Irish Aboard Titanic (15 page)

Carpets in the
Titanic
were made by an Abbeyleix firm with whom William Gillespie was associated. He seems to have been travelling to Canada to drum up more business, while having the useful calling card of being able to boast about Abbeyleix finery on the floors of the luxury new liner.

Born in County Carlow, William was the fourth son of Abbeyleix gentleman Richard Gillespie, who died aged 74 in 1908, when William was 27. William became a law clerk in Dublin, and his mother, Eliza (1851–1914), ran a coffee shop in the town in a bid to deter alcoholism. Among the other children, according to the 1911 census, were Emmanuel, a 27-year-old druggist, sisters Esther Deborah (24) and Ida Ruth (22), and Matthew Humphrey Gillespie (17).

It appears William was working in 1912 for Viscount De Vesci of Abbeyleix, who ran an award-winning carpet factory in the town. The Kildare Carpet Company supplied four carpets for staterooms, including the wardroom, on the White Star's magnificent new vessel. Order books were full and the United States and Canada were among the export markets.

After William's drowning, a number of contributions were made in his name to the
Irish Times
relief fund. W. A. Robinson and the staff of James Pim & Co., Mountmellick, contributed £3 10s, while the Abbeyleix Choral Society donated £5 5s – an astonishing figure given that basic wages in the factory amounted to only three shillings a week.

William's mother died within two years of his loss, and the carpet factory closed within the year. His name is memorialised on a tablet at the graves of his parents in Abbeyleix Church of Ireland graveyard: ‘And their fourth son, William Henry, lost at sea in the
Titanic
disaster, 15 April 1912'.

Katie Gilnagh (17) Saved

Ticket number 35851. Paid £7 14s 8d.

Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

From: Rhyne, Esker, County Longford.

Destination: 230 East 55th Street, New York city.

Katie Gilnagh survived because of a white lie. When she finally gained the upper deck, she was told that lifeboat No. 16 was too full and she could not go. As the boat began to descend, Katie cried: ‘But I want to go with my sister!' The crewman hesitated and suddenly relented. She could get in.

‘God help me, I told a lie,' she told the New York
Daily News
on the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking in 1962. ‘At first they didn't want to let anyone else into it because it was overcrowded. I said that I wanted to go with my sister. I had no sister aboard. They let me get in, but I had to stand because we were so crowded.'

Katie did have a sister in New York – who was inconsolably arranging for a Requiem Mass when Katie walked through the door.

Besides the lie, Miss Gilnagh had also lived because of her beauty and the effect it had in winning sympathy and securing help. On two separate occasions men acted to ensure that Katie made progress to the upper decks.

During the crossing she had occupied compartment Q161 on E deck, all the way aft on the starboard side, five decks down from the boats. Her cabin partners are believed to have been sisters Margaret and Kate Murphy, and Katie Mullen, all fellow County Longford travellers. All four were saved on boat No. 16, launched from the port side.

Relatives tell that a week before sailing, a gypsy woman called to the Gilnagh house and was being turned away by her father, Hughie, when Katie demanded that her fortune be read. She was told she would soon be crossing water and there would be danger, but that she would come to no harm. The palm reading cost her sixpence.

Author Walter Lord, in
A Night to Remember,
described how years later Gilnagh told of attending a party in steerage on the Sunday night of the disaster. At one point a rat scurried across the room. The boys gave chase and the girls squealed with excitement. Then the party was on again. Lord describes what happened for Katie after the berg impact:

Katherine Gilnagh, a pert colleen not quite sixteen [
sic
], heard a knock on the door. It was the young man who had caught her eye earlier that day playing the bagpipes on deck. He told her to get up – something was wrong with the ship …

At another barrier a seaman held back Kathy Gilnagh, Kate Mullins and Kate Murphy. (On the
Titanic
all Irish girls seemed to be named Katherine.)

