Irish Aboard Titanic (8 page)

Why he should have needed to take all his money with him was beyond anyone's understanding. In the wake of his death, there were stories in the locality of him being weighed down in the water by the sheer poundage of gold sovereigns. Others noted acerbically that it was not after all so hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

Pious Patrick Colbert had amassed his money as a railway porter in bustling Abbeyfeale, a short distance from his home place. The youngest of seven children, he was born on 5 November 1887 to farmer John Colbert and his wife Kate of Kilconlea, County Limerick.

Patrick was one of those originally booked to travel on the strike-bound White Star liner
Cymric.

County Limerick victims, Abbeyfeale, Sunday

The list of survivors published today contains no reference to the name of Mr Patrick Colbert, Kilconlea, Abbeyfeale, Mr James Scanlan, Rathkeale, nor of other young men said to have been on board from East and North Kerry.

Pat Colbert, for whose parents and family the greatest public sympathy is felt, was until his recent departure for the States, a porter at the railway station here, and a young man noted for his industry, intelligence and temperate habits.

There were some other intending emigrants about to sail in the
Titanic
from this district, but on the advice of an Irish American friend waited and sailed on another steamer.

(
The Cork Examiner
, 22 April 1912)

1911 census – Colbert; Kilkinlea, Abbeyfeale.

John (67), farmer, Kate (65); married 39 years, ten children, eight living. Michael (36), cattle buyer, Nora (34), Denis (29), and Tim (27), cattle buyers.
Pat (23)
, railway porter.

Edward Pomeroy Colley (37) Lost

Ticket number 5727. Paid c. £28 10s, then £6 extra aboard.

Boarded at Southampton. First Class.

From: 17 Orwell Road, Upper Rathgar, Dublin.

Destination: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Edward Pomeroy Colley died on his thirty-seventh birthday – 15 April 1912. In the weeks thereafter, several women wrote to his family in Ireland claiming to have been his girlfriend or even fiancée. He had indeed been an eligible bachelor. An engineer and land surveyor from Dublin and a relative of the Duke of Wellington, victor at Waterloo, Colley was returning alone to Canada and his mining interests. He occupied cabin E58, amidships on E deck.

Two days before he boarded at Southampton he had escorted a young lady to George Bernard Shaw's
Man and Superman
in the West End and wrote that it was ‘rather improper in places'. Another flame was on his mind aboard the
Titanic.
Colley wrote a letter on ship stationery, dated 11 April 1912 (taken off at Queenstown), in which he belatedly congratulated his first cousin Norah Webber on her marriage to an officer of the 30th Lancers in the Punjab.

‘My dear Norah', he began, before launching into the expansive style that won him so many female admirers:

I am a No. 1 sized elephantine pig and I shouldn't have let the fact of your being faithless to me + marrying ANOTHER have the effect of coolness. As a matter of fact, it's not coolness at all, but I've been putting it off 'til I could send you a wedding present, which I have been unable to do. The Bank are not treating me well, + I'm afraid a cheque might be treated with dishonour. But I will some day, + meantime you have my broken heart at your shell-like feet …

I hear that all you married Webbers are absurdly happy. I don't think you + Adie [her sister Adelaide] ought to be really, when you consider you each of you broke my poor tender little heart. But then I was always too tender hearted where BEAUTY was concerned!!

Goodbye little Norah + write like a decent cousin to Eddie Colley. My love to you and my regards to my cousin-in-law, whom everyone tells me is too nice for words. Love from Eddie.

A day earlier, on 10 April, Colley wrote to his sister-in-law Edith. The missive reveals more of the man's intriguing struggles with affairs of the heart. It has been edited here:

This is a huge ship. Unless lots of people get on at Cherbourg and Queenstown, they'll never half fill it. The dining room is low-ceilinged, but full of little tables for 2, 3 and more in secluded corners. How I wish someone I liked was on board, but then nice people don't sit at tables for two unless they're engaged or married. I wonder my blue blood didn't tell me that?

They also have a restaurant where you can pay for meals if you get bored with the ordinary grub. Our most distinguished passengers seem to be W.T. Stead, Chas. M. Hays and E.P. Colley. Oh, and the Countess of something, but her blood is only black blue (give me good red corpuscles. I seem to know more about them. And they circulate faster.)

