A pocket watch belonging to a postal clerk aboard the RMS Titanic has sold for £98,000 – 110 years on. Oscar Scott Woody’s watch is frozen at the time he went into the cold North Atlantic when the ship sank on 14 April, 1912. It was recovered from the ocean and returned to his wife Leila the following month. The watch was sold at Henry Aldridge & Sons in Devizes on Saturday along with other memorabilia from the doomed ship. A first-class menu featuring ‘plover on toast’ sold for £50,000 and a list of first-class passengers went for £41,000.
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Thomas Andrews, 1911 Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons
After he died on 15th April 1912, his father received a telegram from his mother’s cousin, who had spoken with survivors in New York, seeing news of Andrews. The telegram was read aloud by Andrews Sr. to the staff of their home in Comber: “Interview titanic’s officers. All unanimous that Andrews heroic unto death, thinking only safety others. Extend heartfelt sympathy to all.” The newspaper accounts of the disaster labeled Andrews a hero. Mary Sloan, a stewardess on the ship, whom Andrews forced to enter a lifeboat, later wrote in a letter: “Mr. Andrews met his fate like a true hero, realizing the great danger, and gave up his life to save the women and children of the Titanic. They will find it hard to replace him.”
Part of Team Resolute alongside BMT and Navantia UK, Harland & Wolff was selected as the preferred bidder for the Ministry of Defence’s £1.6bn contract to manufacture three vessels providing munitions, stores and provisions to the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers, destroyers and frigates. Harland & Wolff’s Belfast shipyard will construct all three 216-metre-long vessels, which upon completion, will be the second longest UK military vessels behind the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers.
Stonehouse later recalled that he was neither surprised by the conversation itself, nor really by the fact it happened off the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Because in the last four decades, the Marquette resident has learned that the fate of the Fitzgerald can and probably will be discussed anytime and anywhere.
A pocket watch that stopped at the very moment its owner went down with the Titanic has surfaced for sale for a whopping £100,000. Oscar Woody perished along with 1,520 others when the ill-fated ship struck an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic in 1912. Mr Woody served as the postmaster on the Titanic. As the liner started to sink he and four colleagues made a futile attempt to save hundreds of mailbags by carrying them to the upper decks. Andrew Aldridge said: ‘We are getting a considerable amount of interest in this item already.This is probably one of the most iconic and important items of Titanic memorabilia offered for auction in recent years.”
When the Titanic bouncy castle first appeared, it was not warmly received by many in the Titanic community. It trivialized a terrible tragedy into a children’s slide. Not as tacky of some other things out there, but still tacky.
Once again it is back in the news in the Irish Sun. Looks like people are still upset with it.
A kid sends a message in a bottle from the US and it ends up in Ireland. It had a phone number and a $1 bill in it. It took some doing but the sender was found, An interesting story to read.
A survivor of the Titanic goes to an invited showing of a new movie of the same name and meets someone who was aboard Carpathia. Now that is quite remarkable.
A mystery solved! There was something the scans around the Titanic wreck were picking up. They were not sure what it was till recently. Turns out to be an underwater volcanic formation.
The tragic sinking of the Titanic in 1912 is undoubtedly the most famous maritime disaster to date. However, there are plenty of other instances that either rival or even dwarf the Titanic in terms of destruction or human loss. Here are seven maritime disasters more tragic than the titanic.
The Titanic might seem the worst passenger ship accident. However, many historic cruise ships met the same fate, though they were not as famous as the RMS Titanic. The earliest cruise ships were constructed in the 1850s but gained prominence after the World Wars ended when vacationing on the seas seemed attractive. Cruise ships were also constructed before that and targeted the affluent section of society. Also, cruise voyages in the 19th and 20th centuries were fraught with many dangers compared to present-day journeys, which have become relatively safer, thanks to advancements in maritime technologies.
Well this is interesting. Apparently these guys from Saturday Night Live bought a decommissioned ferry and decided to rename it Titanic II. What could go wrong?
“Saturday Night Live” star Colin Jost revealed this weekend that the decommissioned Staten Island Ferry he purchased with fellow Staten Islander Pete Davidson will be named “Titanic 2.” “This is why idiots should not be allowed to do things,” Jost said on Late Night with Seth Meyers Friday night.
Unfortunately they have run into problems getting their ferry insured. Seems insurers are not keen on its name.
Prentice recalled the moment the ship struck the iceberg and said that there was “no impact as such” but it just felt like “jamming your brakes on a car.” He continued, “We had a porthole open and I looked out and the sky was clear, stars were shining, the sea was dead calm and I couldn’t understand it. So I came out of the cabin and I thought I’d go forward.” Prentice went to the “well deck on the starboard side” where he could see ice, but there was “no sign of damage above waterline.” However, he soon realised that the ship had “slipped over the iceberg.”
