Queenstown
Charles Kirkland (71) Lost
Ticket number 219533.
Kirkland was a Free Will Baptist minister, originally from Glasgow, who had taken a sabbatical from his pastoral work in Canada to settle up a relative’s estate in Scotland. He was journeying to the United States and Canada, where he intended to visit a married sister in Tuxford, Saskatchewan.
Records of lawsuits against the White Star Line show that Rev. Kirkland had family members living in Old Town, Maine. He had six children, named as sons Algie, Henry and Allen, and daughters Alma Jipson, Myrtle Treadwell and Maude Elden.
Hilda Slayter (30) Saved
Ticket number 234818.
Miss Hilda Slayter, one of the First-Class [sic] passengers saved from the Titanic, was coming back to Canada on the big liner to marry Mr Reginald Lacon, of the big ranch owners of British Columbia, and son of the late Hon. Mr Lacon.
Miss Slayter, who is a Halifax girl, and a sister of the Captain of Queen Victoria’s private yacht, has been in England and France visiting friends, and incidentally collecting a beautiful wedding trousseau, in view of her coming marriage to Mr Lacon. The trousseau will, of course, be lost, but one may well imagine that the coming bride will be none the less welcome for that.
(Edmonton Daily Bulletin, 25 April 1912)
Hilda had been in Ireland to visit her younger sister, Margaret, 26, who was married to an army officer and living in Anglesea Street, Clonmel, County Tipperary. She was travelling home to get married herself in Moon Island, British Columbia. Just turned 30, Hilda was the daughter of a wealthy doctor in Halifax, where the bodies of Titanic victims were later landed, and where she now lies buried herself. She had been living in Europe for many years and had trained as a professional singer in Italy.
The Cork Examiner reported: ‘Miss Hilda Slater, sister of Mrs Haslam, wife of Captain [Gerald Willoughby] Haslam, Royal Irish Regiment, Clonmel, is among the rescued, and a cable announcing the glad tidings has been received by her relatives’. It appears certain that Hilda was saved in boat No. 13 – the same starboard boat entered by Dulwich College teacher Lawrence Beesley, who seems to be describing her in the course of relating a coincidence:
One conversation took place that is, I think, worth repeating. One more proof that the world, after all, is a small place. The ten-month-old baby which was handed down [into lifeboat No. 13] at the last moment was received by a lady next to me – the same who shared her wraps and coats.
The mother had found a place in the middle and was too tightly packed to come through to the child, and so it slept contentedly for about an hour in a stranger’s arms; then it began to cry and the temporary nurse said: ‘Will you feel down and see if the baby’s feet are out of the blanket? I don’t know much about babies but I think their feet must be warm.’
Wriggling down as well as I could, I found its toes exposed to the air and wrapped them well up, when it ceased crying at once. It was evidently a successful diagnosis. Having recognised the lady by her voice – it was much too dark to see faces – I said ‘Surely you’re Miss –?’ ‘Yes’, she replied, ‘And you must be Mr Beesley, how curious we should find ourselves in the same boat!’
Remembering that she had joined the boat in Queenstown, I said: ‘Do you know Clonmel? A letter from a great friend of mine who is staying there at ––– (giving the address) came aboard at Queenstown.’
> ‘Yes, it is my home and I was dining at ––– just before I came away.’ It seemed that she knew my friend too, and we agreed that of all the places in the world to recognise mutual friends, a crowded lifeboat in mid-ocean at 2 a.m., twelve hundred miles from our destination, was one of the most unexpected.
(Lawrence Beesley, The Loss of the SS Titanic, 1912)
Hilda Slayter was duly married on 1 June 1912, and had a baby of her own the following year with the arrival of Reginald William Beecroft Lacon. She died in British Columbia on 12 April 1965, three days before the fifty-third anniversary of the sinking. She was 83.
Epilogue
What follows is an extract from Lawrence Beesley’s The Loss of the SS Titanic, 1912. This piece is an unrivalled evocation of land and sea, what it is like to be on a ship, and the optimism of a journey begun. But it also counterpoints the splendour of the Titanic with nature’s own prowess, and in reference to the evolving sport of aviation, points to a threat to the golden age of the luxurious liners profoundly more potent than any iceberg or individual disaster.
