Nowhere suffered as much from the sinking of the Titanic as Southampton and a century after the disaster the city wants to tell the forgotten story of its 549 residents who died.
A job aboard the mighty liner was a dream come true for the men of this port on England’s south coast in 1912, offering three square meals a day and lodgings for the night at a time of severe hardship.
Three-quarters of Titanic’s crew came from the city, many toiling as stokers in the ship’s engine rooms or as stewards tending to the needs of passengers.
When Titanic set off from Southampton docks on her fateful maiden voyage to New York on April 10, 1912, the people of the city cheered it off full of pride. The contrast could not have been greater five days later when the liner hit an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic, plunging Southampton into mourning and leaving many of the victims’ families in poverty.
“Southampton’s Titanic story is very special because most of the crew came from Southampton and that story hasn’t really been told anywhere else before,” said Maria Newbery, curator of SeaCity, a new maritime museum that focuses on the liner’s crew.
The first news of the sinking was posted in the window of a local newspaper just hours after the disaster, but no one believed it at first. When the awful truth began to dawn, “a great hush descended,” Charles Morgan, who was nine at the time, recalls in the city’s archives.
“I don’t think that there was hardly a single street in Southampton that hadn’t lost someone on that ship.”