Internet users were recently left shocked after a video showing a bouncy house in the shape of the ill-fated Titanic ship surfaced on social media. The clip was shared on Instagram by user Tara Cox. It showed the tragic ship replica tilted to look like it was sinking, and the bouncy house also had inflatable icebergs attached to it for the full effect. “Omg is it just me or is this morbidly wrong. (But it does look hella fun!)” Ms Cox captioned the post.
Once they had reached the shore of New York on the 18th of April, the six Chinese men were pulled apart from the other survivors and detained based on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This act was implemented back in the late 19th century due to the United States wanting to maintain white “racial purity” despite Chinese people within America making up only 0.002% of the whole American population at the time.
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MV Le Joola at Ziguinchor in 1991 Photo: Yamboo via Wikimedia Commons
As far as maritime disasters go, the Titanic stands alone—at least in our minds, but not in the history books, at least as far as victims go. In a piece for the New York Times, Elian Peltier revisits the Joola, the passenger ferry that departed on a 17-hour journey along Senegal’s coast toward the capital of Dakar on Sept. 26, 2002. It wouldn’t make it. Passengers streamed below deck as rain started that evening. Then the ferry listed toward the left and capsized. There were just 64 survivors among the 1,900 aboard; every baby and toddler perished. (Roughly 1,500 people died on the Titanic.)
The only picture of the Marconi radio room onboard the Titanic. Harold Bride is seated at his station. Photo was taken by Father Francis Browne, SJ, while aboard Titanic. Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons
The ship that sent the iceberg warning to Titanic has been located according to the BBC. The SS Mesaba was crossing the Atlantic Ocean on April 1912 and sent a wireless message to the Titanic about the ice it had spotted. The warning never reached the bridge. The SS Mesaba was sunk by a German torpedo in World War I and her remains in the Irish Sea were not located until recently. “ Now using state-of-the art multibeam sonar, Bangor University researchers have been able to identify the Mesaba’s wreck and pinpoint her final resting place.”
Front Page, New York Herald, 15 April 1912 Public Domain (U.S. Library of Congress,www.loc.gov)
Clement A. Griscom, founder of the International Mercantile Marine Company, built his estate (called the Dolobran Estate) in 1881 in Haverford, Pennsylvania. The sprawling 17,000 square foot home was his home until he passed away in 1912, several months after Titanic sank. He stepped down as president of IMM in 1904 to become its chairman. The estate is considered masterpiece and was down by well known architect Frank Furness. Built on lush land, this estate no doubt was a respite from the world. With seven bedrooms (and bathrooms to match), a lovely sunroom, kitchenettes for guests, and a swimming pool to enjoy warm summers, it was certainly a place one could simply get lost in. Griscom certainly loved it and now the house is up for sale if you have 3 million dollars to spend for it. It has been renovated, so you do have modern comforts but still retains the look and feel of that time. The slideshow of the estate is worth looking at if nothing else to see how people with lots of money lived back then. When you see some of the tacky estates of the Hollywood celebrities of today reside in, you see back then they knew how to impress without being gaudy.
Before we compare them, it’s important to identify all the Titanic museums in the United States. There are five Titanic museums in the United States. The very fact that we have that number, all telling and retelling the same story, is an indication of how the tragedy is rooted deep in the socio-cultural psyche of the republic. There’s a Titanic museum in Branson, Missouri. Another Titanic museum is in Pigeon Forge, Tennesee. Sin City is also home to a famous Titanic exhibition at the Luxor Hotel & Casino. The fourth Titanic museum is in Orlando, Florida. And then the fifth and last is in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. Our order here is not chronological. For instance, while the Massachussettes museum comes last in our order, it’s actually the oldest Titanic museum in the United States having been established in 1963. Aside from these, there are other learning centers that have richly documented the story of the Titanic. In this respect, the Maritime Museum at Battleship Cove, previously the Marine Museum at Fall River, is worth a mention.
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Titanic Jewish Experience Offers A Moving Tribute To The Liner’s Jewish History
The Times of Israel, 24 Sep 2022
Through mid-February, visitors to the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge — and its sister Titanic Museum in Branson, Missouri — will also see the Titanic Jewish Experience, a tribute to the ship’s estimated 67 Jewish passengers and two Jewish crew members. “Did you know Titanic had a kosher kitchen and a kosher chef on board?” a sign announces at the entrance to the Titanic Museum.
