Martina Devlin: The Titanic love story that caused a rift in my family
FROM the outset, the Titanic was always more than simply a ship. Designed to celebrate man's mastery during the Machine Age, it became identified instead with indelible disaster.
But its human story of thwarted dreams, its freight of penniless emigrants facing death alongside the glitterati, transformed it again -- this time from a liner into a legend.
And that legend sails on. It's one in which I have a personal interest because my grandmother's uncle eloped on the Titanic. He drowned with the ship, his chances of survival slight -- not just as a man but as a steerage passenger. My relative left something behind, however: a posthumous daughter who made it to the Land of Opportunity which eluded him.
The Titanic was launched 100 years ago this week in Belfast, and the following April she set sail across the Atlantic. Among the 2,000-plus on board was Thomas O'Brien, my granny's "poor Uncle Tom". He was a shy, 26-year-old creamery worker from the townland of Bonavie in Co Limerick, close to the Tipperary border. But America beckoned, and he decided to follow his four feisty sisters to Chicago, one of whom was my great-grandmother. He would stay with them till he found his feet.
But Tom had a secret he didn't share with the sisters, or his mother with whom he lived, or his older brother Patrick who came home from Chicago to take over the family farm after their father died. He was bringing someone with him on the dollars sent home by the girls to pay for his passage -- chain emigration, as it was called.
That someone was a handsome, red-haired woman whose family farmed in a neighbouring townland. Perhaps they met when he collected their milk for the creamery.
Her name was Hannah Godfrey and she was a few years older than Tom although she claimed to be the same age. With 30 on the horizon, Hannah would have realised time was against her.
My guess is she saw Tom as her chance of escape. And who can blame her? When he said his sisters were helping him to emigrate, she wasn't about to be left behind.
They made their way to Queenstown -- Cobh as it later became -- where they waited for a ship. Easier said than done: the Welsh miners were striking for a minimum wage, so coal was in short supply to fuel these great beasts across the Atlantic. Many sailings were cancelled.
Tom and Hannah had tickets for another vessel but were transferred to the Titanic. It must have seemed like a stroke of luck because steerage on the Titanic was equivalent to second class elsewhere.
They shared their cabin with another couple. Privacy was a luxury other classes enjoyed. Still, meals were plentiful, and survivors' accounts report merriment in third class, where the predominantly young emigrants partied during this hiatus between two worlds.
Everyone knows what happened next. Three days after leaving Cobh, on the night of April 14, 1912, the Titanic collided with an iceberg. It was a catastrophe that could have been averted if ice warnings from other ships had been heeded. Or perhaps if the lookouts had been given binoculars, instead of having them locked away on the bridge. The Titanic is a story peppered with ifs and buts, as tragedies tend to be.
Steerage passengers were furthest away from the boat decks where the lifeboats were launched, and sailors were stationed by exits to keep them back until their betters had a chance to board.
As it became apparent that the Titanic was sinking fast, those in steerage refused to be contained and made a rush for survival. There were too few places for everyone, even if there had been enough time to launch all the boats.
Tom and Hannah must have been among those who dashed towards the lifeboats, and Hannah managed to win a place on one of the last to be launched before the Titanic turned on her nose towards the ocean floor.
She reached New York safely, on board the rescue vessel the Carpathia, and was taken in by the nuns. Tom's daughter was born five months later: little Marion O'Brien, a Titanic baby.
Tom died, either by drowning or hypothermia in those icy waters, and his body was never recovered; or if it was fished out, it was not identified. This was far from unusual. Steerage passengers tended to have little by way of identification -- they couldn't afford monogrammed cigarette cases or shirts with initials stitched on to the collar. And bodies retrieved from the water were bloated beyond recognition.
Tom's mother, my great-great-grandmother Margaret O'Brien, was notified of his death by White Star Line. She was advised to claim the compensation -- a pittance not paid out for some years. White Star successfully argued for cases to be heard in the US where there was limited liability, whereas cases determined in Britain would have proved more costly for the company.
But Hannah popped up, to the O'Brien family's surprise, claiming to be Tom's next of kin. She said a priest in Cobh, a relative of hers, had joined them as man and wife, although no proof was ever found in a marriage registry in Ireland.
She must have produced some paperwork in New York because her claim was allowed. Meanwhile the sisters wrote to Hannah there, offering a home to her and the baby, but she turned them down. She told them she knew they were only after the money, adding that she'd be reminded of Tom whenever she looked at them.
This letter caused ructions, and a breach between the families that was never mended -- until I heard about the story a few years ago, and decided to use it as the basis for a novel.
During my research I managed to make contact with baby Marion's descendants. Hannah was long gone, Marion had also died, but one of her daughters was still alive and we talked about our Titanic connection.
It felt as if something from the wreckage had been reclaimed. I'd given them Tom and they'd shared Marion with us.
Martina Devlin's novels include 'Ship of Dreams', a fictionalised account of Tom and Hannah's life, published by Poolbeg
- Martina Devlin
Irish Independent
