This is yet another of my blog adaptations of a presentation I gave to the British Family History Society of Greater Ottawa on April 8th, 2017. It contains some information that I didn't have the time to include, and omits some items that really only work in an oral presentation.
In early 2017, this notice appeared at the website for the British Family History Society of Greater Ottawa:
Gail Roger’s mild obsession with the Titanic led her to the discovery of the closest thing to a celebrity in her family tree: Harry Grattidge — sailor, survivor, and a Commodore of the Cunard Line. No, she hadn’t heard of him either. We will meet some of the Grattidge ancestors that Harry and Gail have in common, ponder the blessings and drawbacks of a highly unusual surname, and discover how Harry came to be a consultant on a classic film by surviving Britain’s worst maritime disaster (not the Titanic).
About the speaker
Gail Roger has been a BIFHSGO member for over a dozen years, and it took her the first seven years to pluck up the courage to make her first BIFHSGO presentation. This is her fifth. Gail’s family will tell you that her obsession with the Titanic is not as mild as she claims. They are mistaken. They also say that her obsession with family history borders on the frightening. They may have a point.
I may be sorry that I asked this question.
Is there anyone who has not heard of
the Titanic?
Now, this
presentation is not about the Titanic, although the
Titanic will keep . . . bobbing up.
People who are obsessed with 1912 sinking of the
Titanic are called “Titaniacs” – probably only by those who are not
Titaniacs.
I am not a Titaniac. No, I’m not, no matter what my family
tells you.
See, real Titaniacs are scary. Y’know, military-history-buff scary.
Even though this presentation is not
about the Titanic, there are four things about the Titanic that I'd like you to
keep in mind.
No, there won't be a test, but things I say during
this presentation may make a little more sense if you can remember them.
One.
The Titanic was a large ship. She had a
gross tonnage of 46,000. Now, what exactly does that mean?
I don't care.
I'm a family researcher, not a nautical
expert. I understand the tonnage of ships about the
same way I do centimorgans in DNA-matching.
I know 46,000 tons means "big ship",
and I use this number to give me a vague idea of how big other ships are in
comparison.
The Titanic
was a very big ship by 1912 standards, and big ships are difficult to maneuver.
The captain of the Titanic was an experienced captain, but not in
commanding a ship of that size. Up until 1911, his largest ships had been
about 22,000 tons; that's roughly half the size of the Titanic.
So,"46,000 tons" means "big ship"; big
ships are difficult to maneuver.
Two.
The Titanic's
First Class featured very wealthy people who would have been familiar to
newspaper readers of the day. This was in the days before movie stars,
television, and rock music, so celebrities tended to be society
people, government
big-wigs, and captains
of industry, such as railways, for example.
This meant, in the days before widespread air
travel, that an ocean voyage was a prime opportunity for networking and
deal-making. This didn't change that much between 1912 and 1952.
The fact that there were rich, prominent, and
important people on board is why we still talk about the Titanic today. Oh, there's some mention of the Third Class where
84% of the men, just over half the women and two thirds of the children died -
which is horrific - but hardly anyone talks of the Second Class in which 92% of
the male passengers died. After all, they were only teachers, preachers
and civil servants.
You know. People
like us.
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Titanic |
Stories about rich and influential people sell.
Two words: "Downton Abbey"
Three.
The sinking of the Titanic engendered many legendary stories.
"Legendary" as in: "not easy to
prove".
"Legendary" as in: "still argued
about" - mostly online.
Most entertaining
stories that people want to believe are legendary stories, and we family historians
are always running up against them, aren't we?
 |
| Liam Tuohy as Charles Joughin in the 1997 film Titanic |
One legendary
Titanic story is the tale of the
baker Charles Joughin, who claimed to
have gotten quite drunk before making it to the stern of the ship before its
final plunge. He said he rode it down like an elevator, stepping off into
the water at the last minute, not even getting his hair wet.
I don't know how true his story is, but he survived the sinking and he lived a long life.
 |
| Charles Joughin 1878-1956 |
Remember him.
Four.
There were about 2200 people aboard the Titanic,
1300 of those were passengers.
The Titanic could have carried up to
3500 passengers and crew, but there had been a coal strike, so, unusually for a
maiden voyage of a prestigious liner, Titanic was not fully booked. This was just as well, because there were only
spaces in the life-boats for about 1100 -- half the people on board and
one-third of Titanic's total capacity.
As it was, only 700 people survived -- all picked
up by the Carpathia.
Remember
that name, and remember that something like 1500 people died that
April night in 1912.
Did I mention that this
presentation is not
about the Titanic?
In the late sixties, my mother took one of those
Famous Writers’ correspondence courses. She was hoping to sharpen her writing skills for
her own presentations at work, and the nonfiction course involved studying and
analyzing a book called A Night to Remember by
Walter Lord. It was about the --- Titanic.
This presentation is not about the Titanic.
