Having climbed on a pile of old books to retrieve a tome about the 'Titanic' from a library top shelf, ROSITA BOLANDfound more than she had hoped for
ON APRIL 15th in 1912, the Titanicslid underwater, leaving behind a narrative that continues to be retold. It doesn't matter that all its survivors are now dead. The story of the most famous ship in the world will never end, and it turns up in the strangest places, including a disused school library.
I attended a boarding school in the midlands, where there was a little-used room near some back stairs that I thought of as a dead library. Unlike the two other libraries in the school, the books in this room were never borrowed, nor was there a librarian.
They mostly consisted of early copies of Encylopedia Britannica, a great deal of religious volumes, pamphlets, periodicals and, bizarrely, 1950s' American high school year books.
When I was 13, I balanced cautiously on a pile of books that I had stacked on top of a chair, and took a yellow-spined, battered hardback off the top shelf.
The title intrigued me. It was A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord; the classic non-fiction piece of reportage about the Titanicdisaster, reconstructed using interviews with survivors.
I began reading, and was instantly gripped by the narrative. The Titanicname had a family connection for me. My Kerry-born grandfather, Arthur Boland, had once worked as a draughtsman for the Belfast shipyard Harland and Wolff, and had been part of the team that worked on the Titanicdesigns.
I continued reading long into the night, under the bedclothes in my dormitory alcove with a torch. I read until the batteries ran out.
The book had an inscription in blue Biro on the flyleaf. "The property of Eugene P Daly, survivor of the ill fated Titanic15th of April 1912."
It was a third (1955) printing of the Henry Holt American edition, which was first published that year. At the back of the book, under the list “embarked at Queenstown [Cobh]” his name was marked in the same hand, with an address alongside it, “15 Wolfe Tone Terrace, Athlone.” My school was in Athlone.
Inside the book was a two-page (undated) letter, in the same handwriting, with an address of at 7 St John’s Terrace, Galway. The letter was addressed to someone who Daly addressed simply as “A Chara”. The letter opened: “As I have promised, this is the Book of the Disaster of 1912. You will see my name in the list of 3rd Class at the end marked in ink.” And when I looked, there it was.
There was another blue scrawl on the acknowledgements page, beside a reference to someone playing the bagpipes shortly before the ship sank.
"The bagpipes were played by Eugene Daly from Athlone and he claims it to be the last music played on the Titanic. He says 'I heard no band whatsoever'." This was a reference to the persistent mythology that, as the ship sank, the band played Nearer My God to Thee.
I did not return A Night to Rememberto the dead library. I had not finished with it. I had been so stirred by the narrative, and thrilled by the discovery of the letter, that I wrote my own letter. I sent it to Walter Lord, the book's author, confidently addressing it simply to, "Walter Lord, c/o Henry Holt, New York, USA". In it, I told him how big an impression his book had made on me, enclosed a copy of Daly's letter, and chanced my arm, by asking if he had any memorabilia from the ship that he might like to part with.
A mere fortnight later, an aerogramme arrived from an address on East 68th Street in Manhattan. It was a lovely, warm, amused letter of appreciation from Lord (I had told him about reading his book under the covers at my convent boarding school). He concluded: "Yes, I do have a few odds and ends from the Titanic– mostly small personal items carried off the ship and given to me later by survivors – but you are right; I value them very highly and wouldn't think of parting with them."
He suggested that I write to the Galway address Daly had given on the letter, to see if I could find out if it was genuine and that he felt sure it was. I duly did so, wondering if this would mean I might meet a survivor of the Titanicbut this time no letter arrived back.
Sensationally, in 1986 Bob Ballard found the wreck of the Titanic. I hungrily examined the photographs that returned from the deep. I wrote a poem, Titanic Expedition, July 1986, about the discovery of the Titanic, and the "extravagance of its tragedy". That poem appeared in my first book Muscle Creek.
Earlier this year, I stood in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s museum in the US and stared for a long time at “Jason”. This was the remarkably small camera-equipped robot that Ballard had used on his expedition, and which had brought back those images from the drowned ship: of lopsided crystal chandeliers still swinging from a chain, of corroded baths, and boilers, encrusted wine bottles, pieces of railings and so on.
In 1997, Walter Lord acted as a consultant to James Cameron on his epic film Titanic. The black and white film adaptation of Lord's own book, made in 1958, was a classic but the technological advances in the intervening 39 years made Cameron's Titanicinto something that fascinated a new generation.
Lord died in 2002. I had been working as a journalist for five years by then, and had a fresh appreciation of the quality of the research that had kept me up all night when I was a teenager. He had interviewed 63 survivors of the disaster to write his compelling book.
I never did return A Night to Rememberto the dead library. Before I left the school, I asked if I could take the book as a memento, and I have it still. Recently, I searched the internet for information about Eugene Daly. His name is listed on all the official websites. You only have to type in "Eugene Daly" and " Titanicsurvivor" to find them. On one, there is a moving account of him by his only child, his daughter Mary Kate Daly Joyce (known as Marion) who was born in 1925.
I discovered that Eugene had been born in Athlone in 1883 which, if he had mailed the book and letter in 1955, would have made him 72. He had – as far as I can make out – been in lifeboat Collapsible B.
AFTER THE TITANICSANK, he worked as a mechanic in Brooklyn, marrying a woman there who is only referred to as "Lil". When news came of the illness of his mother in Athlone in 1921, they went back to Ireland; a sea voyage which he found traumatic. Once there, Daly vowed never to cross the Atlantic by water again. The couple settled at 7 St John's Terrace, Galway; the address on the letter I found. He must have sent it to a relative in Athlone but how it ended up where I discovered it I do not know.
By the time I wrote hopefully to Daly as a schoolgirl, he was already dead: he died in America in 1965, aged 82. Once Lil died, in 1961, he decided to go and live with his daughter in New York, who had settled there by then. This time, he flew across the Atlantic.
Marion writes of the stories her father told her about being in the lifeboat: “He went on to say that his big heavy coat had protected him a lot as he hung there, those long hours on the collapsible. Our family had three treasured relics of that awful night: my Dad’s watch, the rosary beads which he had entrusted to some girls to send home, and the old black great-coat.
"I remember it well. It hung on the back of my bedroom door. It had a greenish tinge to it, possible from the sea water. Often, on a chilly winter's night, my mother would take it down off the hook and throw it over me in my little bed, for extra warmth. It still held the warmth. It felt so good, like warm arms about me. We called it the Titanic."
Titanic, the Artefact Exhibition, is currently on show at the City West Hotel, Dublin.
For more visit the website titanicdublin.com or call 0818-719300
