Hot off the Press: the Truth about the Titanic Sinking (1912)

 

A 1908 pic from Technical World magazine showing where the Titanic and the Olympic were to be built.

 

I found this interesting article written about the Sinking of the Titanic in a magazine published in the US in June 1912 that tells the story from a working man’s perspective – and an engineer’s perspective. Here’s the first part of  Loss of the Steamship Titanic: the World’s Greatest Achievement in Shipbuilding. From Locomotive Firemen and Engineman’s Magazine. (Amazing what you can find on eBay.)

 

My ebook, Threshold Girl is about a college girl in 1911/12,is based on real letters, and contains information about the Titanic, from the point of view of the woman on the street, so to speak.

 

The sinking of the Whitestar Steamship Titanic, at about 2 o’clock on the morning of April 15, 1912, is the greatest disaster in maritime history, one thousand,six hundred and thirty five lives being lost, out of a total of 2, 340 on board, while many of the 705 who were rescued suffered hardships and terror, that will doubtless impair their health and mar their future happiness.

 

The Titanic was on her Maiden Voyage, she was the biggest finest ship afloat and her reign as Queen of the Seas was only of five days duration. On April 10th she sailed from Liverpool and on the following Sunday night, give days later, collided with an iceberg and sank, about 150 miles south of Cape Race Newfoundland and about 1100 miles east of New York.

 

Nothwithstanding the presence of much floating ice, and repeated warnings from other vessels that the icebergs were in the vicinity, she was steaming ahead when the collision occurred at a speed of about 21 and a half knots, about 24 and 3/4 statute miles and hour.

 

Some few minutes after 11 o’clock, accounts vary as to the exact time, a veritable mountain of ice was seen ahead, against which despite all efforts the ship crashed, a submerged portion ripping open the vessel’s bottom  on the starboard side.

 

The shock was not violent, but the officer’s soon discovered that the damage was such that it was just a question of how long the leaking bulkhead and pierced air compartments would keep the vessel afloat. (to be continued)

 

 

 

The Titanic and Olympic being built. Pic from Technical World Magazine.

 

This article is to be Continued next post.

 

You’ve Got Mail: Titanic Era

A Pile of 1910 era letters. I have 300 of them.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. Cliche, no kidding. True? You bet.

Right now I am trying to publicize my ebook Threshold Girl, a story about my husband’s great Aunt Flora and her year at college in 1911/1912.

No vampires, no lesbians. Just Presbyterian teachers in the Edwardian Era. All corseted up to keep their morals from spilling out at the seams. See the problem?

(The newswires were abuzz  (ancient metaphor) with a story about X Files actress Gillian Anderson. Apparently she had a lesbian affair in high school or something. “Boy is her career that much in the toilet?” I wondered.” Actually, I like her a lot and she’s been working in Britain. And she starred in a fine production of the House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.

Anyway, it’s coming up to the 100th anniversary of the Titanic Era,so I’m using that angle to get attention, to try to get some publicity.

But I’m not living in the past,  my pitch is more about trying to promote an ebook. Ebooks are “IN” right now, and even if Amazon and a few others are trying to get control of the whole ebook thing, it’s still pretty much up in the air, I think. At least, I HOPE.

So I’m pitching my Threshold Girl as both an ebook story AND a Titanic Story.

The trouble is, who do I pitch too?

Arianna Huffington posted an interesting article last week on her Huffington Post. She worries that the  ’traditional’ news media was caught up in a dubious habit of playing second hand rose to Facebook and Twitter by covering little but  ’top trending’ stories on these social media, as if  ’top trending’ means IMPORTANT.

Of course it doesn’t, it likely means just the opposite.

That or Crime Stories. That seems to be all the traditional press is covering these day. It’s cheap: it draws readers through titillation. It’s tabloid. It’s lowest common denominator, but it seems to be all we’ve got lately.

My Threshold Girl story IS NOT a top trending topic on Twitter. (And there’s no Dead-Young-Women in story for titillation. No the women it in are all very alive.) The book popular in a few classrooms in Canada and the US, that’s all. (The follow up to Threshold Girl about Flora’s sister Edith, Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, does have a love-and-murder theme. So I’m learning.)