I was eleven
and read pretty well anything I found lying around the house, so I became
hooked, like so many others, on the story of this disaster. It has
everything: glamour, tragedy, injustice, lots and lots of human error.
Rather like family history research.
A few decades later, after a particularly tough day
in late November of 2004, I sat down to watch a telecast of the 1958 film based
on that book.
Because nothing
says “relaxation” like a maritime disaster in which nearly two thousand people
die by drowning, crushing, or hypothermia.
I’d seen the movie before, of course, but, if you
remember any of my other presentations, most of my family history discoveries
are accidents, and they usually involve revisiting
a document, book, or, in this case, a movie that I thought I knew.
This time, I noticed something in the opening
credits.
It was the name “Grattidge”.
That’s the surname of one of my
great-great-grandmothers.
I had just joined BIFHSGO that year, but even from
my minimal and untutored pre-BIFHSGO research, I knew that “Grattidge” is a
highly unusual surname.
I staggered
over to the computer and entered “Grattidge”
and “Titanic” into the search
engine.
A whole bunch of hits came up – including this one.
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| Clicking on any image will enlarge it. |
Remember Rootsweb? I used to spend hours
browsing their mailing lists – the listserves for the individual counties were
particularly useful to a newbie such as myself. The Rootsweb lists and archives are still there,
and if I'm googling in search of an obscure historical fact, chances are that
I'll find an answer that I can find nowhere else posted years ago by a family
researcher on Rootsweb.
Rootsweb had its beginning at a time when people
couldn't get a family tree with a single click.
However, this was my very first encounter with
Rootsweb, and I was beginning with the only
list for the surname Grattidge. It is, after all, a highly unusual name.
I spent a few weeks reading everything in the
Grattidge Rootsweb message archive, before finally getting the courage to
introduce myself. I met about a dozen people, from Sweden to Australia,
researching the Grattidges. This intrepid group of distant relatives had all
sorts of data on Harry Grattidge and his astonishing career,
and they had the Grattidge family worked out to 1590.
They hadn’t done this by copying down online trees.
It was as if I’d stumbled upon a personalized seminar in family research.
My fifth cousin Paul in Sweden had resources on
medical ailments and occupations. My fourth cousin Rex in Australia sent me
photocopies of parish registers and marriage bonds. My fifth cousin Peter in Derby, England, had
written a Grattidge history with quotes, photographs and charts.
I remember attending one of my first Great Moments
of Genealogy at the Legion Hall on Kent Street, and thinking: I’ve just had
one of these!
In fact, I should warn you that this is what
happens when you let a Great Moment fester for over a decade: a full-hour
presentation breaks out. It’s like a boil.
First, the name. It’s probably derived from a
place name, and that place is Gratwich, a tiny hamlet in the country of Staffordshire, north-east
of the city of Stafford, where several branches in my
maternal line come from.
Gratwich is four miles to the east of Uttoxeter, which is the location of the earliest Grattidge record the Rootsweb list had.
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| Once again, clicking the image will enlarge it. |
I’ve mentioned this in my last presentation, but if I want a
detailed map of an area in the United Kingdom, I use Street Maps.uk to really
know where everything is. This map shows
why Gratwich is described as “remote”. There’s really very little
around it.
If I want a relatively uncluttered map where I can
look up walking distances between places, and create my own family maps, I use
Google Maps.
Here, I’ve been using one of my customized family
maps to track the christening and marriage places of my subsequent Grattidge
ancestors.
You see that for most of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the Grattidges settled within ten miles of
Gratwich - often
four or five miles - even though I have no record of any Grattidges
there.
Yet.
So, I think that, as far as name origin theories
go, this is a pretty good guess.
Now, I believe the guess came from my cousin Peter Grattidge,
who lives in the town of Derby, within reach of these ancestral villages, and
has been researching the Grattidges for decades.
He has another theory that, of all the Grattidges
living on the globe today, more than ninety percent are descendants of
four brothers born in Foston, Derbyshire in the late eighteenth century. This means that when I run into someone with the
surname of Grattidge on the Internet, the chances are superb that they are
related to me -- and I can usually figure out exactly how quite quickly!
Here’s my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather
William Grattidge who married his first cousin.
This happened quite a bit in my family, which may explain a lot.
They actually had nine children. One daughter married, but her descendants
petered out. One son died as a
baby. The three youngest died in the flu
epidemic of 1803. (My cousin Paul in
Sweden had a plague encyclopedia.)
So here
are those four sons from which most Grattidges descend.
Like his surviving brothers, Thomas had two wives, but both his partners proved particularly fecund. The second, Kezia, was
initially his mistress and she bore him six children before he married her and three children afterward. When he died, she married
another Grattidge nephew and had two more kids.
So in the present day, amid a host of Grattidge descendants, we have an
expert angler who has written extensively in magazines and websites, all which seem to feature people cradling carp.
