Flesh and Blood Page 10

  Was this just an aberration? A pre-Christmas binge before they shipped him off to France? Unfortunately not. Owen Joseph did it again in early January – and this time the army issued a warrant for my grandfather’s arrest for desertion. On the back of the warrant is a charming handwritten list of the kit items he’s absconded with: 1 boots, 1 felt hat, 2 dungarees, 1 chin strap …

  What the hell was he up to? Owen Joseph was nowhere near the front, so he wasn’t deserting his post in battle. Was this behaviour unusual, or were his fellow soldiers up to the same tricks? Historian Roger Beckett observed that casual absenteeism accounted for over half of all military offences in the Aussie Army. A memo to depot commanders in December 1915 illustrated official concerns:

  It has come to notice that in several camps throughout the Commonwealth large numbers of men absent themselves without leave, some for short periods such as weekends and others for long periods. That this offence should have become so general indicates a great lack of discipline in the camps concerned.

  It seemed that those strapping volunteer Aussies didn’t get the memo about a narrow conformity to British military discipline. Some would simply stroll out of the gates for a few days’ sightseeing after square-bashing. So did Owen Joseph feel this offence to be a petty one – an optional excursion, rather than a desertion – or was it an indicator of something else in his character? A tendency to answer only to his own narrow disciplines when wider events impinged upon him?

  Whether petty or serious, the fact remained that my grandfather was a fugitive for the next year and a half. Wanted notices went out across the Commonwealth for his arrest, as a listing in the February 1916 edition of the New South Wales Police Gazette illustrates:

  McGann. O, Joseph. Private, 31 years of age, 5 feet 7 inches high, fresh complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, tattooed on both forearms; born England. Deserted 5 January 1916.

  I love the biographical detail of my grandfather’s diminutive size and tattooed arms – trademarks of a wiry, tough seaman – although I might have preferred the information to come through family anecdote, rather than through the British Empire’s equivalent of Crimewatch. So where was he in 1916? I expect he went back to sea. Service in the vast mercantile marine might have provided temporary anonymity to a black-ganger who kept his head down. But surely not forever. How was he going to evade the long arm of military justice?

  The answer, when I finally discovered it, made me laugh out loud. On 3 August 1917, Owen Joseph – now calling himself simply Joseph McGann – strolled into another army recruiting office in Western Australia and enlisted as a new recruit in the Australian Imperial Force infantry for a second time. A second attestation paper reveals that a ‘fitter’s labourer’ called ‘Joseph McGann’ was recruited in Fremantle. Amusingly, when asked to list previous service, he states only that he’d been a member of the Royal Naval Reserve – wisely omitting to mention his more recent military adventures. The reborn recruit then undergoes a second bout of basic training at Blackboy Hill camp in the Perth hills, and is assigned to the 51st Battalion, leaving Fremantle on the troop ship Canterra, and arriving in Southampton on 30 January 1918.

  Was my grandfather finally ready to embrace the discipline that an exposure to the Great War required of him?

  Not quite. Upon arrival at a training camp in Wiltshire, the new Joe quickly returned to his old tricks. His service record reveals several fresh charges of absent without leave, complete with docked pay. A tendency for absenting himself in the face of unsuitable exposure clearly lay deeper in my granddad’s character than any change of name could penetrate.

  There was, thankfully, one event he did turn up for. In July 1918, Joe married my grandmother, Elizabeth Walls, a young laundress from Liverpool. Perhaps with the Western Front looming, he thought it time to put his life on a more respectable footing. Yet would Private McGann simply repeat his previous disappearing act, and vanish before his battalion departed for France?

  To the eternal relief of this blushing descendant, Joseph McGann finally arrived at the Western Front in August 1918. The war was in its last violent stages; the German spring offensive had taken the battle out of the trenches, but had run aground. The Allied counterattack, known as the Hundred Days Offensive, was now underway. This would prove decisive – and the Australian 51st would play its full part. Joe would undergo a raw exposure to the statement and the question of experience.