The question is? How to make a story about teachers in 1910, Presbyterians at that, ‘sexy.’

A headline I read (somewhere online) last week claimed that ebooks are making reading “sexy” again.

(I don’t think it was ever considered sexy. I know. I read a lot in my teens and twenties.)

Another article, I scanned quickly, says that ebooks are changing how we read: while texting, uploading, watching videos. Sexy because it’s so chaotic, I guess, so unpredictable.

Reading is no longer this ‘sit by yourself under an old oak tree by a bubbling stream’ type of activity.

Yes, we’re going through a period of exponential change, similar to the 1910 era, when the motion pictures (and they’d only been around for a few years)  were becoming more popular each day, and when telephones were becoming widely used- although LONG DISTANCE was still very expensive.

The Nicholsons of Richmond Quebec wrote a LOT of letters in the 1910 era, because they couldn’t afford to use the telephone for long distance. (That’s why I could write Threshold Girl, I have hundreds of their letters from the Titanic Era.)

The Nicholson women wore off a lot of calories walking to and from the mail in their town, Richmond, Quebec. About a mile each way.It was a favorite thing to do, after going to church. (Radio wasn’t yet around, although wireless technology was, so sermons were their only daily entertainment. ) They got mail twice  day! Even on Saturday.

I am guessing that for a couple of centuries now walking to the mail has been the highlight of many a person’s day. (Or even just getting the mail at the home.)

I’m not guessing. I KNOW it has been.

And even if the mailman mostly brought bills, junk mail and bad news, the hope always was that on THIS DAY, it would bring something better!  Amazing News! Or merely good news. Or just an entertaining letter, a happy letter, from an old friend maybe. A long lost friend, perhaps. A letter to lift our spirits, to make us feel valued, loved and less alone in the world.

(In 1910 people often wrote letters to vent or to complain, (like Greg Smith at Goldman Sachs, yesterday) so many letters the Nicholsons received from friends and relatives were major downers. (And in those days they had things to complain about: typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever.)The Nicholson letters are written in a time of family turmoil, so they are not careful sometimes and write things they shouldn’t.) If one of them writes something nasty about a family member, BURN THIS LETTER is often written in large print at the bottom. I have a couple of those. )

So nothing much has changed in that regard. 100 years later. With email, and texting, and all the rest that is evolving so quickly whatever I write now will be obsolete before I finish typing the sentence. (Maybe TYPING is obsolete, I haven’t checked.)

No, little has changed, if considering the human heart, the human condition: We’ve just got so much more media to build our hopes and dreams on, that’s all.

What has changed dramatically, is how PRIVATIZED our lives have become.  Threshold Girl reveals how, in the days before media, people had to rely on each other much much more. Changes were abreast though.

In 1910 Richmond Quebec was losing citizens to the big city and the West. It was getting lonlier in small towns, especially for younger people.

Parlour Games 1910

Flora Nicholson and May Watters in Nantucket, 1908.

I spent my primary and elementary school years in a duplex in Montreal, 5 rooms.

We had a living room, my mother sometimes called a parlour.

The place we watched TV.

I see that in the UK they call living rooms reception rooms. Most Victorian row houses have 2 reception rooms. I assume this is because, in Victorian houses, you had a sitting room for the family and a parlour, closer to the door, for guests.

It was this way in Tighsolas in 1910.

The parlour was closed most of the time. In Threshold Girl, www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf Flora airs the room out for the Ladies Aid meeting.

A parlour, then, is a formal ‘reception room.’ A living room is where the family gathers, when it is  cold you stay in the kitchen. In French Canadian homes, there were huge kitchens, and the huge families congregated there.

Today we have living rooms and family rooms… home theatre rooms, whatever. There’s a TV screen and other screens in everyroom, so the ‘electronic fireplace’ has no special allure, unless, like in our house, it is the biggest screen, with dvd player.

In my house, while the kids were at home, all the house was a living room. The kids went where they pleased. I recall being surprised when a woman told me she kept the kids out of the living room.

