Letter reveals for the first time how Titanic owners demanded huge sums from grieving families to be reunited with bodies of ship's crew

An astonishing letter from the Titanic's owners to the family of a dead officer asking for a huge sum of money to return his dead body to England has been uncovered 103 years on from the tragedy.

The letter, dated May 7, 1912, was sent from White Star Lines to Christopher Moody, the brother of 24-year-old officer James Moody, who died after the Titanic hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage.

In it, company bosses demand £20 - the equivalent of £2,000 in today's money - to return his body to England, and state that Christopher Moody will have to pick up the tab from there.

The letter, from bosses at Ismay Imrie & Co, the parent company of White Star Line, read: 'We have your further letter of the 6th instant, and while we will be prepared to transport the remains of your brother across the Atlantic to either Liverpool or Southampton we regret that it is not possible for us to do any more.

'Should you after further consideration desire the remains of your Brother to be returned will you kindly telegraph us in the morning at the same time sending us a deposit of £20 for any expenses and land charges on the other Side and we will at once cable New York asking then to arrange this if practicable.





'We also think it right to point out that the arrangements and expenses for taking charge of the remains after arrival of the steamer at Liverpool or Southampton would be on your account.'

Instead, the company suggests that Mr Moody's remains be buried in Halifax with the other survivors, but they offer to send his family 'a photograph of the tombstone', if they want one.

Even more shocking is the fact that Mr Moody's body had not been recovered by the time the letter was sent, and bosses would have known that, as all remains were cataloged.

The remains of Mr Moody, who was on watch when the ship struck the iceberg and later helped passengers into the lifeboats while declining a space for himself, have never been found.

Mr Moody was among the 1,500 passengers and crew to die aboard the Titanic when it sank in the north Atlantic on April 14 1912, two days into her maiden voyage.

He had been serving as the Titanic's sixth officer, and was the only junior officer to perish after staying behind to help evacuate the passengers after the other officers left.

Born in Scarborough in 1887 to John Henry Moody, a town councillor, and Evelyn Louise Lammin, James was privately educated before being sent to King Edward VII Nautical School in London.

He passed his masters exams there in 1911 before becoming an officer. He was originally stationed on the Oceanic, the Titanic's sister ship, but transferred just months before the disaster in 1912.

The letter has come to light after being listed for auction by a collector who acquired it directly from Moody's family. Andrew Aldridge, from the auctioneers, said: 'White Star Line is asking for £20, which was a colossal amount of money in 1912, for the return of the body of one of their own officers.

'The mere concept of requiring payment for the return of the body of anyone who died on Titanic - let alone one of the ship's officers - is just beyond comprehension.

'It is an horrific act on the part of White Star. You can't imagine how Christopher Moody must have felt to have been greeted with a letter like this when he was grieving for the loss of his brother.

'What's more, the £20 White Star were asking for did not cover getting the body home or to the undertakers once it arrived in England. 'But where this letter is most shocking is the fact that Moody's body had not been - and never was - recovered in the aftermath.

'When this letter was sent the recovery ships had already arrived in New York and the bodies they had found had been identified and catalogued. 'You would like to think the sending of this letter was an administrative error but it's open to a lot of interpretation. 'The implications are huge - how many families of the deceased did White Star ask for payment from?

'James Moody was an incredibly brave man, helping to get passengers into liferafts and choosing to stay with the ship until the bitter end. 'It appears that White Star treated his body as a commodity, which callous in the extreme.'

Wednesday 15 April 2015

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3038296/Amazing-letter-reveals-time-Titanic-owners-demanded-huge-sums-grieving-families-reunited-bodies-ship-s-crew.html

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15 April 1912: Titanic disaster dead remembered

Relations of those who died on the Titanic have gathered in the city where the doomed liner was built to commemorate the anniversary of the sinking.

The Titanic Memorial Garden in the grounds of Belfast City Hall witnessed a poignant memorial service as relatives laid flowers in memory of those lost 102 years on from the disaster.

The White Star Line vessel, which foundered on her maiden trans-Atlantic voyage after striking an iceberg, was built less than a mile away in the city’s once thriving docklands.

Each year on the day of the April 1912 tragedy, a solemn ceremony is held at the memorial garden where all 1,512 victims are listed on bronze plaques.

