Titanic Connections

I've been thinking all week about the Titan submarine crew. On midsummer's morning I woke from a dream at 0351. I'd been in the dark claustrophobic vessel and jumped out of sleep into wakefulness with an enormous gasp. I must have been holding my breath while asleep. Normally I would drift off again, but as it was the summer solstice I went outside and waited for sunrise. A tawny owl chick was squawking for food, then the day birds started up and fingers of golden light tickled the dawn mist aside.

I sat with a mug of tea. There was still hope for the Titanic explorers at that time, but my thought was that if they had survived, the cold would get them before the oxygen ran out. I was aware that I hadn't woken up from a nightmare of being on the Andriana. You may not even recognise the name: it was the fishing boat that sank with over 500 migrants aboard off the Greek coast.

When I was at school, midsummer's day meant getting up really early and doing a few hours fishing, then a newspaper round, before school. One year was particularly magical. I hooked a huge tench just as the swirling mist was stirred by that golden light. After school I did another round for evening papers, whizzing around the streets of Nottingham on my bike, along Loughborough Road, then down Chestnut Grove. I forget which house numbers I delivered to, but Number 9 might have been one. Remember that address.

In March 2012 I went to St John's, Newfoundland, to write a story to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

I arrive in bad weather. There are ice bergs offshore and a stinging icy rain falling. Out along the coast the cliffs are white with ice and the trees are all bare. One week earlier I had been in Kenya and I am feeling the cold. Also I struggle to understand the language they speak here. It's supposed to be English, but sounds like a bad Irish actor attempting a medieval Anglo Saxon dialect after dental surgery.

Down on George Street the pubs are packed and I drink beer with Dave Myrick, leaning forwards to catch his words over the sound of an Irish band rattling through The Fields of Athenry.

Dave's great grandfather had saved a priest's life during the St John's riots of 1861 and was rewarded with the post of lighthouse-keeper at Cape Race. A generation later, Dave's great uncle Jimmy, became apprentice to the keeper, Robert Hunston. On the night of April 14, 1912, the fourteen-year-old Jimmy was the first person to hear the distress call from an ocean-going liner that had hit a growler. "That's what we call them: big low icebergs that you don't see till it's too late."

Dave taps out messages in Morse code on the bar:   ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄   ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄   ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄. "That was the Titanic distress signal. CQD, used before SOS became the normal. Jimmy raised the alarm." Not everyone accepts this version of events. Jimmy only revealed the story when he was an old man, having been sworn to secrecy by the senior radio operators who should. not have left a 14-year-old to monitor the station.

Like all the Myricks, Dave learned Morse Code and got into telecommunications. He loves Newfoundland. "Pound for pound, there's more moose than people." It is a quirky locality, not least for its village names: Spread Eagle, Dildo and Shagrock are all close together.

"You should visit the Maritime Centre," he says, and offers to introduce me.

I am staying at a hotel called Ryan Mansions, once home to fish merchant James Ryan who came out from Belfast in the 1850s and became the island's wealthiest individual, sending  more than 200 schooners to plunder the abundant cod fishery. When he had the house built, he wanted the finest woodwork and sent back to Belfast for panelling and staircases, engaging the same craftsmen who were working on a new state-of-art ship for the White Star Line. Kevin Nolan who owns the place now shows me round. He is especially proud of that staircase. "They built the Grand Staircase on the Titanic out the same oak with the same tools. It was the feature that everyone remembered, climbing through seven decks and finishing under a glass dome."

When the oceonographers Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard finally reached the wreck in September 1985, they found the staircase missing. It's thought to have been ripped from its foundations by the force of the ship hitting the sea bed and ejected upwards through the glass dome.

This town is steeped in maritime history, and not just the Titanic. In the Crow's Nest bar on Water Street there is a U-boat periscope and the clientele are discussing the latest tragedy: an 14-year-old boy coming home alone by skidoo from his grandmother's house had got lost in the pack ice. He was still missing. I chat to a fisherman who entertains me with similar grisly tales spiced with lots of local dialect which I have to query. "Mauzy? What does that mean?"

"Warm and foggy. Lots of foggy words around here. Mostly we say the weather is just RDF."

"?"

"Rain, Drizzle, Fog."

