The Lost Deposition of Glynnis Smith Mclean, Second-Class Survivor of the Rms Titanic: A Historical Novel

Copyright © 2016 Scott Stevens.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Certain characters in this work are historical figures, and certain events portrayed did take place. However, this is a work of fiction. All of the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8256-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8255-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015919836

iUniverse rev. date:   01/30/2016

Contents

Introduction

The Diary—Growing Up In Ulster

The Diary—On Board Titanic

Background On The Lost Deposition—When And How

The Lost Deposition

After Lunch: A Dialog

Mrs. Mclean’s Remembrances

The Collision

On The Boat Deck

Adrift On The Lifeboat

The Carpathia

The Senator’s Soliloquy

The Disposition Of The Deposition

Aftermath

Conclusion

To my family—Valerie, Alyssa, and Amy—and to

the Valiant Cate (Vanessa) who got me started.

INTRODUCTION

From March 31, 1909—the day the keel was laid down for the construction of what would be the largest, most opulent ship to steam across the North Atlantic between Great Britain and North America until April 15, 1912, the day when those frigid waters closed over the spot where that ship disappeared on her maiden voyage—many lives were on a collision course with the iceberg calved months earlier from a glacier in Greenland and set to strike a glancing blow to that ship. So many lives—more than 1,500—foundered with the ship that night.

Hopes and dreams torn asunder.

No plans were kept.

And no life was ever the same again.

Sunday, April 15, 1962. Fifty years to the day from when the frigid North Atlantic waters closed over the stern plates of the White Star Line RMS Titanic. A good many survivors of the sinking had been tracked down and interviewed for the fiftieth-anniversary commemorative editions of the numerous magazines and newspapers being made ready for publication and focusing on this day. All were asked their stories—their recollections—of this night in 1912 when their worlds came apart.

Many recalled (again, for many had previously been interviewed by author and historian Walter Lord before 1955 for his book A Night to Remember) what it felt like when the ship first brushed the iceberg:

Barely felt it.

Grinding jar.

Like rolling over a thousand marbles.

As well as what they were doing at the moment of impact:

Sleeping.

Reading.

Smoking.

And their reactions to the first call to the lifeboats:

Didn’t believe the ship could sink.

Didn’t want to leave the ship and take to the sea in an open lifeboat.

Didn’t want to leave husband.

Father.

Son.

Their responses to the news of the sinking:

Initial calm at the news—and denial.

Then as time went on, there came a realization of the seriousness of the situation:

Confusion, then panic.

Tales were told of heroism and of shame.

Of gallantry and of cowardice.

Some of the stories were exciting. For instance, Ruth Blanchard (Becker) told of how she’d almost been left behind without the rest of her family; her mother and two younger siblings had boarded Boat 11, and twelve-year-old Ruth had been fortunate enough to get into Boat 13 just a few seconds later. Her mother didn’t know she was alive until they were reunited on the rescue ship almost nine hours after the sinking.

Second wireless operator Harold Bride, aged twenty-two, spoke of how he’d been briefly trapped under overturned Collapsible B and how he’d later stood on the keel of that boat with more than twenty other men under the charge of thirty-eight-year-old Second Officer Charles Lightoller, senior surviving officer from the ship, for an hour and a half until they were taken off by Boats 12 and 4 with the rockets from the rescue ship just in sight.

Baker (Chief) Charles Joughin recalled how he’d thrown at least fifty deck chairs from the doomed liner into the water and then walked on the side of the dangerously listing ship as her stern rose high preparatory to taking her fateful plunge. His amazing equilibrium was in spite of inebriation caused by the brandy he had consumed in the brief time between the collision and the sinking, preventing him from stumbling and falling overboard. He’d then stood on the very stern plates of the ship as it went down and treaded water for over an hour alongside Collapsible B, never once getting his hair wet or even seeming to be affected by the freezing water.

The British film A Night to Remember (based on Mr. Lord’s extraordinary book) had come out in 1958, four years before the publications of these commemorative Sunday editions. Although altered for the sake of cinematic drama, it was a fairly accurate representation of the last hours of the legendary passenger liner and the events leading up to the disaster. Surviving Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall, now a retired commodore, was hired as technical advisor for the film to aid in accurately portraying the events of the voyage and its climax.

