 'Titanic'
stewardess came to Colombo
By Noel Crusz in London
Violet Jessop, a stewardess of the ill-fated
liner Titanic was one of the seventeen stewardesses who were saved when
the Titanic sank on April 15th 1912 after hitting an iceberg on her maiden
voyage to New York. Violet visited Colombo on her way to Australia on a
P&O boat Malwa on Feb. 2nd 1913. She stayed at the Galle Face Hotel
and has left an account of her visit, which included a trip to Cinnamon
Gardens, and her views on Ceylon tea.
I am here in London researching The Cocos Island Mutiny and visiting
the documents section of the Imperial War Museum and the Public Records
Office. But being a Titanic buff, I cannot resist the National Maritime
Museum in Greenwich, where the first memorial to the Titanic disaster was
launched on 15th April 1995. I stood by the stone laid by Edith Harsman
who was 15 when she was on the Titanic.
Violet Jessop was born in Argentina of Irish migrants from Dublin, the
eldest of six children.
In the book Titanic Survivor her memories at sea are carefully
recorded. Author John Maxton-Graham took material from Violet's four 'Seaman's
discharge books': which were blue-bound volumes of passport size.
Violet shared her cabin with Ann Turnbull another Stewardess and was
about to recite a prayer that an Irish woman had given her, when she heard
the crash, as the Titanic hit the iceberg. The engines soon went silent.
A steward rushed in saying "The ship is sinking!" She hurried
to help passengers wear life- belts, before finding a warm coat for herself.
'Life-boat 16' was launched after steerage third class passengers, nearly
25 of them were guided to the upper deck. It was a myth that these third
class passengers were prevented by gates from reaching the upper-decks.
In her lifeboat there were 56 passengers, which included the three male
crew, and three stewardesses. There were no first class passengers. This
life boat soon found 'boat 6' and remained together till day break, when
the Carpathia found them.
Violet Jessop vividly describes the last moments of the Titanic.
There were lights still on. Tightly embracing her was a forgotten baby
thrown into her arms just before she entered the lifeboat. She heard a
thunderous roar as the Titanic broke into two and sank. Migrant women in
the lifeboat were weeping. Violet says 'she stared hard at the sinking
liner as if by looking she could keep it afloat.'
Soon the Carpathia, under captain Arthur Rostron was seen. But the stewardesses
wrongly accused Capt. Stanley Lord of the Leyland steamer Californian of
seeing the Titanic and not coming to her aid. She writes to a friend Mrs.
Emery: "The Californian was within sight all the time, and this was
the real cause of calmness on the Titanic, as we all expected a ship so
near to come to our aid". The Californian was in fact 19 miles away
and could not have reached the Titanic, which had only 53 minutes to live.
A fortnight after Lord Mersey's British Court inquiry on the loss of the
Titanic, Violet was looking for a job. She accepted the fact that ship-stewardesses
were poorly paid, and depended for tips from the generosity of rich passengers.
In February 1913, Violet joined the P&O liner Malwa, an Australian
mail steamer, which steamed from Tilbury. The ship called at Colombo. Violet
Jessop writes:
"I found contentment when I first walked through the Cinnamon Gardens
in Colombo, luxuriating in the tropical scents around me.They lulled me
into a perfect restfulness that even aching limbs had not the power to
dispel, perfect compensation for the supreme efforts of getting ashore
from the throes of a coaling ship." She felt the warm waters of the
Indian ocean. She was lucky to escape the thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit
of the Atlantic Ocean, which gave passengers only a few minutes to survive
in that water.
She made some scathing remarks about Ceylon tea.
"I had always imagined that to take tea in Ceylon would be the
acme of tea drinking. I approached my first Colombo cup reverently, but
it proved the vilest lukewarm beverage I have ever tasted. I soon forgot
it in the spell of the sunset hour: All the colours of the world displayed
over the heavens, accentuating those three lonely bending palms of the
Galle Face Hotel."
Violet was certainly enthralled with the Galle Face scene. "All
the magic of a tropic evening gathered around me as the Indian Ocean breakers
thundered in, and the palms nodded and dropped their tall heads understandingly
as if the recipients of many confidences over the years."
Meanwhile in London a retired busman Rodger Meachem has signed a deal
with Harland and Wolff, the Belfast firm that built the Titanic and still
owns the name. Meachem can make millions with a range of clothes featuring
Titanic and the White Star Line. On the other hand Hollywood's golden boy
Leonardo Dicaprio is getting a bad press for accepting the role of a psychopathic
cannibal in a new film; a long way from the nice boy image of the Titanic.
In London I secured Morgan Robertson's book 'The Wreck of the Titan'.
It was published in 1898, by a former Merchant Navy officer. He was worried
by the disregard of large ships for icebergs. The similarities of the fictional
SS Titan are startling. His ship ( 800 feet) of 24 knots with 2200 on board
hit an iceberg and sank. So did the Titanic 14 years later! I also secured
a copy of a letter from the granddaughter of a spiritualist Mr. Penny,
who warned the British Editor W.T. Stead not to board the Titanic. Stead
had written a short story in 1886 about a sea collision made worse by life
boat shortage, and rescue of survivors of a ship that hit an iceberg. Stead,
ignored Penny's warning, and perished in the disaster.
Once again?
If everything goes well, a $500-million
replica of the Titanic will be crossing the Atlantic on the tragedy's 90th
anniversary in April, 2002. Fine. But what if, heaven forbid, the ship
sinks? Is it worth the effort?
Some people seem happy tempting fate. People like the folks who announced
recently that they are working on a sequel to the Titanic.
Not the movie. The ship. A Swiss-U.S. partnership is building a $500-million,
full-size replica of the boat to cross the Atlantic Ocean on the tragedy's
90th anniversary, in April 2002. (The original ship cost $10 million.)
The oil-fuelled steamer is supposed to make a Southampton, England-New
York round trip. Ticket prices are to range from $10,000 (Leonardo DiCaprio
class) to $100,000 (Kate Winslett). Presumably, there will be enough lifeboats
this time around.
Although to hear Walter Navratil, president of the Swiss-based development
company, White Star Line Ltd., tell it, it won't matter. "It cannot
sink," he told the New York Post. Sounds familiar.
Potential passengers will be glad to know, however, that some just-in-case
precautionary measures are being taken. "It will have modern equipment
to detect icebergs," Annette Voelcker, spokeswoman for G&E Business
Consulting and Trust, the Swiss-based developer and the chief shareholder
in the project, told the Post. Good to know. Although, if you think about
it, what's the point?
If Navratil is so certain that the ship can't sink, they could save
some dough by leaving all the high-tech iceberg detectors out.
Just like Cameron could have saved some money by leaving out an hour
of conversation in his movie. Of course, laughably bad dialogue didn't
sink the movie. The same can't be said for an iceberg and a ship.
-Friday
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