He Gets Great Aunt's Titanic Boarding Card By Coincidence

I've written about coincidences involving the ill fated Titanic previously on my 67 Not Out blog but here's something else that ties in with that story.

Last year there was a special Titanic exhibition held at the Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall. John and Elizabeth Curnow from Plymouth decided to take a look.

Visitors to the exhibition were all given replica Titanic boarding cards with the name of a passenger on them. The idea was that they could then check to see whether the passenger had survived the iceberg.

Obviously lots of these boarding passes were handed out, completely at random. When John and Elizabeth got round to looking at the one they had been given they were amazed to see that the name on the card was that of John's great aunt.

John's great Aunt, Addie Wells of Penzance, was on board the Titanic along with her children John and Ralph. She was on her way to be reunited with her husband, Arthur, who had emigrated to Akron, Ohio.

The family were originally booked to travel on the Oceanic but were transferred to the Titanic because of coal strikes which were taking place at the time.

Addie and her children, were a few of the lucky ones. They survived by scrambling aboard a lifeboat and were then transferred to the Carpathia and taken to safety.

John said of the boarding pass, "Surely there's more chance of winning the lottery. It had to be fate... never in a million years could we have expected to receive our great aunt's boarding pass."

Further Reading:
Titanic Coincidences