The Titanic Files (Vol.1)

1

Titanic and the Animal World

In addition to transporting passengers and crewmen, RMS Titanic was carrying a number of animals of different species (authorised as well as unauthorised). Let's take a look at these various creatures.

Animals Transported on Board the Titanic

Canaries

In 2011 a newly published book by Frankie McElroy made the undocumented claim that Hugh McElroy, the Titanic's purser, was personally caring for a caged canary that was being transported from Southampton to Cherbourg:

Hugh had taken to canary minding, the canary sailed on the Titanic and survived. It was owned by a Mr Meanwell, who lived in [Cerentan], France, and wanted to get his prize-winning precious canary to Cherbourg from England. He asked the Chief Purser to carry it on RMS Titanic, and to have the bird in his office, the canary disembarked when the Titanic arrived in Cherbourg .1

A 31 March 2012 posting by 'Joseph' on the Encyclopedia Titanica bulletin board mentioned the price that 'Mr Meanwell' supposedly paid for the transport of his canary. However, Joseph failed to document his claim about the transport price and seems to have based his overall statement on the McElroy book's undocumented claim that Titanic's purser was caring for a canary in his office:

The canary in a cage never went down with the Titanic, it was carried by Chief Purser Hugh McElroy from Southampton to Cherbourg and recovered after the ship docked in France on April 10th, by the owner who had paid 15 shillings for the fare.2

Despite these undocumented claims, there's little doubt that a canary was still on board the Titanic when the vessel left Cherbourg and headed towards Queenstown. In fact, in recent years an actual receipt for the bird was discovered by a salvage expedition at the wreck site.

Last year, Premier exhibited a selection of artifacts in Las Vegas, among them a pair of blue and white striped men's pajamas, a travelling receipt for 'one canary in a cage' and a pair of never-worn white gloves.3

Did a 'Mr Meanwell' really pay 15 shillings for Purser McElroy to keep a caged canary in his office and transport it from Southampton to Cherbourg on the Titanic? The answer to this question is 'probably not', since no survivor ever reported seeing such a canary housed there. In fact, the supposed identification of 'Mr Meanwell' seems to be a mistake as well.

Marian Meanwell

Mrs Marian Meanwell was a 63-year-old milliner who was born in England and lived there until 1912, at which time she booked a third-class passage on the Titanic in order to travel from Southampton to New York to be with her daughter. The contract ticket list also shows that Mrs Meanwell paid an extra fee for the transportation of a canary.4

Since Mrs Meanwell was travelling all the way from Southampton to New York, why did her name reportedly appear on the Titanic's roster of cross-Channel passengers who were scheduled to disembark at Cherbourg? The answer is very simple - it didn't.

In truth, the names of twelve Titanic cross-Channel passengers are listed at the top of that particular page of the contract ticket list, but at that point a blank space separates those twelve names from the beginning of a second list of names - a separate list of five passengers (Mr Noel, Mrs Meanwell, Mr West, Mr Dulles and Mrs Harper, of whom only Noel was a cross-Channel passenger), who were all transporting listed items of cargo. In addition to Mr Noel's '2 cycles', and Edwy West's '8 cases' and '1 crated cycle', a notation shows that Mrs Meanwell paid 5 shillings (not 15 shillings) for the transport of '1 canary', and that William Dulles and Myra Harper each paid £1 19s 4d for the transportation of one dog apiece. (Obviously the freight charge for a tiny caged canary was much less than the charge for carrying larger, heavier, uncaged canines; interestingly, Mrs Meanwell's 5-shilling canary expense was the same amount of money that Mr West paid for the transport of his '8 cases' all the way to New York, so the superficial impression that Mrs Meanwell's payment was insufficient to ship her canary to New York is clearly mistaken.)

