When Titanic sank on the night of April 15th after hitting an iceberg, Maggie was rescued in lifeboat 16, which I was commanded to man by one of the ship’s officers. We were rescued by the steam ship Carpathia at dawn the following morning after eight hours drifting in the freezing cold. Maggie was suffering terribly and was lifted out of the lifeboat onto Carpathia barely conscious.
She had been given lend of a coat by one of the other passengers in the lifeboat; a yank actress, Vivienne Walker-Brown, as Maggie’s own coat was damp with the water and was making her shiver.
When the Carpathia arrived in New York, we first docked at the White Star Line pier to unload the lifeboats from Titanic which had been hauled aboard the rescue ship. As lifeboat 16 was being lowered, I saw a black coat in the bottom and grabbed it, remembering that it belonged to the Irish girl. When I discovered the packet of letters in the pocket I suspected that these were important to her, and that she must have taken them from her suitcase before leaving her cabin.
In an attempt to get the coat and packet of letters back to her (which I have never read), I visited some of the hospitals in New York which I knew had taken survivors. Being in reasonably good health myself, I was not admitted to hospital and was taken in by the Salvation Army until my employer, the White Star Line, could find accommodation for me in the city.
I was told at the St Vincent’s Hospital that a Maggie Murphy and a Peggy Madden had been admitted, but had been discharged earlier that day. I had no idea where they might be travelling onto, other than that Peggy, who I had become quite friendly with on the ship, was travelling on to St. Louis. I have a mind to try and track her down when we have all had chance to recover from our ordeal.
Unable to find Maggie, I have kept her coat which bears a set of rosary beads in one pocket and the packet of letters and some browned cherry blossom petals in the other. I assume the letters are very important to her so I will keep them until such time as I might be able to find her, or her friend Peggy.
I don’t want to write about Titanic or what happened that night. I just want the haunting sounds and images to leave my mind and I swear that I will never set foot on a ship again for as long as I live.
If, in time, this letter and the coat and letters belonging to Maggie are returned to her, please pass on my regards. She was a very brave young lady and I will never know how she must have felt stepping into that lifeboat, leaving those she was travelling with standing on the deck of the boat which we then watched sink to the bottom of the sea.
Whatever happens, I hope she goes on to live a very happy life and that she manages to return to her sweetheart in Ireland. From what little she told me about him, I think she must have loved him very, very much and I think he must have loved her equally.
I would like to declare here in writing that I have never read the letters as I consider them to be a private matter for Maggie’s eyes only. I thank God that we are safe and it would make me a very happy man indeed to see the letters reunited with their rightful owner.
Written by Harry Walsh (of sound mind),
New York
America
Grace folded the page up and placed it carefully onto the table. For a while she couldn’t speak.
‘Incredible, isn’t it,’ Mr Lockey said. ‘You must keep the letter and give it to your great-grandmother. I hope she will be happy to know how Harry came to have her letters.’
‘What was he like, your uncle?’ Grace asked, interested to hear more about this young man who had risked so much to save lives and whose integrity was such that throughout his life, he had kept Maggie’s possessions in the hope that he would one day find her.
‘Ah, Uncle Harry!’ Mr Lockey chuckled, ‘Lucky Uncle Harry – the man with a permanent twinkle in his eye, a plan up his sleeve and a spring in his step. He was like a second father to me, so I was extremely fond of him – where oh where do I start?!’
For the next two hours Grace absorbed every detail of Harry’s life – how he had been so traumatised by the events of that night and by the loss of so many of his colleagues from Southampton that he refused to ever step foot on a boat again and had found employment with the Cunard line in the offices (‘the safest place to work for a steamship company’ he’d said), unable to bear the sight of the White Star Line swallowtail flag. She heard how his mother was frantic waiting for news of his fate and how she’d stood for days at the docks in Southampton, along with hundreds of other weeping mothers and wives, refusing to leave until she knew what had become of her beloved son. She listened as Mr Lockey told her how Harry’s parents and sister had eventually travelled to New York to start a new life with him, how his father’s health improved and allowed him to work again at the docks and how his mother had become a very influential figure at the Salvation Army, helping those less fortunate than herself. She listened with amazement at how Harry had spent two years trying to track down the girl Peggy Madden who he was sweet on, only to discover her just before the outbreak of war and then to lose contact with her again. How, by the time he returned from war and made his way to her home in St. Louis again, Peggy was married with two children. How, apparently she had laughed when she saw him standing in the driveway and swore that if she didn’t love her husband so much she would have run off with him there and then because he was the most persistent man she had ever met! How they became firm friends, keeping in contact until he was an old man and how he had never married, saying that he would rather be happy and alone than be with anyone other than the Irish girl who filled his dreams every night.