If you’ve never seen the Titanic in person, you’re not alone. But you can become part of that small coterie soon. As part of a trip with OceanGate Expeditions, you can visit the wreck of the Titanic next year alongside a crew of dive experts, scientists, and filmmakers. The caveat: it costs a quarter of a million dollars. Still, the experience promises to be a singular one. Scuttled under about 4,000m of North Atlantic Ocean water, the RMS Titanic rests about 600km off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The ship sank in 1912, taking about 1,500 souls with it. Divers first found its wreckage in 1985. Tour visitors are called “mission specialists”. That could register as amusing but actually, the company requires its clients to train for some mission-specific tasks while at sea. Submersible navigation, piloting, tracking, communications, maintenance, and operations all make the checklist. Mission specialists make one submersible dive during the voyage and assist on the surface when other teams dive. There’s room for six such positions on the mission, the brochure adds.
Renata Rojas had been obsessed with the Titanic for more than half of her life when she looked out the window of a submersible, 4,000 metres under the North Atlantic, and saw the doomed ship’s spectre appear hauntingly from the depths. She thought she’d cry – but she was far too busy.
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Morgan Robertson circa 1890-1900, self-portrait Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons)
Robertson’s novella draws many similarities between the fictional SS Titan and the RMS Titanic. The book mentions the ship’s perceived “unsinkable” attribute that many assigned to it due to the advanced technology used to construct it, an attribute shared by the RMS Titanic. It is also predicted that because of this perceived attribute, less-than-usual safety precautions were taken when equipping the ship with safety equipment, mainly manifesting through the lack of lifeboats.
Editor’s Note
The book, Futility or Wreck of the Titan, is actually a good read. The article accurately relates the similarities, but the fictional Titan was different and hits the iceberg dead on. Robertson always denied his book was inspired by anything supernatural. The version of the book I have also includes one or two other stories. One is about an attack on the United States by Japan long before it happened! Back in the time he wrote it, Japan had emerged as a major power and was flexing its military muscle (such as defeating the Russians and taking Port Arthur from them). So a lot of people were worried about a Japanese attack on the US (I know because I read a lot of letters written by people back prior to World War I about their concerns). Robertson took what he knew about ships and crafted a clever story about a big new ship that suffers catastrophically on its maiden voyage with a shocking loss of life. The book would likely have been forgotten had not Titanic occurred making it a prescient book. It does beg the question-if he saw it as a real possibility how come the people who built and ran the ship didn’t? Like the question as why every culture has a version of meatballs, you may bang your head fruitlessly against the wall on this one.
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Padlock on gate George Hodan publicdomainpibtures.net
As seen in Cameron’s movie, there were clear separations between first, second, and third-class passengers on the Titanic, and they had designated areas where they could walk around freely. In accordance with US immigration law, the Titanic had to have gates between the ship’s decks in order to avoid the spread of diseases, but these weren’t used in cruel ways as seen in the movie. Third-class passengers were in the bowels of the ship and thus didn’t have direct access to lifeboats, but they weren’t purposely kept behind gates to avoid getting to the lifeboats, and third-class stewards were reportedly instructed to have passengers put on their lifebelts and go to the deck, but many refused.
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With autumn now officially here, it is time for the pumpkin! Here are some helpful tips from the Muppet Labs on carving your pumpkin.
Titanic Leaving Queenstown 11 April 1912. Believed to be the last photograph of ship before it sank. Public Domain
On the early morning of 1 Sept 1985, the wreck of the RMS Titanic was found 400 miles east of Newfoundland in North Atlantic by a joint U.S.-French expedition. The liner lay 13,000 feet below the surface of the ocean and its finding would excite the world that continues to this day.
Ever since Titanic sank in 1912, there have been many attempts in locating the wreck. However the depth of the ocean, the vastness of the search area, and technological limitations made that impossible. Robert Ballard, a former Naval officer and oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts had tried in 1977 without success. In 1985, Ballard along with French oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel, decided to set out in search of the wreck using more sophisticated technology to help locate the wreck.
This time they were equipped with more sophisticated technology to aid them in seeing what was on the ocean floor. The Argo, an unmanned and experimental submersible sent photographs up to the research vessel Knorr. And on the morning of 1 September, while investigating debris on the ocean floor, it passed over a massive boiler that came from Titanic. The following day the wreck of the ship was found and that it had split in two with a debris field between the stern and forward sections, The ship and much of the debris was in good shape despite being down there since 1912. The discovery electrified the world and confirmed (but was discounted in the British enquiry) that Titanic had split in two. Unmanned submersibles were sent down to look at the wreck giving us the first look at the ship in its watery grave. The images are just as haunting today as they were back then.
The use of the submersibles for this type of deep diving to wrecks opened up a new world of exploring shipwrecks outside of the normal diving depth humans could endure. Ultimately manned submersibles would be developed to allow researchers to slowly descend to those great depths and study the wreck of Titanic and other ships as well. While genuine controversy exists over the later salvage of Titanic (Ballard was not part of that and opposed it), the discovery of the wreck and the technology used to find it has opened up new worlds in seeing the fascinating world in our oceans.