And, from the line of Kezia the
mistress-later-wife, we have a Grattidge who has won prizes at Crufts for
the Staffordshire Bull Terriers he breeds at his kennels. My helpful Rootsweb fifth cousins, Peter and Paul, descend from this line as well.
And descending from brother William Grattidge, we have
Frederick James Grattidge, a Lord Mayor of Birmingham, plus
at least four recipients of the MBE and the OBE, as well as the runner-up in Britain's Next Supermodel 2009.
I call this the overachieving branch of the family.
From Richard Grattidge, we get a lot of Americans and
a lot of Kansas farmers. Also a
rock musician, but not a famous one.
Then, there’s my
great-great-great-great-grandfather John, who is also Harry Grattidge’s
great-grandfather. Lots of Aussies in this line,
including my fourth cousin Rex from Rootsweb. I should point out that we have 2
OBEs descending from John.
Identifying and placing modern-day relations is one advantage of an unusual surname.
A chief
disadvantage?
No one knows how to spell it -- particularly those
intrepid transcribers at Ancestry. This means, among other things, that
I'm still finding records associated with Grattidges in my direct line -- once
I clue in to who "Willan Grubbage" is.
I ran into more fun with spelling when taking the
online course “Finding People in the National Archives” with Pharos Tutors last
spring.
Our teacher Guy Grannum , who is an archivist with
the National Archives, was demonstrating various “wild card” techniques for
searching the National Archives catalogue, so I suggested “Grattidge”.
I soon received a charming email, saying that my
correction had been accepted, and that a small accompanying biographical note
had been composed, so I went to check it and Grattidge was spelled correctly!
But “Cunard” wasn’t.
The Collections Knowledge Officer took prompt action.
Here’s how the page looks now, with some of the
details I provided. I was rather proud.
So, how exactly is Harry Grattidge related to me?
My great-great-great-great-grandfather John
Grattidge is at the top, and starting with me at the bottom, we can go clockwise, through my mother, my
grandmother, my
great-grandmother Clara Elizabeth Stokes - who is Harry’s first cousin – then to my great-great-grandmother Anne Grattidge -
who is Harry’s paternal aunt – to Daniel Grattidge, the ancestor that Harry and I
share.
Harry’s dad is George Grattidge, one of Anne’s
eight younger siblings – she was the eldest, so Harry and I are first cousins –
three times removed.
My great-great-grandmother Anne Grattidge (probably pronounced "Annie", after the fashion of the day) is the earliest Grattidge relative I
had within living memory, because she was in the living memory of my late
grandmother.
Anne’s husband John Stokes earned my gran’s undying
enmity for chewing her out at age twelve – for whistling. That was in 1912, well-brought-up girls
weren’t supposed to whistle. She never
forgave him.
My grandmother remembered two things about her
grandmother Anne Grattidge:
Every Christmas, or any other family gathering,
Anne would declare in tremulous tones:
“Of course, the next time, I will not be with you….”
This went on for years.
When she died at age 79, she flatly refused to let her
husband visit her deathbed -- after ten children and sixty years of marriage.
When Anne was born in 1844, her father Daniel was a
railway brakesman in Stafford, but his father (my great-great-great-great-grandfather) John Grattidge had been an
innkeeper, among many other things.
 |
| Photo taken in late 1950s or early 1960s |
In 1854, my great-great-great-grandfather Daniel
Grattidge took charge of the Castle Inn on Eastgate Street in Stafford. With
one brief interlude, the inn remained in the Grattidge family for over 60
years.
Up until two weeks before I gave this presentation, the above photo was the
only picture I’d seen of the Castle Inn – it was demolished in the early 1960s. I think my invaluable cousin Peter in Derby
emailed it to me.
And here’s a story that further illustrates two
things: 1) the
unexpected benefits of doing a presentation for BIFHSGO; and 2) why you should always try to give credit for every
discovery you make.
I was actually looking for mid-19th-century
pictures of the Stafford Railway Station to illustrate this talk when Google
Images brought up a shot of Stafford from over a century ago. It was on a website about memorial drinking fountains.
The blog-writer, who goes by HIS, had carefully
credited a website called
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http://www.staffspasttrack.org.uk
Click to enlarge. |
On the right, is the Castle Inn in 1877. They know this because the Borough Hall is being built, near the centre of the photograph.
In 1855, Harry Grattidge's father George Grattidge, the sixth of the nine
Grattidge children in that generation, was the first of the family to be born
here.
Daniel Grattidge ran the inn until his death in
1863 at age 42, at which point, his wife and my great-great-great-grandmother
Matilda took over for the next nine years.
Someone named Edward Hudson was in charge for another
four years – I know this from a book entitled Inns and Alehouses of Stafford by John Connor, large parts of which are online at Google Books, including,
thank goodness, the parts pertaining to my family! (You can also order his
books through Amazon.uk.)