The report goes on to recount the story of how James Farrell got them through the gate (see James Farrell) and then continues:

Even then, Kathy Gilnagh's troubles weren't over. She took a wrong turn … lost her friends … found herself alone on the Second-Class promenade, with no idea how to reach the boats. The deck was deserted, except for a single man leaning against the rail, staring moodily into the night. He let her stand on his shoulders, and she managed to climb to the next deck up. When she finally reached the boat deck, No. 16 was just starting down. A man warned her off – there was no more room. ‘But I want to go with my sister!' Kathy cried … ‘All right, get in,' he sighed, and she slipped into the boat as it dropped to the sea – another Third-Class passenger safely away.

Gilnagh described James Farrell as her ‘guardian angel'. He appears to have reached the upper decks, according to an
Irish Independent
report of 15 May 1912, about a letter written home by Katie concerning the ‘sad fate of fellow-passengers from her district':

(She) states that James Farrell of Clonee was very kind to her and another girl. As they were leaving the ill-fated vessel he gave her his cap to cover her head, and shouted ‘goodbye forever'.

An
Irish Post
article from 25 May 1912 records:

A County Longford survivor

Among the passengers who were saved from the ill-fated
Titanic
was a young lady named Miss Katie Gilnagh, of Killoe, County Longford, whose photo we reproduce. She has written to her parents in Longford giving a graphic narrative of her experience.

In her letter she states that she and another girl named McCoy were the last two girls taken on the last boat, and a young man who had previously got into the boat was taken out of it. She further states that she was wearing a small shawl on her head which got blown off, when a person named Mr James Farrell of Clonee, gave her his cap.

As they were being lowered, he shouted: ‘Goodbye for ever' and that was the last she saw of him.

Katie may have been identified aboard
Carpathia
by fellow survivor Lawrence Beesley in his 1912 book
The Loss of the SS Titanic:

Among the Irish group was one girl of really remarkable beauty, black hair and deep violet eyes with long lashes, perfectly shaped features, and quite young, not more than eighteen or twenty; I think she lost no relatives on the
Titanic
.

Joyously welcomed by sister Molly in New York, Katie was photographed to reassure the family back home. She sat on a chair, smiling sweetly, as Molly stood protectively alongside.

Katie was born in Rhyne, County Longford, on 13 October 1894, appearing in the 1901 census as the second eldest child of parents Hugh (35) and Johanna (33) Gilnagh. Katie was aged just six, and had an elder sister Mary (7), the selfsame Molly who was waiting anxiously in New York eleven years later. Four other children listed were Ellen (5), Thomas (3), Bridget (2) and one-year-old Elizabeth.

Katie was initially assisted by the Jewish Emigrant Society in New York and was aided to the tune of $100 by the American Red Cross, which described her as an Irish domestic servant, 17 years old. She later married John J. Manning from Roscommon. Heartbreak came to Katie with the death of her brother William in 1917, while her adoring sister Molly died in 1933. Katie also lost her husband before they could grow old together. He died in April 1955, not yet 60.

She went back to Ireland only once, in 1962, on the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking, and crossed the Atlantic for only the second time in her life – this time on an airliner. Her nephew Johnny Thompson recalls that a soothing voice which came over the intercom had the opposite effect on Katie: ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Smith … ' Horribly alarmed and distressed, Katie had to be brought to the cockpit to verify that it wasn't the same Captain Smith who was in charge on her first Atlantic journey.

Earlier that year, as a 67-year-old grandmother, Katie had attended a 50th anniversary memorial service at the Merchant Marine Institute in South Street, Manhattan. She told the
Daily News
of her memories of the sinking:

When we had gotten away from the ship I could see its lights but it was so dark I didn't know what was happening. The man in the boat kept saying ‘I can see it sinking'. Then I did see it sink. It went down bow first. The water crept up to the portholes, extinguishing the lights. When it went under it made a loud frightening noise. About eight hours later we were rescued by the liner
Carpathia.
My relatives thought I was dead, and when I got to my sister's house they were preparing for my funeral.

She told her family that there had been epithets about the pope on steel girders about the
Titanic,
written by the ‘Orangemen' among the Belfast builders, but made no claims about seeing them herself.