The coast of Ireland looked very beautiful as we approached Queenstown Harbour, the brilliant morning sun showing up the green hillsides and picking out groups of dwellings dotted here and there above the rugged grey cliffs that fringed the coast. We took on board our pilot, ran slowly towards the harbour with the sounding-line dropped all the time, and came to a stop well out to sea, with out screws churning up the bottom and turning the sea all brown with sand from below. It had seemed to me that the ship stopped rather suddenly, and in my ignorance of the depth of the harbour entrance, that perhaps the sounding-line had revealed a smaller depth than was thought safe for the great size of the Titanic; this seemed to be confirmed by the sight of sand churned up from the bottom – but this is mere supposition.
Passengers and mails were put on board from two tenders, and nothing could have given us a better idea of the enormous length and bulk of the Titanic than to stand as far astern as possible and look over the side from the top deck, forwards and downwards to where the tenders rolled at her bows, the merest cockle-shells beside the majestic vessel that rose deck after deck above them. Truly she was a magnificent boat! There was something so graceful in her movement as she rode up and down on the slight swell in the harbour, a slow, stately dip and recover, only noticeable by watching her bows in comparison with some landmark on the coast in the near distance; the two little tenders tossing up and down like corks beside her illustrated vividly the advance made in comfort of motion from the time of the small steamer.
Presently the work of transfer was ended, the tenders cast off, and at 1.30 p.m., with the screws churning up the sea bottom again, the Titanic turned slowly through a quarter-circle until her nose pointed down along the Irish coast, and then steamed rapidly away from Queenstown, the little house on the left of the town gleaming white on the hillside for many miles astern. In our wake soared and screamed hundreds of gulls, which had quarrelled and fought over the remnants of lunch pouring out of the waste pipes as we lay-to in the harbour entrance; and now they followed us in the expectation of further spoil. I watched them for a long time and was astonished at the ease with which they soared and kept up with the ship with hardly a motion of their wings; picking out a particular gull, I would keep him under observation for minutes at a time and see no motion of his wings downwards or upwards to aid his flight. He would tilt all of a piece to one side or another as the gusts of wind caught him: rigidly unbendable, as an airplane tilts sideways in a puff of wind. And yet with graceful ease he kept pace with the Titanic forging through the water at twenty knots: as the wind met him he would rise upwards and obliquely forwards, and come down slantingly again, his wings curved in a beautiful arch and his tail feathers outspread as a fan.
It was plain he was possessed of a secret we are only just beginning to learn – that of utilising air-currents as escalators up and down which he can glide at will with the expenditure of the minimum amount of energy, or of using them as a ship does when it sails within one or two points of a head wind. Aviators, of course, are imitating the gull, and soon perhaps we may see an airplane or a glider dipping gracefully up and down in the face of an opposing wind and all the time forging ahead across the Atlantic Ocean.
The gulls were still behind us when night fell, and still they screamed and dipped down into the broad wake of foam which we left behind; but in the morning they were gone: perhaps they had seen in the night a steamer bound for their Queenstown home and had escorted her back.
All afternoon we steamed along the coast of Ireland, with grey cliffs guarding the shores, and hills rising behind gaunt and barren; as dusk fell, the coast rounded away from us to the northwest, and the last we saw of Europe was the Irish mountains, dim and faint in the dropping darkness.
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About the Author
Senan Molony
Senan Molony is the Political Editor of the Irish Daily Mail, and is the author of several books, including Titanic: Victims & Villains, Titanic and the Mystery Ship, Titanic Scandal: The Trial of the Mount Temple and Lusitania, an Irish Tragedy, the latter also published by Mercier, along with The Phoenix Park Murders. Honoured at the inaugural National Newspapers of Ireland journalism awards in October 2011, he is a lecturer on the centenary re-creation of Titanic’s maiden voyage.
http://www.mercierpress.ie/senanmolony