It’s obvious why in 1910 they kept the parlour closed. A clean house was sooo important, that’s how a woman was judged. A clean house meant a clean mind and clean morality.

So keeping a room always clean for visitors decreased the chance of being the target of criticism and evil gossip.

Threshold Girl Comes Along

My Delineator. I have no idea how to use Corel Photoshop.. which drives me crazy. But I cleaned up my Delineator. I haven’t seen this pic on the web. It’s from August 1909.

A beautiful day, and I spent a great deal of time working on Threshold Girl…as I await my new Delineator from 1911, which will have some up to date fashions…Not that the Nicholsons wore the lastest fashions… so I’m pretty safe with the 1909 patterns.

I am changing the story into the present tense, so that when I talk about a flashback, I don’t have to use past anterior, or whatever it is called in English.

Funny, I know the name of tenses for French, but not for English.

And I’m still confused about Sherbrooke Street and the streetcar. I know from a book I have bought by Aline Gubbay, A View of Their Own, that Westmount got electric street cars in 1893 and one of Sherbrooke the year later.

But I read so much about the controversy about putting in a track between Greene and Atwater, and I also found that there were two loops, north and south, and I also found some ‘instructions’ on how to get to NDG in 1910 and they don’t mention going along Sherbrooke. So I don’t know.

Wait a sec. The Gubbay book has a map with a tiny tread marks where the street car went… I guess befoe 1913, because it goes along Sherbrooke only to Greene and then along st. Catherine.. and another goes down Victoria to St. Catherine.

So, logically, the girls would take the street car right at the corner of Greene and Ste Catherine.. the two routes converge there….

I will have Edith take the UPPER Loop because the Upper LOOP is the pretty loop… and she aspires to HIGHER things. So I’ll still have the girls walk to Sherbrooke and Victoria…and then take the tram to the city. I guess I’ll have Edith drop off a library book at the Westmount Library. They’ll walk through the park. But that’s a long walk….Hmm. They did walk a lot in those days, even in their corsets..

Oh, I don’t know.

Uses and Abuses of the Corset 1909..

From the Delineator, 1909.. Charlotte C. West MD

“Throw that into the furnace when you get home,” was the invariable comment of a noted medical man, as with disdainful gesture he indicated the corset of each clinical patient who was presented to him for examination, at the same time casting a sidelong glance of disapproval a this woman assistant, who was always well corseted.

The woman physician worked along silently in the clinic until an opportunity enabled her to show one of the patients that her condition, gastroposis or falling of the intestines and stomach, was caused by the improper use of her corset.

“But I can’t do without my corset,” wailed the patient.
“The improper use, not the use of it,”answered the woman doctor.

The male doctor suggested the woman doctor write up the subject of the corset from a medical point of view.

…How long have women worn some form of garment such as that now termed a corset? For centuries. So is it reasonable to assert that an article of apparel which has for centuries withstood the shafts of ridicule, possesses some extraordinary virtue and has not been dependent upon vanity for its survival through the ages.

In man, because of the erect posture, the abdomen is undoubtedly the most vulnerable portion of the body, and all are agreed that its natural supports are an insufficient protection for the organs which they cover. What happens:A gradual shifting of the stomach, liver or kidneys from their moorings, they descend, gravitate toward the lower abdominal zone.

Physicians who have made a study of such conditions find that many cases of neurasthenia, irritable spine, chronic headache, backache, are due to prolapsed abdominal organs and can be corrected, not by surgery, but by properly fitted articial supports.

With a properly fitted corset, one unconsciously assumes the ideally erect posture. Every corset and every abdominal supporter should encircle the upper thighs and pelvis, and be fitted upon the person who is to wear it… Metchnikoff, the geat biologist, in his “Prolongation of Life” shows that women live longer than men, and this irrespective of station or race and since women from every walk of life wear some kind of corset, it is not fair to presume that it is has not been an agency for harm? On the contrary, who can say that he longevity of women may not be dependent upon the beneficient effect of the much maligned corset.”

