Survivors’ tales

Some of the survivors came from Kent.

Kate Buss was from Sittingbourne. Born in 1875, she was the third of seven children born to James and Elizabeth Buss of Shakespeare Road. She spent her early adult life in Upper Halling, working in a grocer’s shop owned by her brother Percy. She was 36 when she left aboard the Titanic to journey to San Diego, California, to join her fiancé Samuel Willis. She wrote postcards home from the ship saying how much she was enjoying the trip and how luxurious it all was – her only objection was to the smell of fresh paint everywhere. She survived the sinking. She was rescued from safety boat 9 and was the last survivor to board the Carpathia. She did later marry her fiancé, on May 11, 1912, and they had a daughter named Sybil. She spent the rest of her life in America, dying in Oregon in 1972, aged 96.

Elizabeth Ramell Nye was from Dover Road, Folkestone, Born in May 1882, to coachbuilder Thomas Ramell, she married her first husband Edward Nye in 1904 and the couple moved to New York in 1909. However their daughter died aged only nine months, and her husband himself died in 1911, prompting Elizabeth to return to England to visit her parents. She was due to go back to America on the RMS Philadelphia, but that trip was cancelled and her ticket was changed to the Titanic. She shared a second class cabin with three other women. She was rescued from lifeboat 11. She returned to New York and worked for the Salvation Army where she met her second husband Colonel George Darby, by whom she had a son Ray Darby. She died in 1963 in New Jersey.