And the interest escalated from there. Throughout the years since the liner’s sinking off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, many stories, articles, and books were written. One of the earliest was by first-class passenger Colonel Archibald Gracie. He published an article in the Outlook magazine on April 27, 1912. His book, The Truth about the Titanic, was written that summer, submitted for publication shortly before his death in November 1912, and published the following year.

Even fifty years later, interest hadn’t slackened; if anything, it was increasing. Obituaries worldwide would make note of the passing of any survivor of the sinking; on occasion, this would be front-page news.

Grand schemes to raise the liner were considered almost from the moment her bow touched bottom more than two miles down. Legends were heard of treasure in the cargo holds, staterooms, and purser’s safes waiting to be salvaged. Eyewitnesses offered conflicting reports regarding the ship’s condition as it went down. Had it gone down intact? Did it break up—or blow up—when the water reached her boilers? Or did it split in half as some survivors adamantly insisted they’d witnessed?

Despite the technical questions, the plans for salvage, and the few mementos, and brushing the what-ifs and educated guesses aside, the stories of the disaster and its human tragedy always stirred the heart. Of the 705 people saved, a large percentage were first-class passengers—and too many of the total were men and crew members. Lifeboats were not filled to capacity; one of them lowered with only twelve people in it though it had a capacity of forty.

Even more startling, while the Titanic carried more than enough boats to satisfy the British Board of Trade regulations, she still could not carry even half the ship’s rated passenger and crew load. There was room for fewer than 1,200 people in the twenty boats (four boats more than regulations of the time called for), yet the Titanic could have carried nearly three thousand persons—passengers and crew combined.

There were better than 2,200 on board when the Titanic departed Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, sailing out of sight and into history. The stated claim was that the Titanic was intended to be its own lifeboat. Fifteen watertight bulkheads lay transverse from port to starboard (left to right) and gave the ship sixteen watertight compartments that would, in theory, allow the ship, sinking though it may be, enough time afloat with a negligible list to either side and/or bow to stern to enable rescue by all nearby responders. This claim gave rise to the illusion that Titanic was unsinkable.

The loss of loved ones. Families parted forever. Many of the third-class passengers unable (for whatever reason) to reach the boat deck until after all the boats were lowered. Many women and children lost (most of them those same third-class souls).

Lives changed forever.

The April 10, 1962, edition of the Los Angeles Evening Herald-Examiner mentioned an exclusive new piece of information that would be published five days hence: the discovery of testimony intended for—but not found among—the transcripts of the Senate inquiry, given by a passenger whose name appeared only on the first, incomplete, list sent by wireless from the rescue ship, RMS Carpathia, and relayed to New York with help from the more powerful set on the RMS Olympic (the nearly identical older sister ship to the Titanic) on April 16 and not repeated anywhere.

Within hours of the moment the rescue ship docked on the night of April 18, the inquiry had begun in New York. It later moved to Washington, DC—with some statements taken wherever the witnesses could be found and others as sworn affidavits—and concluded just days before being presented to the full Senate on May 28, 1912.

Transcripts of the inquiry would become publically available after 1918.

This testimony had been given near the end of May (on the twenty-fourth), the day before the chairman of the inquiry boarded the RMS Olympic to question her captain and her wireless officer and to reinterview one of the firemen who’d survived the disaster and was now assigned a berth on the older sister ship. That would also be the last day testimony was gathered prior to compiling and submitting the final report to the Senate. It consisted of its chairman (Michigan senator William Alden Smith), his longtime stenographer (Mrs. Mary Altford), and the aforementioned passenger, and was given in her hotel suite in New York rather than in Washington, DC, before the full board. This testimony was never added to the records of the inquiry, and there was no mention of its existence in the extensive catalog of notes and evidence. There was just a cryptic entry in the senator’s personal journal regarding his final intentions before returning to Washington from New York near the end of May. For years, it had been taken by historians to be in reference to the aforementioned visit to Olympic.