  The 51st was stationed near to Amiens and distinguished itself in battle during September in successful Allied attacks on the Hindenburg Line. I have no record of my grandfather’s conduct in battle, except the knowledge that he was present. Yet I do know that he was plagued by persistent gastritis at this time, which led to numerous periods of disability and treatment in the military hospital.

  Gastritis is a nasty condition caused by inflammation or erosion of the stomach lining. It can induce severe pain, nausea, vomiting and indigestion. It could well be stress-induced, or simply the result of the appalling conditions in which he fought. There was certainly nothing on his record to indicate malingering. Perhaps it was his body’s answer to the things his mind had been exposed to – the heat and horror of battle burning like acid inside his stressed and overheated core.

  Whatever its pathology, Joseph would survive exposure to it. Early in November 1918 the Germans surrendered. In the aftermath, Joseph McGann was diagnosed with chronic gastritis and shipped back to England. Just after this he was demobbed, completing his second term of service with a little more respectability than the first. Amusingly, he was now entitled to receive the Victory Medal – not bad for an active military fugitive! What’s more, in January 1919 the warrant for his arrest was pardoned in a general amnesty, leaving our former deserter free to enjoy his new married life as a decorated veteran, and not a criminal. Joseph had survived his own potentially fatal exposure. Would it now make him grow as a result?

  Not exactly. Despite his new life, Joseph’s habit of wandering would endure. The final part of his military record concerns correspondence relating to the address to which Joe’s war medal should be sent. The medal was dispatched to his family address in Liverpool, but returned by his wife Lizzie – who informs the authorities that her husband has run off to Australia, and can now be contacted at a harbour café address in Melbourne, care of a certain ‘Mrs Ward’. Joseph had deserted again.

  Family legend had it that a priest was dispatched to Melbourne to appeal to Joe’s Catholic conscience and get him to return to his family. The appeal worked: Joe ended his life with Elizabeth and his three children in Liverpool. He was never known as Owen after the war, perhaps as a precaution against the exposure of his previous misdemeanours. Yet the wider exposure of the experience had not changed Joseph’s core character. If anything, it seemed to consolidate the tendency he had to wander off when life made too many demands of him. Joseph’s tendency to wander ultimately came to define him: as a seaman, a soldier, and a husband.

  *

  So what of Owen Joseph’s brother James? What would he be exposed to in those tumultuous early years of the twentieth century – and would the experience make him shrink, alter or grow?

  We last saw James McGann in 1912, leaving South Africa on the Kinfauns Castle, arriving in Southampton on 23 March. We take up his story from there.

  James got paid off from the Kinfauns Castle in Southampton, but didn’t go straight back to Liverpool. Instead, he found local lodgings near to the docks and looked for a new ship. There had been a major strike by coal workers, and the ocean-going ships were now low on the fuel they needed to travel. Work was therefore hard to find, but the great liners leaving Southampton for New York might still provide some quick employment for a capable fireman like himself.

  There was a rumour that a gleaming new White Star liner had managed to secure the coal it needed and was looking for 250 black-gangers to stoke its pristine boilers for the maiden voyage to America. James landed a job as one of its seventy-three trimmers. He signed the
crew agreement on 6 April 1912, and prepared to sail four days later.

  The gleaming new ship was called the RMS Titanic.

  TESTIMONY

  It’s the early eighties. I’m about eighteen. I’m sitting with my auntie Mary McGann, my dad’s sister, in her tenement flat in Liverpool. I’m quizzing her about her father Owen Joseph and his family. It’s the first week of my new preoccupation: a quest to find details of my McGann ancestors.

  Mary’s memory is a tease – capricious and enigmatic. Detailed one minute, vague the next. She’d remember something clearly on one occasion, only to forget it the next time I see her.

  ‘Did your dad have any brothers and sisters, Mary?’

  The question isn’t trivial. Owen Joseph died when she was a kid, so information on unmet relatives is sketchy. Mary ponders. I sip her strong, dark tea served with a compulsory overabundance of biscuits. She nods in sudden recollection.

  ‘He had a brother. James. Worked on the ships like Dad did.’ I note this down. She sips her tea and smiles.

