Next April the Nova Scotia town will mark the centenary of its role in retrieving and burying the ship’s passengers,
During the 9/11 emergency, many flights scheduled to land at airports in the northern United States were diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the eastern seaboard of Canada. For the people of Halifax this was a strange echo of the disaster that took place in the chill wastes of the North Atlantic 100 years ago next April 15: the sinking of the “unsinkable” passenger liner RMS Titanic with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.
The Titanic disaster, like 9/11, was an event that defined an epoch, and each April Halifax remembers the moment when it was dragged into the spotlight of history. Next year is the most significant anniversary of all, the centenary, and this proud maritime city is gearing up for a series of commemorations.
The role Halifax played in the Titanic story is little known on this side of the Atlantic. Yet it was a crucial one. Halifax was the Titanic’s coroner, undertaker and mourner. It gathered, identified and buried the bodies, and it did so with great diligence and respect. The poignant tales of love and loss uncovered in the process ensure that the sinking is remembered not just as a historic event but as a human tragedy on a colossal scale.
After Titanic clattered an iceberg at 11.40pm on April 14 1912 and sank at 2.20am on April 15, more than 1,500 (exact numbers are disputed) passengers and crew perished in the icy waters. The 700-plus survivors, crammed in lifeboats or clinging to wreckage, were picked up by RMS Carpathia and taken to New York. Behind them, in a seascape dotted with icebergs, they left a swirl of flotsam and human remains.
The task of dealing with this watery grave fell to the nearest major port, Halifax, 700 miles to the west. Titanic’s owner, the White Star Line, chartered several “cable ships” – usually used to repair transatlantic telegraph cables – to retrieve the dead. Theirs was a task grimmer than any ship’s in a horror story.
Loaded with coffins, ice, embalming fluid and body bags, these “death ships” recovered 328 bodies, of which 119 were buried at sea. “As far as the eye can see, the ocean was strewn with wreckage and debris,” a crewman recalled. “Bodies [were] bobbing up and down in the cold sea.”
As the ships and their grisly cargo returned to Halifax the city went into mourning. Black bunting was hung. Church bells tolled. Dotted across the city, sites associated with the tragedy can still be visited.
The Mayflower curling rink on Agricola Street, now an army-and-navy surplus store, served as a makeshift morgue, though the wealthiest victims, such as the American industrialist John Jacob Astor, received preferential treatment even in death: they were taken to the more salubrious surroundings of Snow’s funeral home on Argyle Street.
The original building is now incorporated into one of Halifax’s most popular restaurants, Five Fishermen, which buzzed with life on the Saturday evening I ate there (for an instantly sobering experience, ask to see the old coffin hoists still visible in the wine store). Opposite the former undertakers is St Paul’s, one of several churches where memorial and funeral services were held.
The bodies of 59 of the victims were reclaimed by their families. The remaining 150, from members of Titanic’s orchestra to coal stokers, were buried in three cemeteries in the city: Fairview, Mount Olivet and Baron de Hirsch. In Fairview, on an appropriately sombre Sunday morning of sheeting rain, I looked for the grave belonging to the great uncle of a friend, but I looked in vain as it turned out. The remains of 19-year-old Charles Davies, of the New Forest, were never found. He may lie still in the ocean, or beneath one of the 44 granite grave markers that say simply “Died April 15, 1912”, followed by a number (corresponding to the order in which the bodies were recovered).
A section of the Maritime Museum, on Halifax Waterfront, is a permanent memorial to Titanic. Exhibits include a piece of the life jacket reported to have been worn by John Jacob Astor, wood panelling from the first-class lounge, and a deckchair. This recliner is a metaphor in mahogany, for the notion of rearranging it and its phantom fellows has become an enduring emblem of futility.
The exhibition also confronts the uncomfortable truth that Titanic was a floating microcosm of the Edwardian class system, that “Despite the myth of 'women and children first [into the lifeboats]’ the survival rate for First Class men was higher than for Third Class children.”
It’s imagining the plight of these third-class children and their families, many of them forgotten and unable to reach the lifeboats, that brings it all home. The most poignant exhibit is a pair of baby’s shoes that belonged to “Body no 4”, a little boy whose identity has been the subject of much speculation down the years.
He was buried in Fairview Cemetery under a headstone inscribed “Erected to the memory of an unknown child whose remains were recovered after the disaster of the 'Titanic’…” Recent DNA tests have established that he was in fact 19-month-old Sidney Leslie Goodwin of Melksham, Wiltshire, whose parents and five siblings, all third-class passengers, also drowned.
But in a sense his identity doesn’t matter. Unknown Child, at the base of whose grave someone had left two fluffy toys and a dummy when I visited, stands not just for all the children who died on the Titanic, but for the death of innocence.
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