Irish Aboard Titanic (43 page)

The lure of the sea

Clark was born at Greenore, County Louth, about 43 years ago. What he did as a lad, I do not know, but the love of roaming, coupled with a passionate longing for the sea, asserted itself early in life and before he was twenty he left his native land and came to Liverpool to seek his fortune.

As may be imagined, he found his way down to the docks. The big ships called to him and the restless tides of the Mersey sang an eternal song of invitation, luring him out to stormy seas and strange lands. But he loved the sea not only for its own sake, it was the adventure, the excitement, and the change of a seafaring life which called to him with an insistent attraction that would not be denied, and before long he found himself on a British warship.

But life in the navy nowadays lacks much of the charm of olden time, and for the bluejacket of today there are no wild adventures on the Spanish Main, no exciting chases after French privateers in the Bay of Biscay, no gold to be wrested from the Indies, and no prize money. All that sort of thing belonged to the days of the wooden walls now gone for ever, and now the navy man gets plenty of discipline, not a little monotony and no fighting.

It was hardly to be wondered at that Clark's restless temperament soon tired of the necessary restrictions of a modern warship and before long he made up his mind to quit. He deserted and got clear away, but the lure of the sea still held him and he shipped as a fireman on board a merchant steamer.

A knock-about time in many oceans followed, and eventually Clark found himself on a ship in Durban port when South Africa was seething with the unrest which culminated in the war.

The thirst for adventure and excitement was too much for him. There was going to be fighting, and men were needed. He left his ship, gave himself up to the naval authorities as a deserter, and in the height of the war fever was let off lightly when it was understood he was anxious to volunteer for the front.

Fighting the Boers

He went to the military riding school in Pietermaritzburg and learned to ride like a cowboy. Then he joined Brabant's Horse and went right through the war in the army of Lord Methuen.

He had many exciting adventures, but shot and shell and bayonet, which laid so many of his comrades low, left him for a long time untouched.

At last his luck changed a little. During a fierce scrap at Blackfontein, Clark was wounded; but here again he got off lightly. A bullet struck a bit of woodwork and one of the splintered fragments struck his arm and opened a nasty cut along the wrist. It was a little affair; Clark's time had not come.

The hardships of the campaign, however, did not altogether pass him by. Towards the end of the war he was stricken down with disease, and for eighteen months he lay in hospital hovering between life and death. But his splendid constitution stood him in good stead, and he was discharged from the hospital fit and well.

Again he took to seafaring, and eventually he shipped aboard the huge
Titanic
and helped to keep her fires going on that first and last voyage, the awful end of which remains one of the most terrible incidents in our history.

Clark went down in the ship when the mighty iceberg ripped her side open and hurled her to her doom.

How he escaped he does not know. He was caught in the swirl of waters as the vessel plunged down – dragged down into the ocean depths with the crippled leviathan as she sank to her last resting place. Even then his abnormal luck did not desert him. He never thought to come up again, but the force of the boiler explosion lifted him and rushed him up to the surface. He struck out vigorously; was pulled aboard one of the boats, and came home to tell the tale.

This awful experience did not cure him of his craving for the sea and he continued to serve in the stoke-hold of various liners, among which was the
Empress of Britain
, the sister ship to the one of which he has again had a miraculous escape from death.

Titanic
and
Empress
Compared

It was his first voyage on the
Empress of Ireland
. When the crash came and the vessel's stokehold filled with water, his thoughts instantly went back to his awful experience of the
Titanic
.

The scenes on the
Titanic
were the worst, he said, because there was more time to realise the full horror of the situation. On the
Empress
, death came more swiftly.

Clark was on duty in the stokehold of the
Empress
when the collision came. The water came pouring in, driving the firemen higher and higher up the vessel, like rats trying to escape rising water in a well. His lifeboat station was No. 5, and somehow or other he got there, but he cannot remember how she was launched. His mind is a blank concerning some of those awful moments spent on the canting decks of the doomed liner.

They had to crawl on hands and knees on the sloping hull in order to get the boat clear, and then their best chance of escape was to plunge into the water in the hope of being able to scramble aboard. Clark was drawn under several times before he got into the boat, and afterwards, he said, they were able to pull about sixty men into her.

And so this man who has faced death time after time was again snatched from the grave. He came home in the
Corsican
and is now once more in Liverpool.

In spite of all he has passed through he is still well, although he complains that sometimes he cannot sleep for thinking of the terrible experiences he has just come through. He is grateful for his good fortune and realises how close he has come to death.

Had all the luck

‘If there is any luck on the sea, surely I have had it all,' he says.

But he still intends to follow a seafaring life, and until he gets another boat he is spending his time ashore with old friends and comrades, in true sailor fashion.

Clark is a Roman Catholic and has a great regard for religious observances. Often after a heavy voyage he returns home late at night tired out; but he is up again first thing in the morning to attend Mass.

He is the luckiest sailor afloat.

He has come face to face with death on land and sea – but death has passed him by.

The 1911 census shows Clark living with a wife nine years his senior, the former Mary Jane Humpreys. A Somerset woman, she had six children, all born in Southampton, but all using her surname. His life subsequent to
Titanic
is unknown.

John Coffey (23) Deserted

Fireman.

From: Cottrell's Row, Queenstown, County Cork.

12 Sherbourne Terrace, Southampton.

John Coffey was the last man off the
Titanic
before the ice hit the hull. Days after the tragedy, newspapers from the
Enniscorthy Echo
to the
Belfast Newsletter
reported: ‘It is said that one fireman, who felt that something was sure to happen, deserted at Queenstown.' The first such report was on 17 April 1912. Two days later,
The Cork Examiner
ran the following:

Lucky stoker – quits ship at Queenstown
.