We nearly had a collision to start with. Coming out of Southampton we passed close to a ship that was tied up alongside the
Oceanic,
and the suction of our ship drew her out into the stream, and snapped the ropes that held her, and round she swung across our bows!

She had no steam up, so had to be pulled back by tugs, and we have to reverse. The name of her was the
New York
in case you see it in the papers. It proves conclusively the case of the
Hawke and Olympic
…

Don't you think that it is I who am common and second-rate and not my friends? I always prefer my funny friends to your pretty people. The blue people find me dull and the red ones don't.

I think my best plan is to make love unplatonically to A__ who owns the books. She has manners that would go down anywhere, dresses like an English girl, and knows all the better people in Victoria (did you know there were some?). She is not beautiful, but very nice, and in fact she would do charmingly but wouldn't please my relations. I am not a snob and you would be the first to call me one if I did more than draw attention to the fact.

But Edie you have never met any of my supposedly dreadful friends, and I have lost all confidence in my power of choosing anyone for fear of family disapproval, that I can't face it. You can have this letter printed if you like, and circulated, and the proceeds of the sale given to the society for aged and infirm chaperones.

I hope to meet Mr and Mrs Kane, and her sister's child, in New York. She will be the ideal chaperone at any rate.

Goodbye Edie, you're a darling and wish you had a sister. I'd hypnotise her into thinking I wasn't common by inclination!

Love from Eddie [Letter auctioned for £15,000, September 2006]

On board the
Titanic,
Colley was reported by fellow passenger Colonel Archibald Gracie to be a smiling Irishman, one of a group of six rich gentlemen who offered their services as escorts to Mrs Helen Churchill Candee, a wealthy writer and socialite who survived the sinking in lifeboat No. 6. Colonel Gracie said the group comprised ‘our coterie', which was determined to keep Mrs Candee amused and accompanied at all times. One writer later described Colley as a ‘roly-poly Irishman who laughed a lot but said little', apparently quoting the lady herself.

On the night of the sinking, the coterie and Mrs Candee attended a concert in the First-Class reception area on D deck, forward, until just after 11 p.m. Colley retired for the night after a visit by some members of the party to the Café Parisien on B deck aft, starboard side, at 11.20 p.m. Twenty minutes later the
Titanic
struck the iceberg.

Edward Colley was born on an estate at Lucan, County Dublin, on 15 April 1875. The Colleys were a distinguished family. Henry was a magistrate and landlord, married to Elizabeth. They had four sons and six daughters. Edward's sister Constance, a pioneering doctor, contracted TB from a patient she was treating in Edinburgh, and died early in 1912 – the event that brought Edward home from Canada.

Major Colley's Journey

I have learned, on the most reliable authority, that our respected and popular Resident Magistrate is about to proceed to British Columbia to look after the estates of his brother, Major Edward Pomeroy Colley, who was one of the heroes who sacrificed his life for others in the terrible
Titanic
disaster.

His brother was an extensive mining engineer, having interests abroad as well as in Dublin and Limerick, and when the sad news that he had paid the penalty of his heroism with the foundering of the monster liner was made known, all creeds and classes in Tipperary and the surrounding district tendered their sympathetic condolences to a popular gentleman in a most trying time.

(
Tipperary Star,
25 May 1912)

His uncle was Sir George Pomeroy Colley, a career soldier who rose to prominence in the British army and became governor of Natal. He fought in China, India, Afghanistan and South Africa – until shot through the forehead by Boers in an assault on Majuba Height in 1881.

When Edward Pomeroy Colley boarded the
Titanic
at Queenstown, he was following in the footsteps of his distinguished uncle who had boarded the troopship
Punjaub
for his first overseas posting from the same port fifty-eight years earlier. On that journey, which took fifty-nine days to reach Table Bay, Sir George had time to compose a prayer at sea – which his family respectfully memorialised after his death. It reads in part:

And when grim Death in smoke-wreaths robed / Comes thundering o'er the scene

What fear can reach the soldier's heart / Whose trust in Thee has been?