Well, some pretty silly arguments. Corsets served a number of purposes. They made the boobs and hips seem larger (which men apparently like). And according to one academic, while corsets for men were a great equalizer, women’s corsets set them up for competition one against the other. Well, that’s nothing new.

But, remember, Protestantism was all about self-control. A corset meant you were in control, not a ‘loose woman’ literally. Here’s a little thing I found in a 1893 Montreal Witness, the evangelical newspaper the Nicholsons read:

The corset (may its shadow never be less) is the root of morality, self-respect and health. It braces up the moral energies as much as it does the physical; many a slatternly Blowsabella that we see lurching along the pavement in a slum would take an entirely different view of life; and its responsibilities if she were put into a properly built corset.

But the corset had to go: women were out working, moving about in offices and running for the tram. And then came a Huge War, killing so many young men, so women had to shake their booty to get the attention of the few eligible men out there. The Flapper Era!

But don’t make fun of great great-grandma. Women are fed similar nonsense today….We’re fatter than ever, because of our sedentary lifestyle and atrocious diets and yet the media sets up super skinny girl/women as ‘ideals.’ And all that Pilates!

Homelife in 1910

Using electric appliances, 1910, from Technical World Magazine article. The Electric Home.

Macdonald College had a electricity in 1910, I read it in an era article. (The curator at the museum in Ste. Anne wasn’t sure; he believed that electricity came to Ste. Anne in 1915.)

So I guess I will have to have Flo comment on that. (Tighsolas gets electrified in 1913.)

Another thing I learned from the same article (an unnamed document from archive.org describing McGill facilities in 1909) is that the food for the students at Macdonald came from the agricultural school. Pork, beef and mutton, with animals slaughtered on site. The farm also provided milk to the school,which is interesting. Remember, it was the age of tainted milk.

They also raised chickens and veggies so I assume the same, that the girls dined on this fare. That, I find very interesting, from a modern point of view.

Now, in the July 1911 issue of a magazine called Food and Cookery, there’s an article by a Dr. Carr, about the Healthy Home. I posted it years ago, on http://www.tighsolas.ca/ because it is a perfect illustration of the ideology of the era. PURITY. It’s the sun that is pure here, and I have a lot of sunshine and sunbeams and sunlight in my novel…. I use it as a symbol of ‘enlightenment.’

Now I feel I must somehow stick it in the story. Maybe I will have that magazine available in the library at Macdonald..It will only be a few months old.

“Give us a healthy home full of intellectual activity where the homely virtues prevail. Where complete honesty and frankness have free expression. Where the lungs expand with pure air, and the brain quivers with wholesome aspiration and sincere inquiry. Where souls bask in contentment and the sunshine of purity and peace.

It is not necessary that the home be a grand mansion provided with expensive luxuries. A home should be a place where there is plenty of air and sun. Too much shade is bad and yet some shade, especially on the west side of the house, is very comfortable and healthful. The home should stand separate from other buildings so that light and air can enter from all sides. There should be under the home a well kept clean and well ventilated basement.

A two story house is preferable to a one story cottage. The second story is better in every respect for sleeping rooms. They are further from the emanations of the ground where dampness and fog settle. A home that is comfortable and yet not too nice, a home where there is a perfect freedom with no unoccupied rooms, a home where family and neighbours frequently gather together. A dirty cellar is bad, a dusty slovenly attic also bad. But worse than either of these is that dark and gloomy room called a parlor, where elegant furnishings and expensive hangings rarely see the light of day, and still more rarely are renovated by a healthy influx of fresh air.

No man or woman can be enthusiastic without some degree of mental training. Those who do little or no reading except to pore over a novel or lazily scan the daily newspaper, such people will sooner or later become the victims of melancholia or hypochondria. There is nothing in life to enthuse them. Such people stagnate. The heart takes on a rhythm corresponding to the low ebb of their mental life.

…Immorality, wicked sin, these may enter a well appointed home. As soon as anything has occurred to a member of the family necessitating concealment, compelling averted glances, provoking blushing or shame, just so soon the house has been invaded by an enemy more dangerous than disease germs, vastly more likely to destroy the home in the end than a dirty cesspool or leaky roof. ”

Ste. Anne de Bellevue 1910

This picture is on Flickr Creative Commons from McCord Museum collection and it is also in a brochure of the Ste. Anne Museum I visited today. St. Anne circa 1910, at the locks.

