Hi everyone,
I am so looking forward to reading the new book about Millvina. Thank you to Anthony Cunningham and all those, including Millvina, who helped to produce this book.
I would like to add a little bit to the story on Millvina's older brother, Bertram. He, as many of you know, was the sibling who WAS interested in the Titanic. Bertram attended various survivor conventions, granted interviews and corresponded with numerous researchers (myself included!) during the 1980s and early 1990s. Millvina had avoided the spotlight before 1988 and left it to Bertram to be the family "spokesman" on all things "Titanic."
Like Millvina, Bertram had no memory of the event, but he did relate a series of anecdotes to various researchers through the years. As he lived in Southampton, and worked down very close to where the Titanic left on her maiden voyage, it seems that Bertram got to know a number of surviving crew members from the sinking. I distinctly recall the Bertram said that through his friendship with George Beauchamp, a survivor who had been in boat #13, Bertram believed that he and his mother and sister were in the boat as well. Evidently, Beauchamp must have recalled a young mother and her children in boat #13, and seemingly convinced Bertram that it was probably his family. From that point on, Bertram always claimed he and his mother and sister were saved in boat #13. After Bertram's death in 1992, it was apparently learned that the report he had been given was speculative and that his family had not been in that particular lifeboat after new information emerged. In any event, I hope Bertram or somebody else wrote down some of the encounters the former had with so many of the Titanic's crew in Southampton. Bertram seemed to imply that a good deal of the conversations that went on between the old seamen and he took place in the local pubs of Southampton.
I know that both Bertram and Millvina said that while their mother never liked to speak of the Titanic because of the sadness it envoked, she also apparently avoided the subject out of her respect for her second husband, Mr. Burden. Millvina said it seemed a little awkward to be discussing a family matter in which her mother's first husband was involved. I often wondered if other Titanic families experienced the same situation. With regard to so many women who were widowed by the disaster, and those who remarried again, and their being children in the picture, was the first husband forgotten at least in the presence of the second?
I doubt Bertram Dean would have been able to shed any more light or contribute anything further on the experiences of his family any better than Millvina. I will always remember Bertram as a quiet man, who was polite and friendly to all those who had the opportunity to know him. He had a gentle spirit, and a voice that barely rose above a whisper, and he seemed to enjoy the attention that the Titanic brought him in his later years. I believe it was Bertram who kept coaxing and finally convinced Millvina into stepping out onto the stage from behind the curtain!
Congratulations again on the new book! I look forward to reading it.
Kind regards,
Mike Findlay
[Moderator's Note: This post and the four above it, originally posted as a separate thread in "Passenger Research", have been moved to the pre-existing one discussing the same book. JDT]
