Titanic — when the unsinkable became the unthinkable

To mark our 175th anniversary year, we feature a different front page each week from past Ottawa Citizens. Today: April 15, 1912

The Citizen of April 15, 1912, ran a small story on its front page announcing that the RMS Titanic, the largest ocean liner afloat, had struck an iceberg and “may be in danger.”

It wasn’t until the following day that readers learned the full scope of the tragedy, with a reported 1,304 lives lost in the world’s worst marine disaster. (Eventually, as more accurate information became available, the number of dead increased by about 200.)

Included in the front-page coverage, under the headline “OPERATOR’S PATHETIC MESSAGE,” was this sad, brief story: “The parents of J.A. Phillips, the wireless operator aboard the Titanic, received tonight this wireless from him: ‘Making slowly for Halifax. Practically unsinkable. Don’t worry.’ ”

Phillips’s body was never recovered. He was 25.

Among the more notable casualties on the Titanic was Charles Melville Hays, president of the Grand Trunk Railway, builder of the Château Laurier hotel and central train station across from it on Wellington Street. Because of Hays’s death, the official opening of the hotel, scheduled for April 26, was postponed until June.

American businessman John Jacob Astor, among the richest people in the world, also died in the Titanic disaster, as did businessman Benjamin Guggenheim.

Upon realizing he would not be rescued, Guggenheim, along with his valet, Victor Giglio, dressed in his best suit, put a rose in his lapel, and sat in a deck chair in the foyer of the ship’s Grand Staircase, drinking brandy and smoking cigars as the ship sank.

Also aboard the Titanic were about a dozen passengers, most from Syria, who were bound for Ottawa. Two survived, including Mariana Assaf (also sometimes spelled Aasaf), whose harrowing account and confirmation of the rumour that some third-class passengers were shot by the ship’s captain and crew as they attempted to reach the lifeboats on deck, was reported in the Citizen on April 24, after she returned home from New York.

“I think somebody must have said that the boat was going to go down,” she said, “for suddenly there was a great confusion and everybody tried to rush on deck. There were many in the steerage who tried to rush in the boats and at these the captain and other officers fired revolvers and some of them were shot dead. Then the rest were driven back again. They were not given a chance to escape.”