The museum has just opened and is in a heritage house, not far from Peter’s Cape Cod or this lock.

Anyway, in my Flora in the City story, first draft, I have Flora and Margaret and Marion visiting the locks.

Margaret came down for the graduation and I assume they did more than the ceremony.

I’m also looking up the Report of the Commissioners of the Royal Commission. ^ years ago I had to go to McGill to find it, now it is online.

And I also found an interesting Gazette article about a riot during the Free Trade Election. Maybe I’ll stick that in.

And here’s a great picture!

I am going back to visit the museum and talk to the curator and look at old pictures so I can better describe St. Anne.

Flora walks to Fort Senneville, but that ruin now is inaccessible, as it is on private property.

I’m Worth Eleven Dollars!!

The Sun Came Out! Yea! My neighbour’s yard could use a mow.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry– or do neither. That’s probably most sensible.

I found this website that evaluates websites and it claims that my www.tighsolas.ca website is worth, get this 11 dollars!

I’m not rich!

The site also claims www.tighsolas.ca gets 65 unique visitors a day, but I know that it gets around 185 or so…about 3,000 a month.

But what they don’t know: that most of the visitors are Canadian students and when they arrive at Tighsolas, they find what they are seeking.

(If you want lots and lots of visitors to a website, just write ‘humungous boobs’ and you’ll get plenty. I know, I wrote this one time on my site when describing my grandmother. I’m sure the swarm of visitors who came to www.tighsolas.ca did not expect so see a fat French Canadian Mamma in flapper-wear strutting down the Atlantic City Boardwalk in 1928. A bit of a let down. But it wasn’t false advertising. She had ENORMOUS boobs.)

Information about 1910. That’s what visitors to my site are seeking. Information about fashion, transportation, family life, suffragettes and cost of living. The Titanic. Eugenics. IQ and Montessori. Marconi and Ford and Edison. Or era information on social etiquette and dating.

And I know these visitors are school children because most of the IP’s belong to various schoolboards, across North America, but mostly in Ontario and BC. Not Quebec, which is annoying, although someone from the Lester B. Pearson Board in Montreal made a thorough visit to Tighsolas last month.

I know that one high school teacher in BC has the kids read the letters and describe what has changed and what has stayed the same in 100 years. And you know, they get it, immediately. (That’s why I am writing Flo in the City: Kids get it!)

I posted this social studies website 5 years ago, not knowing what I was doing, and despite its many shortcomings, structurally speaking, it has been of some considerable use to students across Canada, I know this for sure – and that’s what matters. Not money.

Back then, in 2005, the info I dug up on the 1910′s, by purchasing era magazines off eBay, was new to the web. (Yes, it has cost me money, a fair bit, to post Tighsolas.) Today there’s a lot about the 1910 era on the web, even Edison videos on YouTube. And everything you could want at www.archive.org.

But my material on middle class family life in Canada is, indeed, rare and unique. And the pages of household accounts are also fascinating and one of a kind.

I have a new improved version of www.tighsolas.ca waiting to be posted (I hired a PhD in History to construct it) but I am awaiting news from an Academic Publisher I pitched before I do anything. This publisher is interested in the Tighsolas letters, for a scholarly book, and maybe I will use the new website as a complementary resource.

But that book won’t make me any money either. Only I will be making a difference, somehow, and that is what I care about.

Yes, Rosie, there are English Quebeckers

My husband taped an edition of Who Do You Think Your Are, because it featured Rosie O’Donnell who traced an ancestor back to 1860′s Montreal.

Irish Catholic, baptised in Notre Dame Cathedral (where the first stained glass window was co-sponsored by my grandfather, Jules Crepeau.)

Rosie visited the Bibliotheque National and the National Archives on Viger, the same place I visited to find the dossier of what remains of the National Council of Women documents from the 1912 era.