  ‘Titanic McGann,’ she adds.

  I look up over my cup.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Titanic McGann, they called him. He survived the Titanic.’

  I nearly spit out my tea. I’d been a genealogist for about a week. This revelation was equivalent to taking a bucket and spade to a quick beach holiday in Somerset and digging up King Arthur’s grave.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She seemed to be. Next day I rushed to the city’s Record Office, unable to contain my excitement. This was pre-internet; newspapers from the time of the disaster were preserved on rattling reels of microfilm that had to be ordered and waited for. I checked survivor lists printed in the days following the sinking, scouring the names for James McGann. Nothing. There was a crewman called ‘J Mc Cann’ – but no McGann. Much later I’d find that this was a simple misprint. Disappointed, I returned to Mary.

  ‘Can you tell me anything more about Titanic McGann, Mary?’

  ‘Who?’ she asked.

  ‘James. Your uncle who survived the Titanic.’

  Mary looked mystified. ‘Don’t know who you mean …’

  She took a bite of her biscuit. I sighed quietly and put my pen down.

  Mary never mentioned ‘Titanic McGann’ again, and I never pursued it further. A trick of the mind, I reasoned. A memory reconstructed falsely, synapses misaligned. A myth too grandiose to be true.

  I was wrong. Mary’s memory was a tease – but rarely false. On that occasion it had fired out a single bright truth like a maritime flare in the darkness, guiding me to a significant event. Being too young to embrace the improbable, I’d sailed right past it.

  *

  It’s many years later. I’m newly married and living in a village in rural Essex. My wife Heidi arrives home from the bookshop and presents me with a gift – a reprinting of Colonel Archibald Gracie’s famous eyewitness account of his survival as a Titanic passenger. I thank her. Heidi stands her ground.

  ‘Turn to page ninety-seven,’ she says. I do. Near the bottom of the page, Gracie had written the following:

  ‘James McGann, a fireman, interviewed by the New York Tribune, on April 20th, was one of the thirty of us, mostly firemen, clinging to [the lifeboat] as she left the ship. As to the suffering endured that night he says: ‘All our legs were frostbitten and we were all in hospital for a day at least.’

  James. Not simply there, but speaking directly to me – his voice captured in time. The first voice of any McGann recorded in public.

  *

  The sinking of the Titanic has transcended the facts of its own tragedy to become an iconic myth depicted in multiple film dramas, and written about in many histories and memoirs. It’s something of a cultural fetish, with websites poring over every detail of its construction, engineering, voyage and personnel, as well as details of the fateful night. But long before Winslet and DiCaprio cavorted on its bow, the sinking of the Titanic had established itself as a key historical event – a moral tale of hubris, lost-world grandeur, class, courage, cowardice, and the equality of all humanity when exposed to mortal experience. There have been bigger maritime losses and many greater tragedies. Yet little has ever managed to match the sinking of that one liner for sheer narrative potency. It sits in the pages of our cultural history like a first-class passenger at one of its plush dining tables: suitably attired and demanding our full attention.

  The bare facts are these. RMS Titanic was the largest and most modern passenger ship of its day, considered by many to be ‘unsinkable’. She set sail on her maiden voyage to New York from Southampton on 10 April 1912 with over 2,200 passengers and crew, including many members of the British and American Establishment. At twenty minutes to midnight on 14 April, the ship struck an iceberg about 600 kilometres south of Newfoundland. The pressure of the iceberg caused the steel plates down her forward starboard side to buckle, breaking the rivet seals. Seawater flowed through the gaps, filling five of the sixteen watertight safety compartments in her hull and making her loss inevitable. Passengers were evacuated into an inefficient supply of lifeboats, many of which were launched below their maximum capacity. The Titanic sank two hours and forty minutes after the collision, with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. Seven hundred and five survivors endured a freezing night in the lifeboats before being rescued by RMS Carpathia and taken to New York. Subsequent public inquiries in Britain and the United States led to major improvements in maritime safety. Many, such as the monitoring of Atlantic sea ice by the International Ice Patrol, continue to this day.