Daniel Grattidge, George’s eldest brother, became
the innkeeper in 1876, so he’s the “D. Grattidge” on the sign in the above photo. Daniel had been, like many of the residents
in Stafford, a shoemaker, and George became a shoemaker too, getting married to
an Ellen Tildesley in 1885, and having three children: Bernard,
Harry, and Clarice.
George's brother Daniel gave up inn-keeping, and invested in
a colliery. He eventually made pots of money. He’ll figure in the story later.
In 1897, George Grattidge brought his family,
including seven-year-old Harry, to the Castle Inn and took over for the next
thirty years.
My great-great-great-uncle George Grattidge was a quiet man who loved detective stories and
long unruffled games of bridge at his club.
He raised neither his voice nor his hand in anger against his three
children, content that (his wife Ellen), from her operational headquarters in the kitchen, should plan and carry
out the daily strategy of shaping (their) manners and morals.
I know this because George is the only family
member whom Harry describes in his autobiography Captain of the Queens, published in 1956. He does mention his mother more than once,
and his brother and sister in passing, but the book - which was reasonably
successful in its time and
even became part of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book series - is aimed at
those interested in his career at sea.
This is the frustrating thing about reading
relatives’ biographies. They rarely supply the details that a family historian
craves.
I acquired the book some weeks after discovering
the Grattidge Rootsweb group. It’s no
longer in print of course, so I checked Abebooks
and
Alibris, and got my hands on a
first edition for about ten bucks.
Captain
of the Queens is described as an autobiography, but it’s
really an “as told to” biography, ghost-written, rather well, by Richard Collier, a historian who was a member of the RAF during the Second World War
and was the author of several books, one of which is in the Ottawa Library.
During the three times I read Captain of the Queens - in 2005, in 2010 and in 2016 - I’ve often
wondered whose voice I’m hearing:
Harry’s or Richard Collier’s.
The description of Stafford in the first years of
the twentieth century is positively lyrical:
. . . the thrill of riding in the brand-new
horse-cars that took you a mile and a half across town, all for a penny, with
the smell of the dirty oil lamp that lit them pricking your nostrils, the
deliciously dry straw on the floor, perfect for scuffing with highly shined
Sunday boots.
Harry’s world - at age fourteen in 1905 - was
indeed expanding. There had been a
railway for decades, and motorcars were making an appearance, even in his
small, landlocked market town.
He took a family trip to Blackpool where a sailor
saved his mother from a stampede in a theatre. Based on this experience, plus
two gold medals in swimming at his school, plus an offhand suggestion from his
father, Harry took the decision to try a career at sea.
So in 1906, he found himself in La Pallice in La
Rochelle, France on the Bay of Biscay, being apprenticed on the Osborne, which was a four-masted
barque.
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| A drawing of the Osborne from Harry Grattidge's collection |
Many merchant ships in 1906 were still sailing
ships.
As the lowliest of the low - a brand-new apprentice
- the first order fifteen-year-old Harry
received was to clean the “fo’c’s’le
head”.
Harry Grattidge was a son of a Stafford brewer and
innkeeper. He didn’t know what a “fo’c’s’le head” was.
Neither did I.
I had to look it up.
It’s the toilet in the very front of the ship and I
couldn’t find any illustrations – for which you’re probably all very
thankful. Ships like the Osborne didn’t have running water, so it
was essential to clear out the --- evacuating hole with a kind of metal
stick called the Golden Reach. In some
ships, this involved hanging over the side in a sling, dangling several yards
above the heaving water. Harry soon had
numb, chapped hands, but he figured this was the worst.
Not really.
Apprentices were routinely slapped and kicked, in
the name of discipline. Harry, as the
youngest, was mercilessly bullied by the other apprentices. He soon developed
boils, and a host of other unpleasant things, due to the dirt and the kinds of
food they had to eat. Being British
sailors, they drank lime-juice to ward off scurvy from lack of fruit and
vegetables. Being a sailing ship, they
were sometimes becalmed and often tempest-tost.
Over about four years, Harry became accustomed to
this life. About 1910, he started
sailing on steamships, eventually saved enough to take his exams, and obtained
his Master’s certificate in early1914 at age 23. He joined the Cunard Line and stayed with
them for the next forty years.
One of his first Cunard ships was the Carpathia where he was Fourth Officer.
 |
| RMS Carpathia |
Remember her?
In 1914, she was still chiefly famous for being the ship that rescued
the Titanic survivors from the
drifting lifeboats.
In Captain of
the Queens, Harry only mentions the Titanic
once, and it’s in relation to a contemporary story about the musicians on the
Cunard ship Saxonia, who went on
strike and then gave up when the captain withheld their food. The captain decided to punish them further by
only letting them go back to work if they first played “Nearer, My God, To Thee”.
