Perhaps the most famous true love story from Titanic is that of Isidor and Rosalie Straus, who perished with the Titanic. Rosalie refused a lifeboat. Instead she turned to her husband and said, “We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go.”
Her husband was offered a seat on the lifeboat due to deference to his age, but he had refused to take a seat from any woman who might need it, and his wife refused to go without him.
Most accounts have them walking away, hand-in-hand, then sitting next to each other on deck chairs on an glassed-in deck as the Titanic went down. I’m not referencing a particular resource with this quote since it is widely disbursed. The picture was from True Stories from the Titanic.
Survivor of the Titanic, Elizabeth W. Shutes was quoted in Colonel Archibald Gracie’s book, The Truth About the Titanic. Elizabeth was a governess who boarded Titanic in South Hampton as a first class passenger accompanying Margaret Graham. While many passengers had no sense of trouble even after the RMS Titanic struck the iceberg, Elizabeth and Margaret were concerned enough to leave their cabin and to seek information. They were told by a crewman that all was well, and returned to their cabin to finish an evening snack. However, Elizabeth’s hands shook so badly she couldn’t hold her sandwich, and the two eventually decided to see for themselves. They were saved along with Margaret’s mother. For more information about Elizabeth and the picture shown to the right, click here. There is another, better picture at Encyclopedia Titanica but the image was not available for copying.
I was moved Elizabeth’s thoughts in reflection of all she endured on the Titanic. You might just see it appear in my novel, Titanic: Legacy of Betrayal, releasing in April. “For the brave American man, a heart full of gratitude, too deep for words, sends out a thanksgiving. That such men are born, live, and die for others; a cause for deep gratitude. What country could have shown such men as belong to our American manhood? Thank God for them and for their noble death.”
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| Image of Titanic at Night taken from HD Wallpapers |
I’ll close this post with words from Charles Vale. He wrote the following in the concluding note in Gracie’s book, as Gracie died eight months after the sinking before he finished his book. (See last week’s post.)
“Good and bad deed were done that night and morning; but the good outvalued the bad immeasurably and when the littleness have been duly reckoned, and the few cowards dismissed, and the uncouth or selfish weighed and found wanting, there remains the grand total of brave and steadfast men and women whose names must be enrolled imperishably in any record of world-heroism.”
