43
Speaker shares Titanic surprises with Ohio Chautauqua crowd in Warren
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
One of the best-remembered but fictional characters in the 1997 movie Titanic, the wealthy and selfish Cal, made it onto a lifeboat and survived by pretending to be the father of a small child.
But most of the men on board the doomed ship actually died — 1,327 of them, compared with 111 women and 54 children, Debra Conner told a crowd of about 135 people Tuesday for the first event in this year’s Ohio Chautauqua series.
Conner’s talk, called “Titanic Surprises,” was the first of five adult workshops and five youth workshops to be presented this week during the series.
Even the richest man on board the doomed ship, John J. Astor IV, 48, died in the 1912 disaster. His 18-year-old bride lived to bear him a son.
In all, the death toll of the 2,223 people on board was 818 of 1,316 passengers and 696 of 908 nonpassengers. That was far from the worst maritime disaster in history. The roughly 1,516 lives lost in the Titanic is a fraction of the 9,300 German troops and civilians who died in the 1945 wartime sinking of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff.
There were 4,400 deaths in the worst peacetime disaster in history, the Philippine ship the Dona Paz, which collided with another ship in 1987.
Those facts were, as they say, the tip of the iceberg.
The impression from the movie is that the iceberg that doomed the ship caused an extremely large breach in the hull. In truth the rupture was only about 5 to 6 feet long, based on an examination of the wreckage many decades later, Conner said.
The iceberg was about four times as long as the ship. And the ship was as long as four city blocks and as high as an 11-story building. Its famed staircase was seven stories high.
A first-class suite on the voyage from Europe to the United States was $4,300, which translates into $100,000 today.
A first-class cabin cost $57,000 in current dollars, a second-class room was $60 ($1,375 today) and third class was from $15 to $40 ($350 to $900 in today’s dollars).
Most of the third-class passengers aboard the Titanic were coming to America to settle here, she said.
There were 710 of them, and they shared just two bath tubs, she said, because in 1912, “it was believed by many of that class at that time bathing was the cause of respiratory illness, so there wasn’t much bathing that took place, obviously,” she said. The trip was intended to take seven days.
As the movie portrays, there were huge class differences on the ship, with the first-class passengers having a combined wealth of $500 million.
First- and second-class passengers were allowed to get into the life boats before the third-class passengers, as indicated by the number of children in first-class and second-class who died — just one. By comparison, 52 of 79 children in third class died, she said.
Most people don’t know that the ship didn’t just sail directly from Southampton, England, she said. It started there, but made stops in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland, before steaming off into the North Atlantic.
In the days after the Titanic sank, ships were sent into the ocean to retrieve bodies. There were 306 brought back in one ship, 17 in a second ship and four more in a third ship, to be buried in three cemeteries in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Conner will talk again about the Titanic at 7:30 p.m. Friday under the big tent near the Downtown Amphitheater as she portrays Titanic survivor Edith Russell, an Ohio native and storyteller who gave interviews for six decades after the tragedy.
James Wagner of Warren, who has attended many of the Ohio Chautauqua events in recent years, said he found the discussion of the conditions of the third-class passengers interesting, because his grandparents and their children came to America on a ship at about that time and probably traveled third class.