Sepia Saturday # 146

You wonder why all these people on the dock were waiting for the arrival of the SS Imperator. No doubt loved ones were arriving from afar: children were waiting for parents or grandparents; lovers were waiting for their beloved. Maybe some of these people were avid readers filled with wild anticipation about the latest episode of a serialized British novel, a very popular literary form in the mid-19th century and still employed in the early 1900's. Crowds, they say, would gather on docks waiting for word of "what happened next?". Charles Dickens was one of the first writers to employ this method of story-telling for the Pickwick Papers and later David Copperfield.

This year is the 200th anniversary of Dickens birthday

And look at all the boater hats! I had to visit Wikipedia (isn't that what Sepia Saturday does to us?) to find out more about them. Any fashionable person in this era might wear one, but I was amused to learn that they were "supposedly worn by FBI agents as a sort of unofficial uniform in the pre-war years". I doubt this is a crowd of FBI agents, but there might be one or two agents mixed in, blending with the crowd, waiting for some intriguing passenger of interest. I'm sure that an interesting story resides under every hat we can see here.

Now we most commonly see these worn by barbershop quartets

 



My last thought about this "listing" ship, which looks quite unsafe to me, has to do with my own family of survivors. I believe I possess a "ship wreck survival gene". Dabbling in genealogy I found out that my great grandfather James Armstrong left Ireland in 1834 on the "Newry" bound from Belfast to Quebec. The ship was blown into the rocks in a storm and sunk in Wales on the Bay of Carnaron, but James survived, went to England where he worked and saved enough money for another passage to Canada. Eventually he made it to March, Ontario where he farmed and lived to be 100, dying appropriately on St. Patricks day 1904, leaving as issue 11 children, the last one born when he was 65, the old devil. 

The aunt I was named for, my sweet Aunt Helen, survived not one but two ship wrecks in the twenties.  She was lucky enough to be on ships where the Birkenhead Drill was observed.     

HMS Birkenhead

The Birkenhead Drill is also known by the phrase "Women and children first". When the HMS Birkenhead sunk off the coast at Capetown in 1852, troops who were being transported on the ship were ordered by their commander Colonel Seton to stand fast while the women and children found places in the few life boats. 193 of 643 on board survived. Rudyard Kipling later immortalized the soldiers chivalry in the poem,  "Soldier an' Sailor Too":

To take your chance in the thick of a rush, with firing all about,
Is nothing so bad when you've cover to 'and, an' leave an' likin’ to shout;
But to stand an’ be still to the Birken’ead drill is a damn tough bullet to chew,
An’ they done it, the Jollies - 'Er Majesty’s Jollies - soldier an' sailor too!
Their work was done when it 'adn’t begun; they was younger nor me an' you;
Their choice it was plain between drownin' in 'eaps an' bein' mopped by the screw,
So they stood an' was still to the Birken'ead drill, soldier an' sailor too!

Read more about the German ship SS Imperator, ships and sailing stories at:

Sepia Saturday