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Titanic Hero Who Saved More Than 50 People Honoured
Experience Titanic's Last Port of Call in Cobh, Ireland.
Late at night on 14 April, 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg.
On 11 April, 1912, the Titanic departed Cobh, formerly known as Queenstown, in Co. Cork, and set sail for New York. Today The Titanic Experience at Cork harbor commemorates the Irish passengers who boarded the ship at Titanic's last port of call.
Irish Central, 20 APR 2020
Cobh, Co Cork, Ireland and the pier where the last 123 passengers boarded Titanic.Getty Images
In the dark, on the first night of September, the bells of St. Colman’s ring out over the peaked rooftops of Cobh. The notes, pure and deliberate, linger over the quiet waters of Cork Harbor below.
Liam and I are on the roof deck of the Commodore Hotel. He is my son, and he is seven. The deck is a short bit of hallway and two steps up from our room, which has such a perfect view of the harbor that its two tall windows might as well be paintings hanging on the wall, the work of an artist with an eye for cloud-bearing light.
A brief rain has left the picnic tables on the deck damp so I remain standing while Liam lopes back and forth, back and forth. As the chimes ring, I call to him and point to the cathedral, miles away, atop a steep hill.
While walking up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, St. Patrick’s startles, as though the cathedral has suddenly stepped forward from the gray gathering of office buildings that surround it. Not so St. Colman’s.
From the moment we got off the train from Dublin a day earlier, it drew our gaze. Wherever we go in Cobh, St. Colman’s is there. Imagine what it must have been like to watch it appear on the hillside, stone by stone over forty-seven years, a slowly manifesting angel.
Now St. Colman’s is gently illuminated, which makes the two clocks on the spire glow. Below the cathedral, a sparse starscape, the lights of the town. Beyond, only night.
St. Colman's Cathedral in Cobh.
Liam and I have come outside so Travis, my husband, his father, can get some work done by dawn, New York time. And Liam needs to stretch his legs. We live in four-room apartment in Brooklyn. He takes his space where he can get it. Liam, tall for his age, quickly shifting from puppy to colt. His eyes are the exact blue of my own, and my father’s and those of my grandfather, who was born in Tuam, Co. Galway in 1906.
My grandfather left Ireland at the age of nineteen. My grandmother, from Ballinasloe, emigrated a few years later. Both, like thousands of Irish before them, and thousands after, traveled to Cork to sail from Cobh Harbor.
Had either left only a few years earlier, their tickets would have said Queenstown. In 1849, Queen Victoria paid a visit, her first-ever trip to Ireland, and Cobh was renamed to commemorate the occasion.
Those with even a glancing knowledge of Irish history will recognize 1849 as a hunger year. Mass starvation and death, eviction and emigration.
It’s difficult to reconcile this with a royal visit. Indeed, after the Irish Free State was established in 1922, Queenstown was replaced with a Gaelicized version of its former (English) name, Cove. And so Cobh was the last my grandparents saw of their homeland, Edward, for decades, Una forever. They would meet and marry in Brooklyn.
Yet it is not our own ghosts that we have come here to find....
The Facts Told By Real Survivors | British Pathé
Watch The Full Titanic Expedition
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