As well as relatives of Irish victims, relations of a number of international passengers who died travelled to today’s event in Belfast.

President of the Belfast Titanic Society John Martin, whose great uncle Dr John Edward Simpson – one of the liner’s two doctors – died on board, said many people retained an interest in the ship.

“Some with a direct family connection to people on board, some who were perhaps related to people who built the ship and then there are others who are more interested in why she sank and all the disaster management type of aspect of the story, so it’s important for a lot of people,” he said.

“But the importance of today – the anniversary – is very much about the people who died and that’s what we are here for, just to commemorate those people and to think about all the years that they lost, all their lives cut so short.”

Belfast Lord Mayor Mairtin O Muilleoir was among those who laid wreaths at the foot of the main Titanic memorial, which was erected in 1920.

“Whenever we gather to pay our respects to the dead I think it is a very special time and very solemn time for Belfast,” he said.

“It’s a real tribute to the Titanic Society that they have kept the memory of the Titanic dead alive for us today and their spirit and heritage and history and memories live on.”

Tuesday 15 April 2014

http://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/titanic-disaster-dead-remembered-627946.html

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Rare picture shows priest praying over Titanic victims before they are buried at sea

They were gathered nine days after the 'unsinkable' liner had gone down in the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of 1,512 lives.

And this haunting black and white photograph taken on board one of the body recovery ships following the Titanic disaster shows a mass funeral for dozens of the dead being buried at sea.

The image - which has been discovered a century on from the disaster in 1912 - shows body bags stacked on the windswept deck while two crewman tip up a stretcher to drop a victim over the side.

The ship's priest, the Reverend Hind, is seen conducting the service in front of the solemn crew, who were gathered days after the Titanic had sunk on its journey from Southampton to New York City.

Although the records show that 166 out of 306 bodies retrieved by the Mackay Bennett ship were buried at sea, no images of the macabre event have been seen by the general public until now.

Most of the victims dropped into the Atlantic were believed to have been chosen because they had no means of identification or were third-class passengers and therefore could not afford a funeral.

In the photo - which has a pre-sale estimate of £5,000 - one of the bodies is clearly labelled number 177, which was William Mayo, a 28-year-old London man who was a leading fireman on the ship.

The image has been owned by the family of one of the crew of the Mackay Bennett until now - as they have made it available for auction at Henry Aldridge and Sons Auctioneers in Devizes, Wiltshire.

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said: ‘Despite the number of bodies buried at sea, visual records of the occasion, such as this photograph, are almost non-existent, even in period publications.

‘This picture blows away the myth that the burials were an orderly and dignified process. You can clearly see the bodies in brown sacks piled up on the deck, with some piled two or three high.

‘The Reverend Hind is seen holding a prayer book looking at two crewman who appear to be tipping up some kind of platform, presumably committing a body into the sea.

‘The Mackay Bennett spent five days retrieving bodies from the wreck site and had to request for a second vessel to join it because there were so many. This photo shows that the deck was pretty much full up with the victims.’

In the aftermath of the Titanic disaster on April 15, 1912, the ship Carpathia picked up more than 700 survivors from lifeboats.

The Mackay Bennet was a Canadian cable laying ship and the owners of the Titanic, White Star Line, contracted it at a rate of £300 a day to recover the bodies.

It left Halifax, Nova Scotia, on April 17 and arrived at the wreck site on April 21.

The crew conducted burials at sea on the evenings of April 21, 22 and 23 and then of the afternoon of April 24, when it is thought the picture was taken.

In an account of the burials, Reverend Hind later wrote: ‘Anyone attending a burial at sea will most surely lose the common impression of the awfulness of a grave in the mighty deep.

Sunday 29 September 2013

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2437189/Rare-picture-Titanic-victims-shows-prayers-said-bodies-buried-sea.html

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Officials: Human remains at Titanic shipwreck site

NEW YORK (AP) -- A federal official says there may be human remains embedded in the mud of the North Atlantic where the New York-bound Titanic came to rest when it sank 100 years ago.

The director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration says forensic evidence indicates signs of human remains at the shipwreck site.

James Delgado said Saturday that one 2004 photograph shows a coat and boots in the mud. He says the way they are "laid out" makes a "compelling case" that it is where "someone has come to rest."

He released the full image this week to coincide with the disaster's centenary. It was previously seen in a cropped version.