The testimony belatedly presented to the world through the Herald’s publication on this golden anniversary was more of an interview than a deposition, though the senator asked many of the same questions throughout the narrative as he had during the official inquiries held over the course of the previous five weeks. This informal atmosphere resulted in a more relaxed environment than that for the testimonies given by earlier witnesses.

As the senator was nearing completion of the inquiry, and as the preparation of the final report at this stage was best left to his staff, the senator was at ease and under no pressures for time. He decided to devote an entire day to speaking with this final witness and thereby obtained the longest, most descriptive narrative taken than any other in the entire investigation. The interview began right after breakfast and took place at the Plaza Hotel in New York, where the young widow had been staying since the Carpathia docked in the late night hours of April 18.

The senator seemed captivated by the calm directness of the young lady. Instead of merely focusing on obtaining her testimony in the same fashion as he had with all the other witnesses he had faced, the two of them also swapped information on his recently acquired knowledge behind the history of the Olympic class vessels of the White Star Line and she the story of growing up in Ireland and meeting and marrying her young husband only to lose him in the early-morning hours of April 15.

Following the interview, she informed Senator Smith that she had a ticket to return to England on the Olympic when the ship was resupplied and ready to sail later the next day. After the five-day voyage, they would dock in Southampton, England. Her family would bring her back to the home she’d thought she’d left forever when she and her groom had boarded the Titanic at Queenstown, Cork County, Ireland, on April 11, bound for their new lives in America. The senator and his aide, upon the conclusion of their deposition with the young widow, would be touring the Olympic the next morning (prior to her departure) and returning to Washington on a specially chartered train to finalize the report and submit it to the US Senate.

The granddaughter of Mrs. Altford had discovered this lost interview among her personal belongings when her parents passed away a few months before. Through contacts, she offered it exclusively for publication to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and its star special features reporter, Samuel Bellingham, for a special Sunday edition. The Herald eagerly accepted this offer—provided that the facts and the details of the deposition were cross-checked, the identity of this previously unknown survivor was verified, and the authenticity of the stenographer’s papers was proven true.

It was the real deal.

After careful transcribing, fact-checking, and organizing of the information was completed, Mrs. Altford’s original notes were returned to the family. They were being besieged with offers from, and were resisting, all temptations to sell them to memorabilia collectors. A decision to donate to the National Archives, where it might eventually be included in the files of the inquiry, was still pending at the time of the article’s original publication.

However, that was just the beginning. Though she was a ticketed second-class passenger and was known to have boarded the ship—except for the initial wireless-transmitted list from the Carpathia via the Olympic and several shore stations—this passenger’s name did not appear on any of the recognized lists of survivors. A search was launched immediately to locate and learn the fate of the previously unknown survivor. It was obvious that Senator Smith had worked from all available survivor lists since he did interview her, but since no mention of the interview, let alone the transcript itself, had been included among the vast volume of papers, notes, and evidence generated as a result of the inquiry, she was allowed to slip into obscurity. Was she dead? Alive? If alive, where was she? Who was she? What was her history? Nothing was known; she was a mystery.

Walter Lord had painstakingly sought out what survivors he could find to interview for his groundbreaking biography of the tragedy (he’d talked to sixty-three for the book), and he had no knowledge of her. Granted, there were many he couldn’t find who had either chosen to remain in obscurity after the sinking for reasons of their own or had vanished into their changed lives, leaving no clues about their eventual fates. This usually applied mainly to the women (who would marry and thus have changed their last names), but men too vanished into time. Others died in the time between the sinking and his search for them. Many who were still alive, but whom he’d missed in his initial sweep for witnesses, he’d later found and come to know and love well.

However, Glynnis Smith-McLean was not one of them.

Through careful and meticulous research (using Mrs. Altford’s notes for background information), Mr. Bellingham was finally able to find her. Still living in her town of birth fifty miles southwest of Belfast, she’d remarried, raised several children, and was now enjoying retirement with her husband of nearly fifty years. She was quite surprised at her sudden celebrity. Of course, she’d read the book and seen the movie (up to a point—she left the theater shaking when the scenes on the boat deck were shown and refused to ever see the film again), but she’d never attempted to cash in on the tragedy. Her story remained untold; only her family and friends of the time knew of her experience. She’d not even told her children. It was an event she’d lived through in her past and moved on from; the activities of her later years consumed all her time and attention.

