Passport Of A Titanic Survivor
Passport Of Titanic Survivor
As you can see sometimes awesome documents come in via my website. THIS is one of them which comes from a UK collector of TITANIC collectibles who got the document direct from Edith’s daughter Dorothy and was Edith’s personal property.
Miss Edith Eileen Brown, 15, was born on 27 October 1896 in the Cape Colony, South Africa the daughter of Thomas William Solomon Brown and Elizabeth Catherine Ford. She boarded the Titanic at Southampton as a second-class passenger together with her parents. They bought ticket number 29750 for £39. Their destination was Seattle. Passport Of Titanic Survivor
Edith Brown was rescued by the Carpathia in lifeboat 14. Together with her mother, she stayed briefly at the Junior League House in New York. Then they traveled 4 days to her aunt Mrs. Josephine Acton at 2400 9th Avenue West, Seattle, Washington. From there they went back to South Africa, where Edith lived with relatives in Cape Town, but her mother moved to Rhodesia after she remarried. In May 1917 Edith met Frederick Thankful Haisman. Six weeks later they were married on 30 June 1917. In August 1918 she gave birth to a son. In the end, the couple would have 10 children. Later they moved to Southampton, back to South Africa, and finally rested at Southampton. Edith Eileen Haisman died on 20 January 1997. Her British passport came also with her NHS medical card.
The last Titanic survivor MILLVINA DEAN died at age 97 in 2009. She was the youngest passenger born on 2 Feb 1912.
RMS Titanic was a British registered four funneled ocean liner built in 1912 for the transatlantic passenger and mail service between Southampton and New York. Constructed at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland Titanic was, on her maiden voyage, the largest vessel afloat. Passport Of Titanic Survivor
Mrs. Haisman said she remembered that her father was dressed in an Edwardian dinner jacket, stabbing the cold night air with his cigar and sipping from a snifter of brandy on the deck of the listing ship as she and her mother were being winched 70 feet down into a lifeboat.
She said that she never forgot the horror of that night and the loss of her father and that even in her later years she suffered nightmares in which she heard the screaming of the drowning victims in the Atlantic. It was 11:40 P.M. when she recalled being jolted in her three-berth stateroom. ”Father appeared a few minutes later,” she recalled. ”He told us: ‘You’d better put on your life jackets and something warm, it’s cold on deck. It’s just a precaution. We’ve struck an iceberg — it’s nothing much. The steward in the corridor says it’s nothing to worry about.’ ”
They hurried through the corridors, leaving behind in their haste her mother’s jewelry case, 400 gold sovereigns, and a roll of bank notes on top of a bunk. ”We waited for ages on the boat deck for someone to tell us what to do. The ship’s band was playing ragtime. They played to keep our spirits up. It was so brave of them. Everybody kept saying: ‘She’s unsinkable. She won’t go down.’
”Father kissed us and saw us into Lifeboat 14. Up to 50 people got in as it swung perilously over the side. One man jumped into the boat dressed as a woman. As we rowed away from the ship, we could still hear the band playing, but now it was hymns.” She watched the mighty liner go down. ”We were almost six hours in the lifeboat and during that time we had no water and nothing to eat. I kept wondering if my father had got off the ship — that’s all I could think of.”
She and her mother were picked up by the Cunard liner Carpathia and taken to New York, where they left on a train trip to Seattle to spend time with an aunt of Mrs. Haisman’s, who lived there and had inspired the move to the West Coast. They soon returned to South Africa, where five years later Edith married Fred Haisman, a shipbuilder’s engineering draftsman from London.
Married for 60 years, the couple lived in South Africa, Australia, and Southampton, where Mr. Haisman worked in the boatyard. They had 10 children.
On 10 April 1912, the RMS Titanic sailed from Southampton, England with 2,208 passengers and crew, four days later the Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank: 1496 people died and 712 survived.
Passport Of Titanic Survivor