They were taken during a NOAA expedition.

The luxury liner went down April 14, 1912, after striking an iceberg.

Published : Sunday, 15 Apr 2012

http://www.wtnh.com/dpps/news/international/officials-human-remains-at-titanic-shipwreck-site_4139402

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Identifying the Titanic’s Victims

For the 328 people whose bodies were recovered at the site of the Titanic disaster, unique fatality reports were created. They speak volumes about those whose bodies were retrieved. From third-class passengers to millionaires, these reports document their lives through what they had on their person that fateful night.

Dr. John Henry Barnstead, a Halifax physician, developed the system for identifying Titanic’s dead. He used a numbering system based on the order in which they were retrieved from the ocean. Mortuary bags were used to hold clothing and personal effects found on the body. This system was used again after the 1917 Halifax Explosion and countless times in other disasters with great loss of human life.

Using Barnstead’s system as its base, these reports document physical characteristics of bodies (typically sex, age, colouring, any identifying marks) and track potentially identifying papers and items found on their person. The reports were used to ensure that family members could claim their loved one’s body and personal effects. Each Fatality Report includes the Medical Examiner’s record listing physical characteristics and belongings, followed in the file by any other documents generated during disposition of the body and its effects. Some include extensive correspondence between White Star and the province of Nova Scotia.


Body No. 124 John Jacob Astor

The record of John Jacob Astor, who was in first class, begins with a description of his person and his belongings:

NO. 124 – MALE – ESTIMATED AGE 50 – LIGHT HAIR & MOUSTACHE

CLOTHING – Blue serge suit; blue handkerchief with “A.V.”; belt with gold buckle; brown boots with red rubber soles; brown flannel shirt; ”J.J.A.” on back of collar.

EFFECTS – Gold watch; cuff links, gold with diamond; diamond ring with three stones; £225 in English notes; $2440 in notes; £5 in gold; 7s. in silver; 5 ten franc pieces; gold pencil; pocketbook.

FIRST CLASS NAME-J.J.ASTOR

Managing the bodies and communicating with families, was the responsibility of the Provincial Secretary’s Office in Halifax. The correspondence in each file was either addressed to or signed by Frederick F. Mathers, the Deputy Provincial Secretary, or sometimes by George Murray, who was both the Provincial Secretary and Premier of Nova Scotia at the time.

Only 209 bodies were brought in to Halifax. The other 119 files in the Fatality Reports are for individuals buried at sea, and are identified as such.

10 April 2012

http://blog.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/blog/posts/identifying-the-titanics-victims/

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Titanic archive - identification and disposition of victims

http://www.gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/titanic/list.asp?Search=

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Tragic story of the Titanic one of many to touch Atlantic Canadians

HALIFAX - His was the fourth body pulled from the icy North Atlantic days after the Titanic sank in 1912.

Sidney Leslie Goodwin was only 19 months old when he died. The little English boy is buried in the north end of Halifax.

Though he wasn't the youngest Titanic passenger to perish, his story serves as a poignant reminder that in the weeks after the sinking, crews from four ships — most of them sailors from Halifax — volunteered to perform the grim task of recovering bodies left bobbing on the cold ocean.

History shows that the residents of Atlantic Canada have so often risen to the occasion at times of tragedy that their willingness to help others has become a threadbare cliche.
But like all cliches, this one contains a hard kernel of truth.

For more than a century before the Titanic disaster, the region suffered through countless shipwrecks, major fires, coal mining tragedies and all manner of natural disasters.
In early October 1853, for example, a fierce storm off the north coast of P.E.I. was blamed for sinking about 100 fishing schooners, claiming up to 400 lives. To this day, the Yankee Gale is considered the worst disaster in the Island's history.

On April 1, 1873 — almost 40 years before the Titanic foundered on its maiden voyage — another state-of-the-art White Star Line passenger ship, the SS Atlantic, went aground and sank just west of Halifax, taking more than 500 souls with her. It was one of the worst civilian maritime disasters of the 19th century. Close to 300 of the victims are buried in mass graves near Lower Prospect. N.S.

By the time the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, residents of the Maritimes and Newfoundland were well acquainted with large-scale disasters, which helps explain why the people of Halifax worked tirelessly to recover the dead and comfort surviving relatives.