She saw herself as a farmer’s wife and mother of three who’d survived a tragedy that so many others didn’t, and she could not understand the attention she was getting so many years later. She had put the tragedy behind her and had no wish to recall it after all these years. She would not allow her picture to be taken or any real details of her past fifty years revealed. It was too late to insist her name be kept secret; news of the lost deposition had already spread globally, but she pleaded to be left in peace.

Mr. Bellingham was one of very few persons who managed to impress Mrs. Branigan (no fool was she; in spite of being a simple country girl, she was highly self-educated, well-read, and inherited her sharp intuition from her parents). His gentle and sympathetic manner struck her as sincere and deep. Because of this, she opened up to him and told her story, eventually allowing—also exclusive to the Herald-Examiner—the publication of diary excerpts from before, during, and immediately after the tragedy to accompany the deposition and her subsequent conversation with Senator Smith. She had not opened the diary since the date of the last entry several months after the event, and she had kept it securely packed away in a trunk that had been stored in the back room of the home she’d lived in since her second marriage. By allowing this to accompany the publication of her deposition, she could illustrate the life she’d had prior to the tragedy and pay tribute to the young man who was her first love and who had remained anonymous for all those years. His body had never been recovered; it was either lost at sea, was buried at sea without identification, or was one of the many unidentified victims who were interred in a special cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a number in lieu of a name on the headstone.

Mrs. Branigan and her family graciously entertained Mr. Bellingham while they pored over a copy of her deposition and paged through the volumes that comprised her diary. At the end of the visit, she impulsively allowed him to reference their chats as needed to illuminate portions of the diary, her testimony, and her narrative—and to touch briefly on her life since the sinking.

The reader will note that there are several contradictions between the three versions of the events that are recorded here. This is normal and to be expected.

First, the diary entries, written at the time or very soon thereafter, would probably be the most accurate—followed closely by her recollections to Senator Smith after the recording of her deposition and narrated as she viewed the events on the movie screen of her mind a few weeks after they occurred. The least accurate, but more in the chronology and detail than in any singular fact, would be the deposition itself. It is difficult to pull selected items out of context and clarify them without the events immediately prior and following that item to help place them in proper perspective. While it may seem, for example, that Mrs. Branigan and her late husband retrieved their valuables after both had visited the boat deck to ascertain what was happening—as her diary entry of April 16 (written aboard the rescue ship Carpathia since there was no entry for April 15) indicates—her recollection to Senator Smith a month later places it as before, when only her husband had gone to investigate, and she had yet to leave their cabin. Considering the harrowing ordeal she’d just undergone and the fact that the experience was still so fresh in her mind (she was still in shock and perhaps a bit confused), her diary entry might be suspected, her later recollection could be more accurate. Likewise, with a month’s reflection between the event and the interview, she perhaps tried to order the events in a logical way that would make sense to her. As she admitted to the senator, she’d not opened the diary since the rescue. It could be that the earlier diary is accurate and the recollection, mentally framed to allow her to understand what had happened in a way she could begin to accept, would be suspect.

In either case, the event is the truth, and its placement on one side or the other of half an hour’s time passage is irrelevant. She did board Carpathia wearing her husband’s greatcoat, and in the pockets were her 1912 diaries and all the money they’d brought with them. Those facts, regardless of when they occurred, hadn’t changed.

Taken in context with previously published and currently available information given by other survivors and those who were involved with the events, the reader was asked only to accept that Glynnis Smith-McLean-Branigan had a story to tell.

The story was hers.

She was a Titanic survivor.

So the discovery of the lost deposition—accompanied by a uniquely rare and incomparable candid narrative recorded without embellishment by a highly trained and detail-oriented court stenographer immediately after the deposition were at long last presented to the world as historically valuable documents that would aid tremendously in understanding the events of the night that the RMS Titanic sank, taking more than 1,500 lives to the bottom of the North Atlantic. In addition, the inclusion of a selection of diary entries chronicling the relationship, the romance, and the loss of the young Irish bride’s dreams lend a sense of pathos, giving the story a life that the deposition alone could never convey.

What follows now is a republication