And indeed next day the town is wrapped in thick fog with an icy drizzle. I go up to the Maritime Centre and meet Captain Chris Hearn who shows me round his institute, a training centre for mariners. Pride of place goes to the ship simulator, a complete ship's bridge with controls that sits on hydraulic rams. "We can train people to navigate their way into any harbour in the world in any conditions in any kind of ship."

As the pilot sails the vessel, the hydraulics give the exact mechanical response, lurching and rolling as required.

"Can you simulate the Titanic on the night of April 14?"

"Sure. You wanna have a go?"

Normally they charge $5,000 per session, so I seize the opportunity. The windows of the bridge fade to a midnight blue and the floor starts to sway gently.

"Of course, we don't have the same controls as the Titanic - these are what a modern vessel has." No brass and mahogany here; all steel and plywood.

I grab the controller and start to slow down, turning to port. I know my history: the Titanic was going too fast and the berg was on the starboard side. Chris smiles. Outside the starboard window, something white appears and there is a sickening crunch, then the bridge lurches.

"I'm afraid you just sank the Titanic."

The simulator at St Johns Maritime Centre

Escaping St John's after this failure, I travel to Halifax, Nova Scotia, a town equally steeped in Titanic lore. Many victims were buried here, including one George Wright, a millionaire and philanthropist. I meet one of his descendants, Gary Shutlack, who has built up an impressive knowledge of the wreck working in the Nova Scotia archives. "It'd make a great blockbuster of a movie, that's for sure."

Gary's ancestor had been staying in London at the Russell Hotel and for some reason wrote a will there, helpfully spraying money in $10,000 doses to all his relatives. Unfortunately he left early, missing the message that came advising him NOT to travel.

"The grave here in Halifax is actually empty," says Gary, "They never found his body."

The enduring fascination of the Titanic must partly be because it created so many stories, each of which touched so many lives. Tiny coincidences lead to death, or life. Gary's current favourite is the tale of survivor Hilda Slater whose diary he has discovered in the archive. A Halifax woman, she had gone to Italy to be an opera singer, but failing in that ambition shipped home aboard Titanic as a second class passenger. Getting aboard she found the paint still wet in her cabin so was reassigned to share with a widow called Fanny Kelly who had her life savings hidden in her luggage. They struck up a friendship, but when the boat was sinking they found themselves stuck on that famous staircase, unable to move in the crush of people.

Eventually they retreated to B deck and found a stewardess. There was a lot of crew on the Titanic, over 1200 of them, and many stewardesses, among them Mary Kezia Roberts, a Liverpudlian. Perhaps it was her who told Hilda and Fanny that, if they were to have any chance of survival, they had to reach D deck.

Just then Hilda spotted a ladder for sailors and, dragging Fanny with her, set off upwards. Fanny, however, refused. "I can't dearie! I haven't any drawers on!"

Hilda left her and made it to a lifeboat, only to narrowly escape death when a second lifeboat came down on top of it. Amazingly, Fanny - still knickerless - also got out. And, among a handful of stewardesses who also survived, was Mary Kezia Roberts.

"I like Hilda," Gary says, "She went on to play piano for Engelbert Humperdinck and died on the Isle of Wight in 1965."

In the Economy Shoe Store on Argyll Street, which is actually a bar, I meet Rob Gordon who remembers his Great Aunt Ethel telling him tales of surviving the wreck when he was a kid. "Because of all the confusion on deck, she thought it was hopeless and had gone back to her cabin. What saved her was a steward who insisted she come with him and jump into a lifeboat."

Ethel watched the ship go down with her father and brother still aboard and for the rest of her life, Rob tells me, was haunted by nightmares of them drowning.

By the time I leave Halifax, I am reeling from all the connections and coincidences and names. My notebook had become a dense thicket of Titanic trivia from which there seemed to be no escape. Everywhere I went I encountered new facts and details. A month after my visit I was on the shore at Saltwick Nab in North Yorkshire and spotted some wreckage out in the shallows. It was the last remaining parts of the SS Rohilla which went down in 1914 during a terrible storm. Despite being only a few hundred yards from the shore 83 people drowned. Among the survivors was a stewardess called Mary Kezia Roberts, the same woman who had escaped drowning on the Titanic. She always maintained that the Rohilla wreck was far more terrifying.

I looked Mary up. The address she had given the White Star Line was 9 Chestnut Grove, Nottingham. Her husband owned the garage round the corner. I did the paper round.

Cape Race Marconi station