"The citizens of Halifax were so moved by it, and they came out in large numbers," says Paul Butler of St. John's, N.L., author of "Titanic's Ashes," a recently published fictional account of the aftermath of the ship's demise. "Being at the mercy of the ocean ... is central to people who have a maritime connection."

Published accounts from the time say the recovery of Titanic victims was physically and emotionally draining, particularly for those who found Goodwin, a fair-haired child whose entire family perished in the sinking.

"He came floating toward us with a little upturned face," John Snow Jr., an embalmer aboard the Mackay-Bennett, told the Halifax Herald after the telegraph-cable ship returned to port, having recovered 306 bodies — 116 of which were buried at sea because they were badly disfigured.
A total of 150 Titanic victims are buried in three Halifax graveyards, their bodies prepared by 40 embalmers from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

It's hard to conceive that anything good could come from taking part in such gruesome tasks, but Bob Conrad thinks otherwise.

In September 1998, Conrad was among a group of Nova Scotia fishermen who joined the search for survivors after a Swissair passenger jet caught fire and crashed into St. Margarets Bay, west of Halifax.

None of the 229 people aboard survived, but Conrad didn't know that as he used a powerful light on his boat to scan a horrific debris field reeking of jet fuel and littered with ghastly array of shredded luggage, clothing and body parts.

At one point, he thought he spotted a child's doll. But as he drew closer, he realized the small figure was that of a toddler's naked body. Conrad recalls how he gently lifted the boy from the water and wrapped him in a blanket.

The fisherman would later learn the boy's name was Robert Martin Maillet. He was only 14 months old when he died along with his parents, Karen Domingue Maillet and Denis Maillet, both 37, of Baton Rouge, La. He was the youngest person on the plane.

Today, Conrad speaks in calm, even tones when describing what happened that moonless night.
"There's a tendency to think that it would be awful — and it is," says Conrad, now 65.
"But, from my experience, when the need to help another is critical, the element of danger and personal threat seems to be gone; it's not there. What would be horrid for your eyes to see, somehow is muted or blunted so that you can perform the task at hand. That was most amazing to me."

Conrad says he didn't think twice about heading out on the water that night. He says he's convinced that his deep desire to help those in need is shared by most people who live in small communities along Atlantic Canada's rugged coastline.

"Why we respond in such a giving, caring kind of way seems to be very deeply connected to the sense of community that we have achieved, unconsciously or otherwise, over the course of our lives" he says.

"Generally, we like where we live. We develop a very deep sense of place in that experience. ... Every society values this sense of community if they can discover it. Sometimes, big cities lose it. Individuals become invisible."

Butler says the reality of living on the East Coast has long meant struggling to survive and relying on others to get by.

"There's almost like an egalitarian ethos in this province (Newfoundland and Labrador) and probably in Nova Scotia. It's based upon this idea that you'll survive if you share and you work out how to survive as a community. The ethos is still there in the background, in terms of sharing and community values."

Blair Beed, a Halifax author and well-known Titanic sites tour guide, says Atlantic Canadians are not unique in their ability to reach out to others.
"When we had the Halifax Explosion in 1917, the people of Boston came rallying to us because of that friendship across the border," says Beed, author of "Titanic Victims in Halifax Graveyards."

"But we certainly have a long history of helping others," he says, noting that Halifax — founded in 1749 as a military base — has always been imbued by a sense of duty and loyalty.

As well, the geography of the Atlantic region has played an obvious role in shaping the Atlantic character, he says. Jutting into the North Atlantic, the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland are routinely in harm's way when the weather turns foul.

"In the early days, people were crashing into us just because they didn't have the technology to say we were there," says Beed, whose grandfather was an undertaker's assistant who helped process bodies recovered after Titanic's sinking.

"I grew up with the idea that my grandfather was one of those people who said, 'The job has to be done.' "

For fisherman Bob Conrad, who still lives in Fox Point, N.S., the motivation to help others comes from a profound place.

"For me, there is this reality for every human being: each of us wants our life to count for something. ... It's just that when you get in a disaster scenario, the opportunity to achieve that is thrust upon you," he says.

"There's something so meaningful in not living for yourself but living for others and in community.

Monday, 2 April 2012

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/titanic-swissair-atlantic-canada-answers-call-disaster-strikes-083007307.html

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