  There have been many accounts of the gilded passengers who died that night; many discussions of the judgements and conduct of the captain and officers, the priority given to women and children, and of the treatment of steerage passengers. However, accounts from the men who worked in the boiler rooms are sparse. Once I’d heard James’s brief, frostbitten voice in Gracie’s book, I wanted to know more about his personal exposure to the tragedy: to piece together his private malady. I didn’t care if his survival had been ignominious, or if his involvement had been far from the actions of the leading players. Genealogy has never been about status or pedigree for me (thankfully!). It’s always been about my family’s life as drama – the character of ordinary people expressed through lived experience and their reactions to it. So I set out to scavenge whatever details I could.

  It’s 2012. I’m searching online newspaper records for the New York Tribune article that Gracie had quoted from, which had featured James. I’m having no luck. I decide to follow another hunch. I figure that the interview the New York Tribune captured may have been part of a larger press gathering, and syndicated to other news outlets around the world. So I start searching more widely …

  And there it is. The Yorkshire Post, 23 April 1912. So much more than I hoped for. Genealogical gold. King Arthur’s grave. Not simply scavenged details, but an account of that night’s events from the mouth of my great-uncle. I’m unable to breathe. When I finish reading it, I cry. For the first time in history, one of my ancestors is speaking publicly of their exposure to life, and for once the world is listening.

  *

  The maiden voyage began without much incident. The Titanic was a huge floating factory of propulsion. Twenty-nine boilers were divided into six separate boiler rooms that could be sealed off with a watertight door in an emergency. The black gang were split into three mighty shifts working around the clock in four-hour watches. Each watch had twenty-four trimmers, fifty-three firemen, and four leading firemen on duty. Each boiler room had four trimmers – some to fetch the coal, others to feed it to the firemen stoking the furnaces. When a shift was done, they’d shuffle back exhausted along the ‘fireman’s passage’ at the bottom of the vessel and up a spiral staircase to their cramped accommodation in the lower decks of the ship’s bow.

  The collision with the iceberg happened on the evening of Saturday the fourteenth, four days into the five-day journey. It’s impossible t
o know which shift James was on, so I don’t know exactly where he was when the fatal collision took place. He could have been in his bunk, or working one of the six boiler rooms when the iceberg hit. Regardless of location, the entire black gang would soon be in the thick of it.

  Fireman George Kemish was on duty in boiler room number two and recalled the moment it happened:

  I had just sent a trimmer up to call the 12 to 4 watch – it was around 11.25pm 14th April when there was a heavy thud and grinding tearing sound. The telegraph in each section signalled down ‘Stop’. We had a full head of steam and were doing about twenty three knots … well the trimmer came back from calling the 12 to 4 watch and he said, ‘Blimey we’ve struck an iceberg’.

  The iceberg made several separate breaches in the front starboard hull along a ninety-metre stretch. Water flooded into the front-most boiler room, number six, through a hole about two feet above where the firemen stood. Number five had also been breached, though it was a smaller hole. The watertight doors connecting all boiler rooms were sealed by a signal from the bridge. All engines were stopped.

  Stopping the ship abruptly from ‘full steam ahead’ created its own problems for the firemen. The boilers were liable to overheat, causing danger of explosion. The black gang were therefore tasked with damping the coal and making the boilers safe. Within fifteen minutes, boiler room six was flooded and abandoned. The men began the task of manually opening the boiler-room doors of safe sections to speed their work. Just then, the lights went out. Firemen were dispatched to fetch lamps, and when they gathered above they saw crowds of steerage passengers in lifebelts, heading towards the ship’s stern. But the black gang still had work to do.

  The firemen and trimmers who’d been off-duty were called from their quarters to help put out the boiler fires. Emergency power was started. Over the next hour, as the frightened passengers gathered above them, the black gang succeeded in making the boilers safe, and were attempting to pump out the incoming water. Suddenly, at five past one in the morning, the water pressure in boiler room six caused the watertight door to give way, flooding into room number five. The men scrambled out. In another ten minutes, the gang in boiler room number four were up to their knees in water.