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Over one hundred years ago, on Monday, April 15, 1912, the RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Titanic, the largest and most luxurious ocean liner of its time, sank on its maiden voyage after hitting a large iceberg 95 miles off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
The construction of the Titanic began in 1909 at Harland and Wolff Shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland at a cost of one-and-a-half million pounds. The maiden voyage of the Titanic began in Southampton, England on Wednesday, April 10, 1912.
The liner first crisscrossed the English Channel picking up passengers, supplies and mail in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland. The Titanic then headed across the Atlantic for New York on Thursday, April 11, 1912 with 2,208 passengers and crew on board.
By late Sunday night and early Monday morning, April 15, the marvel of the luxurious voyage would end in a marine disaster taking 1,500 lives.
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Thomas Maher is a Grade 3 student living in Coldstream, British Columbia with his parents, Eddie and Penny (Dawe) Maher. Eddie and Penny both grew up in Newfoundland.
Since Thomas received his first book on the Titanic, he has been captivated by the pictures and the technical details of the ship’s construction, the sinking and the rescue. One of the most compelling books for younger readers is Titanic by Jim Pipe, a Firefly book (2007).
Among Thomas’s varied memorabilia is a book on the RMS Carpathia, the ship that arrived to rescue survivors on that fateful night. Thomas has collected commemorative stamps of the Titanic and pictures from the 1985 expedition that discovered the final resting place of the Titanic. That expedition used a robot submersible with video cameras to find the wreck and debris field around the Titanic’s collapsing bow and stern. Follow-up scientific expeditions to the site and the James Cameron 1997 movie have increased interest in this historic ocean liner.
When Thomas and his parents were deciding on costumes for Halloween in 2022, they settled on a Titanic theme. Thomas’s mom, using glue, wood, cardboard and paints replicated the long, slick shape of the lavish liner. They added white deck railings and working lights for the port hole and upper deck windows of the sumptuous cabins and ballrooms.
Mom, under Thomas’s watchful eye, used empty Pringle chip containers to fashion the Titanic’s four towering funnels. They then added the crow’s nest where lookouts could watch for icebergs. They flew the White Star Line red and white flag and pennants from the model’s mast. Finally, the Titanic’s name was emblazoned on the model’s bow.
Mom ordered a captain’s uniform so that Thomas could play the part of Captain Edward John Smith. Penny dressed as Rose and Eddie dressed as Jack, characters played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the Academy Award-winning movie.
As Thomas, aka Captain Smith, and passengers went door to door in the neighbourhood on Halloween, they were surprised by the interest and the knowledge that people, a continent away from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, still have for the great liner’s sinking.
At one house, a lady invited them in to see a model of the Titanic on her fireplace that had been skilfully fashioned by her father many years earlier.
The unbelievable sinking of such a giant floating palace still enthralls people from age nine to 99, far removed in time and space from that bitterly cold April night.
Although Thomas’s questions about the ship, the iceberg, the rescue and the final resting place are quite simple, they do probe, in a rudimentary way, what went wrong on that voyage and how such loss could have been avoided.
Luckily, on Halloween night 2022, there were few icebergs in the Okanagan Valley around Cold Stream, B.C. This time, Captain Smith (Thomas) heeded warnings from his wireless room and crow’s nest, and wisely reduced speed and changed course so that his Titanic would not be damaged on his watch. His gleaming Titanic would dock in his bedroom for a few more years, lights on, funnels intact, with the White Star Line flag fluttering from its rear mast.
Robert Dawe (Thomas’s Pop),
Topsail