And if 'tis Thine immortal will / My spirit hence to call

‘Thy Will be done', I'll whisper still / And ever trusting, fall.

Thomas Henry Conlin (31) Lost

Ticket number 21332. Paid £7 14s 8d.

Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

From: Arvagh, County Cavan.

Destination: North Fairhill Street, Philadelphia.

Thomas Henry Conlin (31) was returning to America after a brief visit home. He had first emigrated from Ireland in the late 1880s. Described as a general labourer on embarkation records, he was travelling back to his sister Rosa in Philadelphia, where another sister, Annie, also lived.

The
Irish World,
published in New York on 11 May 1912, contained this assessment of him:

Thomas Conlin, Jr, thirty years old, of 2238 North Fairhill Street, this city, is counted among the victims of the
Titanic
disaster. He was seen on the ill-fated boat by survivors who knew him and was not among those rescued by the
Carpathia.

He was born in Ireland, came to this country when very young and attended the St Edward's School. He was a member of the parish total abstinence society, the B.V.M. Sodality and the Holy Name Society. He was an agent for a machine company and had gone to Ireland to visit his old home.

Those aboard
Carpathia
who knew Tom Conlin were the Murphy sisters, Kate and Margaret, and it is recounted that Conlin took off his coat and threw it to these girls, who were dressed only in their nightclothes, as they were about to descend in a lifeboat. He knew he would not need it. It also appears that Tom and the Murphy girls were cousins.

One story around Cormore, County Cavan, claims that Thomas Conlin was engaged to an American woman named Lena Keyes, who later moved to Dobbs Ferry in New York, where she worked as a housekeeper. She never married and died in her nineties.

Michael Connaughton (31) Lost

Ticket number 335097. Paid £7 15s.

Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

From: Tang, County Westmeath.

Destination: 965 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn, New York city.

Born at Lisaquill, Tang, adjoining Ballymahon in neighbouring County Longford, Michael was a trolley car operator (horse-drawn) in Brooklyn at the time of his death. He was returning from his third trip to visit his relatives, and was much mourned by married sisters Kate Horan and Mary Conlon, who revered their brother as the person responsible for bringing them to New York. Kate lived at his stated destination.

It is thought that Michael could have been rooming with his fellow Athlone man, Eugene Daly, in compartment C-23 on F deck, starboard bow, very close to where the iceberg impacted. In a letter home, Eugene's cousin Marcella, notes that ‘that boy Connaughton … perished'.

Kate Connolly (23) Saved

Ticket number 370373. Paid £7 15s.

Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

From: Curtrasna, County Cavan.

Destination: 309 East 88th Street, New York city.

Kate Connolly saved a boy as the
Titanic
slipped to her grave. She carried the toddler, aged only two or three, into a lifeboat and kept him warm all night. After rescue by the
Carpathia,
the child was reunited with his mother who came down into the steerage area of the Cunard liner and took him back, rather ungratefully, according to the Irishwoman.

Kate was saved in lifeboat No. 13 on the starboard side. ‘Kate jumped ought [
sic
] into the boat,' wrote her fellow survivor, Julia Smyth, who followed her. The escape came in the midst of chaos. Julia talked of a huge crowd, ‘thousands', in front of the women, each one anxious to escape. One of their cabin mates, Mary McGovern, also saved, spoke of sailors desperately linking arms to create a human chain while armed officers held the crowd at bay. This happened around collapsible D, all the way forward on the port side, and possibly earlier, further aft, as steerage passengers surged up from the stern.

Even as 23-year-old Connolly was saving herself however, a 35-year-old namesake, also Kate Connolly, was being condemned to death by freezing immersion.

The surviving Kate Connolly was born in Curtrasna, Drumlymmon, County Cavan, on 14 June 1888, and baptised the same day. By 1901 the family consisted of father James (57), a farmer, mother Catherine (46), née Fagan, and children James (28), Catherine herself (13) and Mary (3). An older sister, Nellie, had emigrated to America, becoming Mrs John McGuckian. In 1912, Kate Connolly was on her way to join her sister at East 88th Street, Manhattan.