What connection has South Africa to the RMS Titanic? Ian Uys
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since Pieter-Dirk Uys rearranged the deckchairs while his farcical SS Bothatanic sank! BEE was no criteria in 1912 and there was only one black passenger aboard. Joseph Laroche, 25, from Haiti had lived and worked in France, where he married a local. His wife, Juliette, 22, was pregnant when they boarded the Titanic with their two daughters, Simonne Marie, 3, and Louise, 1. When the ship sank Joseph went down with it while his wife and daughters were saved.
Captain Edward Smith, aged 51, earned the Transport Medal during the South African War for bringing troops to Cape Town and Durban, so he was well acquainted with the ports. He went down with his ship.
Captain Edward Smith
He left behind in Southampton his wife, Sarah Eleanor, 50, and daughter Helen Melville ‘Mel’, 10. In July 1914 Mel unveiled a statue to him at Lichfield. The sculptress was Lady Kathleen Scott, widow of Captain Robert Falcon Scott CVO RN who had died in the Antarctic two weeks before the Titanic sank. His last port of call had been Cape Town, where a monument to him exists at the foreshore.
Captain Smith’s daughter, Mel, married Sidney Russell-Cooke in 1922 and they had twins a year later, Simon and Priscilla. She suffered tragedies in 1930 and 1931 when her husband was killed in a hunting accident and her mother by a taxi in London. Simon served in the RAF during World War II and was killed off Norway on 23 March 1944. In 1946 Priscilla married a lawyer, John Phipps, before dying of polio in 1947.
Mel lived her life to the full, including driving sport cars and becoming a pilot. In 1957 she visited the set of ‘A Night to Remember’ and said that the actor who played her father bore a striking resemblance to him. She died in Leafield, Oxfordshire in August 1973.
William Thomas Stead, 62, was a renowned newspaper editor and publisher. In 1886 he wrote an article about a passenger liner colliding with another in the mid-Atlantic and sinking with great loss of life due to insufficient lifeboats aboard. In 1892 another story followed of the ‘Majestic’ with Captain E J Smith in command, saving passengers from a ship which had struck an iceberg.
Stead was pro-Boer during the South African war. He published articles about concentration camps which he received from Boer ladies, among them the Van Warmelo ladies of Pretoria who featured in the book “The Petticoat Commando”. He was a passenger on the Titanic and made no effort to save himself. Stead sat reading a book while the ship sank.
William Thomas Stead
Tom Brown, 60, his wife Elizabeth, 40, and daughter Edith, 15, were aboard. He had owned the Masonic Hotel in Worcester. His last words to his family were, “I’ll see you in New York”. He didn’t, and his words are the title of a book today. Elizabeth and Edith returned to South Africa, and then Elizabeth immigrated to Rhodesia, while in 1917, Edith married Frederick Haisman in Johannesburg. They settled in Simonstown, then Australia, then Southampton where a street is named after her. She died there in 1997, aged 100.
Edith Brown
Henry Julian came to South Africa in 1886, and then spent seven years as a mine manager in Barberton, Johannesburg and Kimberley. He invented a gold extraction process and become wealthy. He later lived in Torquay Devon, where King George V visited him. On the Titanic, aged 50, he assisted woman and children into the lifeboats and went down with the ship.
Henry Julian
James Webber, 62, was a third class passenger who also perished. He lived for a while in Johannesburg and is commemorated on his sister’s tombstone in Braamfontein cemetery. She was Mary Griffin who died at Johannesburg in 1897, aged 66.
Robert Hichens, 29, the quartermaster who steered the ship when it struck the berg, was an irascible man who was admonished by Molly Brown in the lifeboat which he commanded. He had a brother, William, in Johannesburg and in 1917 a fellow Titanic survivor, possibly Edith Haisman, said they met there. In England Hichens was later jailed for assault and in 1940 died aboard a cargo ship
Robert Hichens
The Van Billiard family had travelled to England from Cape Town. Austin 35, and his sons James, 10 and Walter, 9, boarded the Titanic. He was a diamond merchant, who had left his wife and two other children in England, taking his two sons in 3rd Class on the ship. None of them survived. His body was recovered with twelve uncut diamonds in his pockets.
Howard Irwin was on a round-the-world trip with his friend, Henry Sutehall, 25. He spent some time in South Africa, and then returned to England where he was to board the Titanic with Sutehall. He had a fight in a pub and was kidnapped before the Titanic sailed. His suitcase was recently recovered from the Titanic’s remains with his personal belongings in it. His friend, Henry Sutehall had sailed and perished.
Howard Irwin
Henry Sutehall
Sidney Jacobsohn, 42, came from Riversdale and practiced as a lawyer in Cape Town. He and his wife, Amy (Nee Cohen), 24, were 2nd Class passengers on the Titanic. His mother-in-law, Alice Christy, 45, and her daughter, Julie, 25, were rescued together with Amy. Sidney succumbed in the icy waters.
The rescue ship, the Carpathia,
also had a South African connection. Herbert Johnston was a 15-year old apprentice on the Carpathia. He later immigrated to South Africa and lived in Margate. President Mandela sent him a letter of congratulations on his centenary celebration. He died aged 104 in January 2010.
At Bushman Valley, Prince Albert, in the Southern Cape there is a hiking route called the Titanic Trail. It takes two and a half hours to reach an iceberg-like rock, the time it took the ship to sink, then plunges down a mountain to two large rocks which resemble the wreck.
Iceberg-like rock on Titanic Trail
Knysna has a ‘Titanic Room’ at its Maritime Museum. Together with the local website (www.titanicresearch.com) – it is a poignant reminder of the greatest shipwreck of all time.