Books & Digital Picks
The Forgotten Victims Of The Fatal Voyage
This month’s family history inspiration
On 15 April 1912, Julie Cook’s great grandfather William Bessant – a fireman in the boiler room of the world’s largest and most luxurious cruise liner – drowned when the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. Compelled to find out more about the subsequent lives of his widow, Emily, and the other womenfolk left behind, Cook uncovers some absorbing historical documents, most notably the minutes of the Titanic Relief Fund in Southampton Archives, which record how financial resources
were allocated to affected families until well beyond the end of the Second World War. Soberingly, we are reminded that the widows were obliged to lead ‘good lives’ before they were considered worthy of receiving an annuity.
On the one hand, this is a lucid history of working- class experience in the commercial port city of Southampton in the early 20th century, conspicuously before the advent of women’s suffrage and the welfare state. But more admirably, it is also
an exemplary attempt at tackling the question of how to match up the documented history of an important event with uncorroborated family stories.
Many of us, like Cook, start out investigating our ancestors because we sense an emotional connection, rather than for pragmatic reasons. This makes her exploration of such concepts as survivor’s guilt, community pride, chivalry, hero worship, national and family myth-making, and silent stoicism utterly
absorbing. Of particular note are the italicised section that fictionalises the family story of William helping a rich gentleman into a lifeboat, and the analysis of how the Titanic widows might have experienced the different stages of grief.
In many survivors’ families, silence surrounded the memory of the sinking for generations. Cook has broken this with a memorable account that is both factually satisfying and psychologically persuasive.