Unlike other Irish survivors, Kate was not haunted by memories of
Titanic
and talked freely to those interested. She believed that she was spared for a reason and was intent on enjoying the years given to her after 1912. However, she never set foot on a ship again. Even when seeing off friends and family she would only ever go as far as the gangway. She died on 1 March 1971, aged 76. Her death certificate gave a date of birth at odds with Irish records (29 October 1895), making her 75 years old.

1911 census – Rhyne, Killoe, County Longford.

Hugh (46), farmer. Wife Johanna (44).

Married 18 years, ten children, nine surviving.

Mary (18),
Kate (17)
, Ellen (15), Thomas (14), Bridget (12),

Elizabeth (11), Margaret (9), Johanna (7), Hugh (5).

Mary Agatha Glynn (18) Saved

Ticket number 335677. Paid £7 15s.

Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.

From: Slievenore, Killaloe, County Clare.

Destination: 715 North Capital Street, Washington DC.

The
New York Herald
photographed Mary eight days after the disaster, attending a reunion of the rescued at the Irish Immigrant Aid Society on Seventh Street. She looked rather more dishevelled than her perfectly composed studio portrait.

In an interview at that time she declared:

Everybody on the vessel seemed to be interested in the fact that the
Titanic
was going to make the distance across the Atlantic in a fast time. Sunday night, only a few hours before the collision with the iceberg, it became very warm in the steerage, so warm that we asked the sailors what was wrong. We were told the ship's engines and boilers were being pushed for all they were worth and that the ship was making the best time of her maiden voyage.

Her room was below decks, close to the engine room, and earlier in the voyage she had sat in her cabin with her coat on for warmth. But on the Sunday evening it was so warm that she and her companions discarded every piece of excess clothing they could.

Mary Agatha roomed aboard the vessel with Julia Smyth, the younger Kate Connolly and Mary McGovern, all of whom may have been rescued in the same boat, believed launched from the starboard side dangerously late in the night. Accounts from the three other women seem to put them in a starboard boat, probably No. 13. Mary Agatha Glynn was certainly saved in No. 13 and she remembered pulling in one of her companions. She also remembered a man standing up to urgently cut the lifeboat falls as another boat (No. 15) threatened to come down on top of them. Their boat landed ‘flatly' on the ocean, and they got away. Mary had an added reason for the terror felt by almost everyone – she was acutely conscious that she could not swim.

She and her cabin mates were among a group saved by Martin Gallagher. He had rushed from his own quarters at the bows of the ship to alert the ladies at the stern. Unlike Mary Glynn and the other women, however, Gallagher was fated by his sex to drown. Mary said that she and her friends had knelt on the steerage deck and begun to pray before Gallagher had found them there and took them up a private stairway to the second cabin. Here he ushered them to No. 13. Mary said she saw Martin fingering his Rosary beads in prayer as the boat was lowered. She also heard barking dogs, ‘neighing horses' and the sweet strains of the orchestra rising above an overpowering soundscape.

Mary remembered pulling at an oar in the boat and later claimed a man had been found hiding below who was wrapped in a cloth and wearing ‘articles of clothing sufficient to pass himself off as a woman' – a suggestion echoed by Julia Smyth who was in the same boat and felt him to be an Irishman. The man, claimed Mary subsequently, had a towel wrapped around his head and had used nail scissors in an optimistic or desperate bid to help sever the lifeboat falls. It seems this ‘woman' of No. 13 might have been Edward Ryan, who admitted to using a towel like a shawl.

One of the crewmen in No. 13, she said, at one stage asked a woman with a baby to keep the infant warm under her coat while giving him the baby's woollen garment so it could be set alight as a flare for keeping the boats together.

She always believed she had heard ‘Nearer My God to Thee' and recalled that as the long hours of darkness gave way to dawn she saw proof that the world was round by smoke appearing over the horizon, followed by stacks, and then the entire form of the
Carpathia
. Bizarrely, she also claimed in later years to have seen whales blowing spray in the area where the
Titanic
foundered, as well as sharks feeding on bodies and deckchair pillows alike.

On her safe arrival in New York, Mary was aided by the American Red Cross to the tune of $50 (case No. 156), and also received a gratuity of $125 from the immigrant aid society.