Harry explains why this was so harsh: Most
ship’s musicians believed the report that the gallant musicians on the Titanic
had played this tune as she sank as fervently as hardened seamen disbelieved
it. (p. 67)
I’d tell you where I stand on this question, but
this presentation is not about the Titanic.
(Did I mention that?)
Instead, I’m going to tell one of the strangest and
most questionable stories in the book.
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| The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia, as they were in June 1914 |
In June 1914, the Carpathia was steaming out of the
port of Trieste, which, as you may see from this lovely, uncluttered, and slightly fuzzy
map, was then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Among the passengers boarding at Trieste were three
scruffy men in trenchcoats.
The Carpathia next anchored off the port of Fiume, which
is now called Rijeka, and is in
modern-day Croatia.
Harry was told that these three passengers were
insistent on being taken ashore, and he was directed to take a rowboat and small
crew, and get the passengers out of the captain’s hair. He put them ashore in the middle of the
night.
A few days later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was
assassinated in Sarajevo, and the crew of the Carpathia recognized the pictures of the
assassins in the papers.
 |
| A photo taken in Belgrade, Serbia in May 1914 |
So, was my cousin Harry indirectly responsible for
the assassination that is widely regarded at the triggering event of the First
World War?
Well, it’s
a good story. Legendary, I’d say.
Harry said, in Captain
of the Queens: “I had ferried them
as close as might be to the scene of their crime.” (p. 69)
Really?
Look at
Sarajevo.
The photo I showed you of Grabež, Čabrinović
and Princip – Princip was the fellow
who did the actual shooting – was taken in Serbia a few weeks before the assassination.
But it’s a good story. It's also a good idea to check a map.
When the war was declared, Harry Grattidge was still
on the Carpathia, and wrote to his
brother Bernard: “For heaven’s sake,
don’t let it end until I get there.” (p. 73) He
mentions his brother’s name about three times in his biography, all in passing. This was the last time he mentioned it.
The war did wait for Harry, and he got more than
enough of it. He joined the Royal Naval
Reserves, eventually became a Lieutenant, and spent a chunk of the war ferrying
soldiers (in a requisitioned English Channel ferry) across the Dardanelles to a
place called the Gallipoli peninsula.
You may have heard of it. He saw
some dreadful things.
Back home, brother Bernard also got more than enough
of the war.
Bernard George Grattidge shows up in the World War One
memorial lists, usually with “Theatre of War: Home” beside his name. I thought perhaps he’d died in a training
accident or while driving a vehicle.
Last summer, my faithful cousin Peter in Derby emailed me. He’d found Bernard’s inquest in the British
Newspaper Archives.
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| Excerpts from the article on the inquest |
This is one reason why it’s necessary to return to
resources again and again, especially the newspaper archives, because they are
always being updated. I learned that
Bernard had been to the front, become shell-shocked, then was discharged from
the army, and placed on the reserve. The
news report supplies the details of his suicide, and of his note to his mother
Nellie. The report also mentioned that
most people at the inquest knew Bernard.
Stafford is a small town, even today.
When
I returned to the newspaper archives myself, I found a description of Bernard’s
military funeral – he was after all, in the reserve when he died. No female mourners are mentioned – Nellie and
Clarice presumably did not march behind the coffin – but Harry was there, along
with his father and Uncle Daniel, who was by now a wealthy man and quite
prominent in Stafford. At least one of the two Stokes
mourners named is one of my grandmother’s four maternal uncles; the other may also be an uncle with a case of mistaken initials.
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| The Staffordshire Advertiser - 3 February 1917 |
None of this is mentioned in Harry’s biography. Family historians tend to find out the sort
of stuff that doesn’t get into biographies.
No wonder we’re so popular.
Harry did get torpedoed towards the end of the war,
but survived it – it’s another great story, but we don’t have the time!
I also don't have the time to recount a rather convoluted story about a Greek lady who was a regular passenger on the Carpathia just prior to the Great War. Her charming manners endeared her to Harry and his fellow officers.
Harry was well into the war when he learned the lady was married to a German official, and had smuggled maps and plans which compromised the safety of a number of places, including Esquimalt, British Columbia. I was startled to read this, because I lived in Esquimalt, now a municipality of Greater Victoria, for several years. I find, the longer one researches family history, the more of these crazy coincidences turn up.
Harry returned to the Merchant Navy as Third
Officer on the Mauretania after the
war. His captain was one Sir Arthur Rostron – the “Sir” on account of having saved the Titanic survivors while Captain of the Carpathia in 1912. Harry doesn’t mention this.
His biography, like this presentation, isn’t about the
Titanic.
His biography also doesn’t mention his marriage in
1917 – five months after his brother’s funeral. Nor does it mention his wife
nor his son. One of my cousins on the
Grattidge Rootsweb list found this information in Harry’s Who’s Who entry, which also mentions that his marriage was
dissolved about 1921.
