The 15th April 2024 marks the 112th anniversary of the most famous shipwreck of all and a chance to look at the fate of St Ives’ Titanic passengers. Of 2,233 on board, 7 were from our town. AGNES DAVIES (née FRIGGENS), her son JOHN and friend MAUDE SINCOCK (née ROBERTS), were among the 705 picked up by RMS Carpathia. As Titanic broke apart and sank, Maude thought the loud noise she heard was the boilers exploding. Agnes tells what happened next:
My older son Joseph (Nicholls) had dressed and he came to the stateroom and put lifebelts on us. Through all this time we had received no warning from the steward, no orders to prepare for anything like what we were to experience. Had it not been for our curiosity to learn what was going on we might have perished. We went on deck about 12.15 and my son (John) and myself were placed in the 3rd lifeboat.
Joseph helped to place us in the boat and asked permission to enter it himself, this being refused with the threat that he would be shot if he attempted to get in. I pleaded with the officers in vain that he be allowed to come with me. There were about 50 in the boat but there was room for more. After we were lowered away and before the boat left the ship some men entered it by sliding down the davit ropes. The men in charge of the boat rowed as hard as they could to get away from the ship. By the time she sank, which was at 1.45, it seemed as if we were miles away, although I could hear the screams, cries and moaning of the drowning passengers.
They spent the night in that lifeboat among the icebergs and when morning came a sailor called out “That’s a ship” as he saw a speck appear on the horizon. The lifeboat rowed toward Carpathia and it was only when she was aboard that Mrs Davies learned that Joseph was among those who perished. Agnes married Richard Henry Nicholls in Penzance in 1886, a union that produced 3 children, one of whom was Joseph Charles. Listed on the 1901 census as a widow, she remarried insurance agent Robert Davies in 1903. John Morgan was their only child.
The St Ives newspaper of 3 May 1912 carried the following letter written by Maude on the Carpathia to her mother in Cornwall:
I am saved but have lost everything. I must however be thankful for my life. I have not a penny and no clothes. I was thrown on board a little boat in my nightdress and boots. I had no stockings on. We were in this little boat in the middle of the ocean for 6 hours. And I was nearly frozen when we were picked up. I shall be a pretty sight when I land.
We were rescued by a passing ship, Carpathia. Titanic struck the iceberg just before midnight and was underwater at about 2 o’clock. There were over 1,000 persons on board when she foundered. Mrs Davies and her son John Morgan (of the Stennack, St Ives) are saved, but we have seen nothing of Joe. We think he is drowned. We have not seen anything of the other ‘boys’ (William Berriman and William Carbines) who left St Ives. We could hear the screams from the men as the Titanic was sinking. I think there are hundreds drowned.
Mrs Davies told me to ask you to send a message to Balnoon to tell her aunt she is saved, but that we don’t know anything about Joe. I don’t know what I shall do when I get to New York. I am frightened to death nearly, and afraid I shall catch my death of cold by the time I get to Hancock. I will write again as soon as possible and tell you more news. I don’t know where they are going to put us when we get to New York.
Your loving daughter,
Maud
She was also known as Maud or Maudie and only stopped making pasties when she was 92, passing away a year later in 1984.
John and his mother settled in Hancock, Michigan. Agnes married an English-born firefighter named Richard Edwards in 1921, dying of cancer in 1933 aged 70. John took his own life aged 48 in December 1951, almost certainly from depression due to his divorce a few weeks earlier, by barbiturate poisoning while working in a Detroit drugs store. He was buried 4 days later in Lakeview Cemetery, Calumet, Houghton, Michigan.
The remaining 4 were travelling to mining work in Michigan.
The only repatriated body was that of WILLIAM CARBINES (19). Willie boarded the Titanic at Southampton as a second-class passenger (ticket number 28424, £13) with his friend William John Berriman and they were planning to join Carbines’ brothers Robert and John in Calumet. His body was among 306 recovered from the sea by the cable repair ship Mackay-Bennett and identified by his 2 brothers. On 10 May it was taken aboard the White Star Line’s Oceanic for transport to Southampton, arriving by train at St Ives on 27 May, met by a long concourse of people on the terrace overlooking the railway. Over 500 mourners paid their respects as he was interred in his grandparents’ (William and Anne Carbines) grave in Barnoon Cemetery on 30 May. A few weeks later his parents suffered further heartache when their youngest child George died on 24 June.
The body of Agnes’ older son JOSEPH CHARLES NICHOLLS (19) was recovered from the sea on 23 April by the MacKay-Bennett, the first of 4 ‘mortuary’ ships chartered by White Star Line to search for bodies in the aftermath of the disaster. He was buried at sea as identification proved impossible. Possessions removed from the body were taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia and identified as belonging to Joe Nicholls by Carbines’ brothers. There is a memorial to him in the same Calumet Cemetery where his mother Agnes and younger stepbrother John are also buried.
The body of WILLAM JOHN BERRIMAN (23) if recovered, was never identified. He is the only one of the 4 without a permanent memorial. His family suffered more heartbreak in the First World War when his brother Samuel was killed in action on 4 September 1916 while serving in the 8th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment.
STEPHEN CURNOW JENKIN (32) was born at Nanjivey on The Stennack, emigrating with his elder brother to Houghton County, Michigan in about 1903 where he worked in the copper mining industry. They subsequently became U.S. citizens. He returned to St Ives in the summer of 1911 to visit his family. He was not due to return to the USA on Titanic but coal strikes meant his second-class reservation (ticket number C.A. 33111, £10 10s) was switched. He had misgivings about the new ship and left his valuables, including his watch, with his parents in case anything should happen to him. A postcard he sent from the ship read as follows:
Dear Father and Mother and Sisters. I am sending another photo of the same ship. This is the 3rd one I sent you. This goes from Queenstown and the last one I sent from Cherbourg, the first one from Southampton. They are three different views of the same ship. I am not sick yet. She is a nice ship to ride on. I’ll write from New York next time.
From your loving son,
Stephen.
His body was not found but he is remembered on the family headstone at Barnoon. Messrs Carbines and Nicholls lived at The Stennack. William Berriman lived at Hellesveor.
In all 12 ‘Cousin Jacks’ were lost in the disaster. Fairview Lawn Cemetery near Halifax, Nova Scotia is the largest single resting place for Titanic victims. See the video below for a video taken at the ‘Titanic Cemetery’.
30 of the 121 graves are unidentified.
Article and video by: Tony Mason
Featured image: RMS Titanic departing Southampton on April 10, 1912 (Wikimedia Commons).
