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

Titanic Coincidence In The News

Titanic Coincidence:
You might well ask: How on earth can the Titanic be news? But there it is in UK newspapers. It's in respect of a book that has been published called 101 Things You Thought You Knew About the Titanic...But Didn't.

According to the writer, Tim Maltin, by coincidence, the Titanic came within two feet of crashing into another liner, as it set off on her maiden voyage from Southampton. Had the ships collided then the Titanic tragedy, with the loss of 1517 lives, would never had happened.

Maltin goes on to say how the Titanic's Captain was only used to boats half of the Titanic's size, and that's why he came close to hitting the SS City of New York.

Maltin explains, "The collision was avoided by about two feet, something which obviously is an indicator of the disaster to come. Anyone with a ship that size would have been accident prone - the world had never seen a ship that big before."

Some things seem destined to happen.

See also post Titanic Coincidences on 67 Not Out blog.

Titanic Coincidence Stories

Titanic in dock
This is one of those 'famous' happenings which I find fascinating. In this case it's about the Titanic coincidences.

But first lets put a slightly different slant on things. How and why things happen is always interesting. Are they destined to happen and if so why?

With the Titanic the problem, as we know, was an iceberg and we accept this without a second thought. But if we think about it properly wasn't it a bit of a coincidence that the iceberg - most likely thousands of years old - broke away from Greenland at that precise time and moved south as far as the New York latitude?

Wasn't it also strange that the Titanic's captain had sped up the ship to try and reach it's destination before time? If he hadn't have done this the Titanic wouldn't have hit the iceberg and killed all of those people.

It was almost like a plan coming together - the iceberg and Titanic had to collide. Some would say it was in the stars.

There are numerous tales of people foretelling the Titanic's demise. A Mrs. Marshall is supposedly to have screamed out as the ship sailed past the Isle of Wight, "It's going to sink, that ship is going to sink. Save them! Save them!" Her mother was on the Titanic.

There are dozens of these sort of stories but many cannot be proven. The case of Morgan Robertson is slightly different as in 1898 he published a novel telling of the 'unsinkable' SS Titan.

In his story the SS Titan steamship sailed out of Southampton on its inaugural voyage and went on to sink following a collision with, yes, an iceberg.

There were similarities between the Titan and the Titanic:

1) Titan and Titanic were on their first voyage.

2) Both ships were sunk after hitting an iceberg.

3) There is a similarity in the names of Titan and Titanic.

4) Titan was 70,000 tons and the Titanic 66,000 tons.

5) Titan 800 feet in length, Titanic 882 feet.

6) Both had three propellers.

7) Both the fictional Titan and the real Titanic were thought of as unsinkable by their owners and therefore had insufficient lifeboats. The Titan, according to the story, had 24 lifeboats for 2,500 passengers and the Titanic had just 20 lifeboats for 2,224 passengers.

Perhaps there was magic afoot with the Titanic sinking? According to the British Museum she was carrying an Egyptian Pharaoh mummy destined for an American museum.

Newspapers at the time made much of the mummy calling it cursed. They made claims that everyone who had photographed the mummy had all mysteriously died.

Some of all this we can perhaps take with a pinch of salt and yet some of the coincidences make you wonder.

As the Titanic left port a cockerel crowed - a sign of bad luck for sailors ...

In 1939 a ship called the Titanian was in the general area of where the Titanic went down. The helmsman had a dreadful premonition and decided to try and stop the ship. Later the Titanian hit an iceberg. It was damaged but could carry on thanks to the collision being at a slow speed.

Footnote: I wrote this post just before my evening meal. Feeling lazy my wife and I decided to have this in front of the television. I switched on the TV and it was the Antiques Roadshow Special and what were they talking about - yes, Titanic collectibles!

They had the original Titanic plans from when it was built, postcards sent by a musician from the ship before it went down (he died) and lots of info about medals issued to the crew of the ship that went to Titanic's rescue - the RMS Carpathia. Carpathia saved 705 lives but was sunk herself by a German submarine during World War 1 on July 17th 1918.

Titanic memorabilia is now valuable.

More Titanic Coincidences:
The Gun That Helped Sink The Titanic
The Titanic Boarding Pass Coincidence
The Costa Concordia Coincidences With The Titanic