A young man named Coffey had a lucky escape from being amongst those lost on the
Titanic
. Coffey joined the
Titanic
at Southampton and on the passage to Queenstown, decided to get out of her as he did not relish his job.

Accordingly, at Queenstown, he stealthily got on board the tender which took the passengers out, and secreted himself on board and got clear at Queenstown successfully, and remained here until Sunday morning last when he joined the
Mauretania.

An account of the escape was given in May 1912 to the Southampton
Evening Echo
by his fellow fireman on board the
Titanic
, Jack Podesta.

All the White Star boats and Cunard liners outward bound called here to pick up mails and passengers by tender and it was the custom for we firemen and trimmers to go up on deck and carry the mail from the tender to the mail room.

A fireman whom I knew very well, John Coffee [
sic
] – I was in the SS
Oceanic
and
Adriatic
with him – said to me, ‘Ack, I'm going down to this tender to see my mother.'

He asked me if anyone was looking and I said ‘No' and bid him good luck. A few seconds later he was gone!

The story has always been that Coffey hid himself under a pile of mailbags taken off the ship for Ireland.

He was equally adept at achieving what he wanted three days later – that fateful Sunday 14 April – when he persuaded the
Mauretania
to take him on board as a crewman despite not having an official stamp to his Book of Continuous Discharge. From the available evidence it seems clear that Coffey used the
Titanic
as a taxi – to obtain a free ride to his home port having been left penniless in Southampton by the crippling coal strike.

Coffey stood as the most famous deserter in maritime history – a footnote without a face, until the efforts of his grandson, Brian Payne, once again brought his likeness to light in 2001. Coffey was a careless, carefree man and a serial deserter. He had quit the similar-sounding RMS
Teutonic
at Queenstown almost exactly a year earlier (on 20 April 1911), his Royal Naval Reserve records show. It may not be a coincidence, for he was born in Queenstown on 3 January 1889. Coffey's father, David, was himself a fireman, and the family was living at Cottrell's Row in the town. When John was born there, his mother, Elizabeth, neglected to tell the authorities until St Patrick's Day, a delay that played havoc with the birth registration.

It may have been inevitable that he followed his father into the calling of marine fireman, joining the Royal Naval Reserve in 1909. Another rite of passage took place – he had his initials tattooed onto his right forearm, common among sailors in case they drown.
Titanic
Quartermaster Robert Hichens, for instance, had his entire surname etched into his flesh. Coffey later added a star in the same place, and the name of a girlfriend, Kate.

Kate was water under the keel by the time Coffey met one Louisa Trevor in Southampton. She was only 17, Coffey had just turned 20, but he was smitten. He added a year to his age so that he would not have to seek his parental permission for the match, and took his teenage bride to the altar on 1 March 1909.

By 1910 Coffey was a fireman on the mighty
Lusitania
, the famed ocean greyhound. Later that year he blotted his copybook by failing to join her sister ship the
Mauretania
, having signed ship's articles. That abortive voyage was his last association with the
Mauretania
until he used her as a meal ticket in 1912.

The mother he was supposedly going to visit according to Podesta's account, was no longer in the town by the 1911 census. Another woman was – widow Margaret Coffey, who also had a son called John. By further coincidence this John was also a marine fireman, evidenced by the certificate of his 1911 marriage in Portsmouth, leading to a misidentification in the first edition of this book. This family lived in Thomas Street, at the top of the town, where folklore said the deserter stayed. In fact, the John Coffey of the
Titanic
, by RNR records, in June 1912 gave an address next door to Margaret in Thomas Street, Queenstown. Perhaps she was his aunt.

Although
The Cork Examiner
's article reported that he deserted because ‘he did not relish his job' other newspaper reports said that Coffey deserted because he ‘felt sure something was going to happen'. Family fragments now say Coffey, on arrival by the
Mauretania
, told New Yorkers that he had a dream of the
Titanic
sinking, so he left the ship: ‘The Americans loved the story and wined and dined him, taking it all in.'

Coffey earned a caution for his desertion, family lore suggesting he spent a few days in jail at Liverpool on the
Mauretania'
s return. In any case, his survival allowed him to father two more children, in addition to a daughter, Louisa. Son John, born in 1915, was later father to Brian Payne, who initiated a mission to uncover his grandfather's past, one made more difficult by Coffey's divorce and subsequent disappearance from the family horizon, c. 1920. The records Brian discovered showed that Coffey continued to sail with White Star and Cunard, but deserted from the RNR in November 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War.

After his divorce, Coffey stayed single, working as a merchant seaman for the rest of his life, finally stepping off the
Urmston Grange
in Newcastle on the day of his 65th birthday in 1954. He died three years later (on 12 June 1957, after a stroke), and was buried in a pauper's grave in Hull's Eastern Cemetery, where he lies with three other adults and four babies.

Brian says: ‘Granddad's grave was much better kept than I had expected. Fate is a strange thing. I will never know what God intended, but I feel that an empty page in my life was written up and completed [by visiting it]. I feel a better person for it.'

John Coffey, the serial deserter, is once more back with his family.

John Coleman (58) Lost

Mess steward.

From: Cork.

7 Mortimer Road, Woolston, Southampton.

John Coleman was born in Queenstown, County Cork, and claimed to be 55 when signing on to
Titanic
, having admitted to being 57 in the 1911 census.

Married for thirty-two years to Roseanne, from Dundalk, they had only one child, who had died in infancy. In his Southampton census entry Coleman proudly noted that he was a ship's steward employed by the White Star Line.

Joseph Colgan (33) Saved

Assistant cook/scullion.

From: Dublin.

27 West Street, Southampton.