NIAGARA LINKS TO TITANIC TRAGEDY
By Shawn Jeffords
Thorold News
April 10 2012
Ontario, Canada
NIAGARA FALLS – Lucie McCarthy feels pride as she looks at the three
letters on her kitchen table.
She and husband Tim examine them closely in their Niagara Falls home.
One is a photocopy of a hand-written letter from her great-great-uncle,
Dr. John Edward Simpson, to his mother dated April 11, 1912. The
other letters are from two eye-witnesses who saw him moments before
Titanic sunk and he was lost to the frigid waters of the North
Atlantic forever.
“I can’t imagine what kind of a tragedy that was,” she said. “And to
be there and know what was going to happen.”
Titanic, an Olympic-class passenger ship, was headed to New York City
from England when it struck an iceberg and sank, killing more than
1,500 people, including Simpson, who was the ship’s surgeon.
Based on the two letters, and a third eye-witness account, Simpson
knew all too well what was happening to Titanic and that he was almost
certain to die. But in his final moments, he did not panic. He set
to work helping calm others and helped them escape.
“There must have been some sense of peace when he decided to stay
and do what he could do to help,” McCarthy said.
Stewardess May Sloan mentions in one of the letters that Simpson took
her and a friend into his cabin and gave them a bit of whisky to calm
them and then went off to help others. Later, Simpson’s sister met
one of Titanic’s officers by chance who praised the doctor for his
calm during the ordeal.
But the third, and perhaps most telling account, comes from Titanic’s
second officer, Charles Herbert Lightoller, who wrote Simpson’s family
to offer his condolences.
He praised Simpson, saying he too was grieving because the doctor
was a friend. Lightoller said he may well have been the last man to
speak to Simpson, whom he encountered while patrolling the decks with
a group of officers.
“They were perfectly calm in the knowledge that they had done their
duty and were still assisting by showing a calm exterior to the
passengers,” Lightoller wrote in the letter. “Each one individually
came up to me and we shook hands and simply exchanged the words,
‘Goodbye old man.’ ”
McCarthy said Simpson’s story has captivated her family for decades,
but in 1997, an elderly family member gave the letter to a Titanic
enthusiast, with the understanding it would be on display in a museum.
It disappeared and after years of fruitlessly searching, it recently
surfaced in a New York auction house, up for sale for more than
$30,000.
The family made a public appeal for donors to buy the letter so it
could be put on display permanently in a museum in Belfast, Ireland,
the birthplace of Titanic. An anonymous donor came forward after the
letter failed to sell and it is now on its way to the Belfast museum.
“It’s awesome,” Lucie said. “It’s a good-news story.”
Van Solomonian said the Titanic tragedy left a life-long mark on his
grandfather, Neshan Krekorian, who at 25 years of age escaped the
sinking ship.
Krekorian, boarded the ship in Cherbourg, France, after escaping
Turkish occupied Armenia. He was a Christian and was fleeing the
country because of persecution that minority faced at the hands of
ruling Muslims. Headed for Brantford, the voyage would haunt him for
the rest of his days, Solomonian said.
“He really was not talkative about it,” he said. “It wasn’t something
he chatted about at the dinner table.”
Krekorian, who is buried in Victoria Lawn Cemetery in St. Catharines,
was just settling into cramped quarters in the third-class passengers
bunks when he felt a draft from an open porthole in his cabin. He
looked out to see a large ice flow surrounding the ship.
After the vessel hit the iceberg, he managed to get to the deck and
jumped into lifeboat 10 as it was being lowered into the water. The
lifeboat was half empty. Few men survived the disaster because women
and children were being loaded into the lifeboats first. Solomonian
said his grandfather didn’t speak or understand English and would never
have understood exactly what was going on, but it likely saved him.
“Everything he did on the boat was based on visuals or just sounds,”
he said. “Language meant nothing to him. This notion of women and
children first, he never heard that. He just went by what he saw….
If he had understood the language I think he might have acted
differently, but who knows.”
Krekorian moved to St. Catharines in 1918, were he worked at General
Motors until his retirement. He lived just a few hundred metres
away from the plant on Carlton St. until he died in 1978. Solomonian
regrets that he never spoke to his grandfather about his experience
aboard Titanic, but it was something he was always struggling to put
behind him.
“He never went on the water again in his life….” he said. “Clearly,
the whole thing about water and boats was something that stayed
with him.”
Solomonian’s father told him once on a Sunday drive to the Welland
Canal that Krekorian wouldn’t even walk close to water. In 1953, a
film based on Titanic opened and he was invited to the premiere. At
the urging of his children he went and then after he wished he hadn’t.
“His children, including my mother, talked him into it,” Solomonian
said. “He kept saying, ‘I’m trying to forget this whole experience.’ ”
After the movie, he was quoted as saying, “I’ve been trying to forget
this memory for 41 years and this movie has brought it all back to
the forefront.”
Two other Titanic survivors came to Niagara after the disaster.
Elizabeth Mellenger, was a second-class passenger aboard Titanic along
with her daughter Madeleine. Elizabeth had been a governess for the
Rothschild family in England, and was headed to America to work for
the Colgate family.
When the ship went down, mother and daughter jumped aboard a rowboat
and survived.
Eventually, the family settled in Ridgeway. Elizabeth Mellenger (Mann)
is buried in St. John’s Anglican Cemetery just outside of Stevensville.
For Solomonian, his grandfather’s brush with history makes him
philosophical.
“If he didn’t survive, his children wouldn’t have been born and all
seven grandchildren wouldn’t be here. That’s the part that hits home.
Then you start to think about fate and why he was blessed with survival
and yet the majority weren’t?”
Solomonian said because of his grandfather’s experience he’s been
interested in the disaster for most of his life. More importantly,
the tragedy changed the way ships are designed as well as the safety
equipment aboard them to prevent further disasters, he said.
“There is just something special about this Titanic thing and I
can’t quite put my finger on it,” he said. “In terms of the 100th
anniversary, it’s about having assurances that we learned from it.”
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