Harry spent most of the twenties on the Mauretania (where he was Third Officer) and the Laconia (where he was Junior First Officer), He encountered a lot of famous passengers, not many of
whom are that famous today.
He seems to have become quite chummy with songwriter
Ivor Novello. How many people nowadays recognize that name? If you’ve ever
sung “Keep the Homefires Burning”, visited the theatres in West End London, or
seen the film Gosford Park, you
should.
Harry Grattidge
eventually moved up to Senior First Officer on the Berengaria. Harry talks of
ships as if they were people, and it’s clear he didn’t like the Berengaria, although it’s never quite
clear why! I gather he thought she was
too “Teutonic”.
One night, when the ship was docked in Southampton and
almost
completely deserted, he stumbled upon the Prince of Wales leading
a jazz orchestra in the Berengaria’s empty ballroom.
“It was very
convenient, of course,” the Prince told him, apologetically. “And I thought we shouldn’t be disturbed.” (p. 134)
The thirties hit the British Merchant Marine hard and
Harry Grattidge found himself living a strange sort of hand-to-mouth existence,
living on the luxury liners that crossed the Atlantic. When a ship was docked at New York (usually
for five days) and at Southampton (usually for six days), he had to buy his own
food, and sometimes the money ran out, and he would have to supplement his diet
from whatever he could scrounge from the leavings in the ship’s buffet.
There was no home in Stafford now; with the retirement
of his father in 1927, the Castle Inn finally passed out of the hands of the
Grattidge family. Harry’s mother Nellie
died in 1929; he does mention that – in passing.
Harry doesn’t mention that he got substantial
financial relief in early 1939. His
uncle Daniel Grattidge, the one who had given up running the Castle Inn in
favour of making pots of money through a colliery, had died - decades after his wife and only child – and we family researchers
know what that means: a lovely will, detailing all his relatives.
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| The Staffordshire Advertiser - 22 April 1939 |
One of the beneficiaries
was Daniel’s niece and Harry’s first cousin Clara Elizabeth Griffiths née
Stokes, my great-grandmother, who, along with her five surviving siblings, got
a small but undoubtedly welcome legacy.
Unfortunately, she accidentally stepped out in front of an army truck in
Wolverhampton two years later, got put in traction for two months, then
died of pneumonia.
Harry got 3000 pounds. A conservative estimate of the value in
today’s money is 160,000 pounds, which is
something like 270,000 Canadian dollars.
Even with an ex-wife and teenaged son, it must have helped.
When the Second World War was declared in September
1939, Harry Grattidge was cruising in the West Indies on a ship called the Lancastria.
He was now Chief Officer – not Captain, I’ve seen that mistake on more than one web site.
1940 was a depressing year for the Allied Forces. In May, the Lancastria was rescuing troops
from Norway at about the same time that an armada of ships and boats of every
size were evacuating soldiers from Dunkirk, France. One of the smaller boats heading for Dunkirk was
that of Charles H. Lightoller, the former Second Officer of the Titanic.
However, this story isn't about the Titanic, nor is it about Dunkirk.
When the Lancastria
returned to Plymouth, she was sent off almost immediately to St Nazaire.
 |
| Google Maps - Latitude 47.09N; Longitude 2.20W |
I know exactly where they were because the coordinates are entered in the history web sites and
in Harry’s book. This is never a good sign. The last time I did a presentation for BIFHSGO, I
mentioned that you can enter coordinates into the search field at Google Maps.
 |
| Position of the Lancastria on 17 June 1940 |
St Nazaire was choked with retreating
Allied troops and refugees.
The capacity of the Lancastria was 3000 people, but there were special orders that
day: to take as many troops as possible
without regard to the limits laid down by International Law.
Harry Grattidge
estimates that there were about 5000 people aboard, soldiers, nuns, families,
unaccompanied children, mostly below decks. Other estimates go as high as 8000.
Four bombs hit the Lancastria at 3:45 in the
afternoon.
Harry Grattidge was the one with the megaphone,
passing on Captain Rudolph Sharpe’s orders:
“Clear away the boats now…your attention please….clear away the
boats.” (p. 155)
There was little time, and not enough people knew how
to lower the boats, anyway. The ship
began to list, and Harry ordered everyone to the port side, to buy more
time. Finally: “Everybody off with their boots.” Some
stripped altogether.
Harry gave the one life-belt on the bridge to Captain
Sharp, who was not a good swimmer.
Harry was a good swimmer.
I’ve done my best to lighten and define this picture,
snapped from a neighbouring boat. Can
you see the heads in the water, and the scores of people standing on the side
of the Lancastria? There were many people trapped inside.
Just before the Lancastria disappeared, about twenty
minutes after being hit – some reports say ten minutes - Harry walked off the
bridge into the ocean, which was slick with oil. He said it was like cold, black syrup. (p. 157)
After swimming for more than half an hour, while the
German planes strafed the water, he was picked up by a tugboat and spent the
rest of the day helping ferry the wounded from the tugs to the troop ship Oronsay, which, if you can believe it,
was still picking up troops and refugees from St Nazaire whenever there was a
break in the gunfire.