Unlike me, she found someone to help her who spoke English

Rosie’s ancestor was a Murtaugh from Ireland and she found all this out she joked “I guess that makes me part French Canadian.”

Just a joke, but it goes to show you how NO ONE understands that there were a lot of English Canadians in Montreal in the 19th and 20 th century and not all Rich Westmount Scots, and that there are STILL anglos in Quebec.

Rosie’s ancestor was a day-worker or journalier as it was usually written. As I’ve blogged about recently, that was a very common ‘profession.’

And this is believed despite that many Quebec born anglos went on to work in Hollywood. Mack Sennett, (Sinnott) from Richmond, Quebec being one them.

Norma Shearer from Westmount. Glenn Ford (Quebec, City). Let me check IMDB. Colleen Dewhurst, Ruta Lee, Ben Blue, Leonard Cohen (but of course), etc, etc. Oscar Peterson, Mort Sahl, the guy who wrote Hertzog (name temporarily escapes me, from Lachine and Vanessa Lengies, the young actress who went to high school with my son and the other contemporary actress from 24.. she’s from south shore.)

Anyway, I really like Rosie, causes she’s smart. And this was otherwise, an interesting program, especially for people who like genealogy.

Nicholson Family Saga: Letter 7. So Bloomingly Poor

Tighsolas,
June 28, 1911
Richmond Quebec

Dear Father,

Your will see by the heading where I am. I only got here Monday evening for I went to Hudson with the Fields’ and had a fine time. They have a cottage by the lakeside and they also have a motor boat where I spent most of my time.

Then one of the men there had a yacht and he took us for a sail from Hudson to Ste. Anne’s and back and after all I find Richmond quite a nice place although it looks queer without a station.

Did I tell you that we really have got an increase of salary for next year so that I will be getting $650 next year and they have given me the next class on my way to the top so that my work I hope will be easier.

The next time you see me you will find me sporting a pair of glasses. I had Dr. Byers examine my eyes and he said that I should wear them all the time but I find that very hard to do and a great deal of the time they stay in their case.

Mother, Edith and Flora have gone to our opera house to hear the famous Lorne Elwyn and I am keeping house with Floss for protection from the tramps. Last night Dr. Skinner took us for a ride from Corris nearly to Trenholmville. It was great and the first time I have been cool for a week.

Since I have not been here very long I have not any Richmond news so will close for this time.

Lovingly,

Marion

Hudson is a picturesque town on the Lake of Two Mountains, just off the island of Montreal. In 1910 it would have been a vacation site. Ste Anne is at the Western most part of island and where Macdonald College and Macdonald Teachers School were situated. The campus now houses John Abbott CEGEP (Junior and Technical College) but also McGill Faculty of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences.

On May 1, 1911, while still at school in Montreal Marion sent this important letter to her Mother.

Tower Street,
May 1, 1911
Dear Mother,

This is just to let you know that I am still alive and as homely as ever. Got your letter with news of the dance in it and had it not been that I was so bloomingly poor, I might have called on you and perhaps stayed over night. Edith will soon be going home – in about two weeks I think.

There is not much doing now but the Horse Show which as I have not a beau I am not going. Mrs. Ellis (boarding house matron)had two tickets sent to her for tonight so she is taking Edith with her.

I was up at the Cleveland’s Wednesday evening to play bridge and last Friday Mrs. Wylie phoned and asked me to tea to meet a nice man. Of course, I went on the jump. The man turned out to be a Mr. Blair from Three Rivers, a brother of Margaret McLeod’s husband.

I have had my white coat cleaned and am getting a new skirt to go with it and last Saturday I got busy and washed and ironed my linen one. It is time for me to go out and eat so will say adieu for the present.

Lovingly, M A Nicholson ESQ (Men only wrote esquire after their name; this is a joke)

The Horse Show was a yearly event. In a special feature in the Montreal Star about the Horse Show the year before in 1910, it was written:”The automobile shall never replace the horse in man’s affections.” Whoops!

Young women in 1910 were still introduced to young men through connections, not through chance meetings, or on the Internet dating sites.