Appearing immediately after the second list of five cargo-carrying passengers is a third roster listing three final passengers - Lucian Smith, Eloise Smith and John Baumann - all of whom were travelling to New York and who were apparently the last three purchasers of first-class tickets for the Titanic's maiden voyage. (No serious researcher would ever claim that Baumann and the two Smiths were cross-Channel passengers even though their names appeared on the same sheet of paper as the cross-Channel passengers and the cargo-carrying passengers.)

The reason why the list of five cargo-carrying passengers and the list of three last-minute passengers to New York were recorded on the same page as the cross-Channel passengers is easily explained: it was to avoid wasting the rest of the largely blank ledger page just for the sake of recording those final eight passenger names on a brand-new page. (Instead, the White Star clerk devoted the next page of the contract ticket list solely to 'Rail Fares'.)5

It seems clear that the list of five cargo-carrying passengers and the subsequent list of three last-minute ticket-buyers were both completely unconnected with the preceding list of cross-Channel passengers. It seems equally clear that the coincidental inclusion of the Meanwell canary and the Dulles and Harper dogs directly beneath the list of cross-Channel passengers has led several researchers to the mistaken conclusion that Mrs Meanwell's canary disembarked at Cherbourg while for some unexplained reason the Dulles and Harper dogs mysteriously remained on board the Titanic and continued onward toward New York. In truth, Mrs Meanwell and her canary were both present on board the ill-fated vessel when she struck an iceberg and went down in the mid-Atlantic.

Elizabeth Nye

In 2009 a curious bit of information appeared in a biography of Titanic survivor Elizabeth Nye, who was a member of the Salvation Army. The book quoted an article from a 1912 issue of the Army's publication The War Cry:

The sister has gone through the ordeal in the most wonderful way, and was good enough to give the War Cry a fairly connected story of the disaster as she witnessed it. First of all, though, she excused herself as she had left something on board [the Carpathia] and wanted to fetch it.

What do you think it was she fetched from the Carpathia? Make a guess!

A little yellow canary bird in a brass cage! That was the woman of it! The poor little chap was a little bedraggled; he had been through all the horrors of shipwreck, but not forgotten how to chirp. Mrs Nye had lost money, clothes - everything, but here was a little bit of life she thought should not be forfeited, and she had saved him.6

There would seem to be only three possible explanations for this story about a canary that supposedly survived the Titanic disaster:

1. Mrs Nye carried her own caged canary into lifeboat #11 even though no survivors ever mentioned seeing a caged bird in that or any other lifeboat.

2. Second-class passenger Nye somehow came into possession of third-class passenger Marian Meanwell's canary on board the Titanic and carried it with her into lifeboat #11.

3. A well-meaning Carpathia passenger might have given a caged canary to Mrs Nye after the rescue, and the War Cry reporter mistakenly assumed the bird had been saved from the Titanic.

In a letter she wrote on board the Carpathia on 16 April 1912, Mrs Nye said, 'I lost everything I had on board; the only thing I saved was my watch that Dad gave me eleven years ago,'7 so our first suggestion that she saved the canary in lifeboat #11 is clearly untrue. Likewise, her letter's failure to mention her taking charge of Mrs Meanwell's canary suggests that our second proposed explanation is untrue as well. The present writer is inclined to favour the third explanation, but there's no guarantee that this assumption is correct. In short, we may never know if a canary was one of the few non-human beings fortunate enough to survive the sinking of the Titanic.

Cats

Joseph Mulholland

Mr Mulholland served as a stoker on the Titanic while she was being transferred from Belfast to Southampton on 2-3April 1912. In 1962 he spoke with a reporter, who transcribed his recollections:

Big Joe is still fond of cats and perhaps he has reason. He recalls that on his way down to the Titanic before she set sail from Belfast with bands playing and crowds cheering, he took pity on a stray cat which was about to have kittens. He brought the cat aboard and put her in a wooden box down in the stokehold.

At Southampton, when he was ruminating whether to take on the job of storekeeper on the trip or sign off, another seaman called him over and said, 'Look Big Joe. There is your cat taking its kittens down the gangplank.'

Joe said, 'That settled it. I went and got my bag and that's the...