Harry saw some ghastly things.
When it was all over, and he was taking the
train from Plymouth to London, the stench of the oil still remaining in his
hair drove many of his fellow passengers away from him.
Afterwards, he would always be a little deaf, with a
reduced sense of smell. The other
symptoms, however, of nightmares, flashbacks and depression are all too
familiar to us nowadays.
 |
| A postcard of the RMS Scythia |
Some months later, he was on one of several transatlantic
runs, which involved transporting as many planes as possible, while he also
circulated amongst the passengers to distract them from the very real
possibility of being torpedoed.
This was how Grattidge encountered the famous author H.G. Wells on the deck of the RMS Scythia.
The conversation involved H.G. Wells’ coming to terms with the death of
his first wife and fellow writer Catherine Wells, and how George Bernard Shaw
helped Wells see her “in the spirit of the flames” at her cremation.
Somehow, after the loss of the Lancastria, Harry found in this idea a sort of lifeline, and, he
says, was able to move beyond the pain.
For me, the spooky part of this incident was the ship
they were on. The Scythia did get torpedoed a year or two later, in 1942, but was
salvaged. In 1956, she brought my father
to Canada. I was born the following
year.
The OBEs for the officers of the Lancastria were announced in October 1940, four months after the
sinking, but Harry did not receive his until January 1943. By that time, Rudolph Sharp, the former
captain of the Lancastria, was
dead. He had gone down with the Laconia, another horrible sinking, in
1942.
I don’t know if you can see, but four of the Lancastria commendations in 1940 were
posthumous.
Harry got his OBE at Buckingham Palace from George VI
himself, and held up the line of honourees when the king asked him why it had
taken so long for Grattidge to get his award.
Harry explained that he had been serving on the Queen Mary, and the King wanted
details: I can pass it on to my mother; she’ll be thrilled. (p. 176)
George’s mother is, of course, the Queen Mary for whom
the ship was named. (And yes, there’s a
legendary story about that which I don’t have time to tell you.)
Harry was trying to give a quick reply, aware of a
long line-up behind him, when the King asked him how many miles he had covered
in the Queen Mary. Harry had the answer, because he had happened
to ask the navigator of the Queen Mary
the same question, just before leaving the ship, so he said: Two
hundred and fifteen thousand three hundred and sixty miles, sir. When the
official party roared with laughter, he realized they thought he was just
saying a number off the top of his head.
Two years before, Grattidge had joined the Queen Mary as Staff Captain. Now, a Staff Captain is not the
Captain. Grattidge’s job was to be a
link between the military and the ship, as well as be responsible for drills,
working conditions and crew discipline.
It’s a big job and the Queen Mary was a big ship,
the biggest Grattidge had yet encountered.
When he asked the Staff Captain he was replacing for a tour, it took
four hours.
The Queen Mary
had been requisitioned for the war to transport troops because she was very
large and very fast. This was a necessity because she had to tear across
the ocean, while zigzagging to fox predatory submarines. This was how she came to slice the British
cruiser Curacao in half.
The Curacao
was part of the Queen Mary’s escort
as she approached Ireland on October 2nd, 1942, but she had come too
close to the Queen Mary’s zig or zag.
At twenty-eight knots (and the Queen Mary
could go as fast as nearly 32 knots), that bow was like a knife cutting through
butter.
337 of the crew on the Curacao died.
Among Harry Grattidge’s challenges on the Queen Mary was making it physically
possible for the ship to carry 15,000
troops per trip without tipping in the more shallow waters near the ports. Each soldier had a place to stand perfectly
still until the Queen Mary was in
deep enough water. They didn’t fail –
not once.
 |
| Using every available space on the Queen Mary |
Miraculously, they found places for all those
men to sleep, but the Queen Mary’s
swimming pool had to go.
After leaving the Queen
Mary, and after receiving that delayed OBE in January 1943, Harry Grattidge
finally became Captain Grattidge.
Two months
later, Harry’s father George died in Stafford, but Harry, of course, doesn’t
mention this.
From a distance, Grattidge glimpsed Josef Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt – FDR looked very ill
indeed; he was to die a couple of months later.
However, he experienced Winston Churchill up
close and personally – and at all hours.
Churchill had an erratic pattern of sleeping and eating, and the crew on
the Franconia, some imported from the
Queen Mary for added comfort,
scrambled to accommodate.
When it was time for Churchill to depart the ship, en
route to a speech in Athens, he addressed the crew over the P.A., and even he
had trouble with the name “Grattidge”:
Captain Graft – hmn – Captain Graff – Oh,
Hell – Officers and crew… (p. 194)
After the address, he presented Harry with Russian
vodka – Churchill didn’t care for vodka – and told Harry to put the gifts of
caviar and cigars acquired from the Soviet government through Customs for him.
Three years later, Harry was still getting duty
notices. When he wrote to
Churchill about the problem, Churchill sent his compliments, asked after his
health, and said he had no intention of paying the duty. Now, if Grattidge were fool enough to pay, of
course….
Harry Grattidge returned to the great liners in
peacetime, captaining the Mauretania, the Aquitania, and the Queen Elizabeth,
among others.
In 1948, the one remaining member of his original
family died, his sister Clarice at age 54.
The youngest of her nine children was 16. Harry doesn’t mention any of this.
 |
RMS Queen Mary – 1952 photo by Erick Bjerke
Senior
|
On New Year’s Day 1949, he became Captain of his beloved Queen Mary. I’ve said that he spoke of the ships as if
they were sentient beings, and it’s clear that he was head over heels about the
Queen Mary.
I guess you always hurt
the one you love, because he grounded her at Cherbourg, France – on his very
first day as her Captain.
It wasn’t his fault, really. The harbour at Cherbourg was still a bit
choked with submerged WW2 ship-wrecks, there was a seven force gale at the time, and a tangle of anchors and cables.
However, he was the Captain, and the ship was his responsibility. He managed to get the Queen Mary back to
Southampton with relatively little damage, and set off for New York into a
lustrous career.
 |
Top row: Bob Hope, Walt Disney, Lord Mountbatten, Lana Turner, Charlie Chaplin
Bottom row: Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Dorothy Lamour, Spencer Tracy, Rex Harrison |
The last chapters of his
biography detail the challenges of being Captain of a boat that attracted the
wealthy, the glamorous and the influential – many of whom wanted the honour of a
seat at the Captain’s table.
While I recognized quite of few of Harry's famous passengers, many more were those well-known to readers sixty years ago.
When he became Commodore of the Fleet in October 1952,
Grattidge was required to captain the Queen Elizabeth. “To me, as a seaman,” he said, “(the Queen Mary) was a great ship, the Elizabeth was a great hotel.” (p. 289)
 |
| 2 June 1953 |
As Commodore Grattidge, he attended the coronation of
another Queen Elizabeth, six months before his retirement.
He was probably seated quite far back at Westminster
Abbey, but for most of his 40-year career with Cunard, he had had, if not a
front-row seat, a damn close view of many
hallmark events of the first half of the twentieth century: India’s independence from
the British Empire, when, as Captain of the Georgic, he was present for Lord Louis Mountbatten's address as the last Viceroy of India to the departing British troops on 15 August 1947; the Yalta conference of February 1945 that
decided the future of post-war Europe; the sinking of the
Lancastria on 17 June 1940; and the Dardanelles Campaign from 1915-1916.
When he docked the Queen Elizabeth for the last time
on December 21st, 1953, he foresaw a life of more obscurity and much
less excitement, which might have come to pass had he not participated in the writing of a
well-received biography, resulting in speaking tours in the States.
 |
Harry Grattidge on
the set of the film A Night to Remember with
actor Kenneth More (in costume as Second Officer Charles H. Lightoller) and
Joseph Boxhall, who
was Fourth Officer on the Titanic.
|
Oh yes, and served as a consultant on a classic film
about the Titanic.
Back in November 2004, when I was seeing his name for
the first time, I idly wondered why he’d been asked. I supposed, vaguely, that he knew a lot about
ships.
Well, yes.
He’d captained the Aquitania, which was roughly the same tonnage as
the Titanic and looked spookily like her, and the two largest liners of the
mid-twentieth-century. He’d even
grounded one of them, and understood how much could go wrong with a big ship.
He knew about having a
passenger list of the rich, famous, and/or influential.
He once stepped from the bridge of a sinking liner as
she vanished beneath the waves.
And he survived the worst maritime disaster in British
history.
I'd say he was spectacularly qualified to consult on a film about the Titanic.
I said there were two OBE’s in my own branch of the
Grattidges, leading down from my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents
William Grattidge and his wife Elizabeth Newham in Foston, Derbyshire, through
their third surviving son, and my ancestor, John Grattidge.
One Order of the British Empire went to Harry Grattidge,
of course. The other was awarded in
1978, to the son he rarely saw.
A year later, Harry Grattidge died in Wexham,
Buckinghamshire, at the age of 78 --- 25 years before I learned of his
existence.
I’m so glad I finally heard of him. He led me into one of the first of the many
great genealogical adventures I’ve had over the past dozen years.
I feel so grateful to those distant Grattidge cousins
for being such wonderful and gentle tutors.
And I’m grateful to you, for being such wonderful and
gentle listeners.
Well, I mentioned that one of George Mason
Hales’ sons was named Anthony, and it looks like he apprenticed with his uncle
and namesake.
The witnesses to this wedding probably are my relatives.
Whoops.
