Good post above. Very valid points.
My first thought was also the „mass shooting“ on deck but then again we can’t really distinguish what was claimed by survivors and how much of it was just made up by the journalists. So I’m looking more for survivors who really went out of their way to go and make wrong statements, or maybe even looked for money and attention with their story. I kind of doubt any survivor was like that, but seeing that even Bride was gived huge sum of money, that really raises my eyebrow a bit, though of course I can’t blame them for accepting this money especially in those times.
I confess that I had not thought of the monetary angle till I learned about NYT's offer to Bride; other papers might have learned about it and the report could then have leaked out among the survivors. But we also have to look at it from
their perspective; those were unsympathetic times compared with today and the surviving victims of the disaster received only small compensations at best. The lower echelon crew were probably worst off, even temporarily losing their livelihood when the ship foundered. Most were poorly paid and as for the passengers, many moving to settle in America lost relatives, friends and most of their possessions in the disaster. Under those circumstances, offers of money for their stories would have been tempting and I would not be surprised if reporters encouraged their "clients" to make their stories as colorful as possible.
About the shooting business, most
sensible researchers agree that
IF there was an incident where one or two men where fatally shot by an officer before he turned the gun on himself, then the much debated one on the starboard forward side in the final minutes would have been the
only one. The issue here is that a lot of survivors had
heard shots being fired earlier, first by Lowe as Lifeboat #14 was lowered, then probably by Murdoch when there was disturbance during loading of
Collapsible C and then by Wilde or Lightoller near
Collapsible D. But all those were warning shots either along the side of the ship or into the air and so did not hit anybody. But if the final shooting incident involving people being killed really did happen, a few survivors would have witnessed it just liked they claimed later. Those people in turn would have mentioned it to other survivors on board the
Carpathia, including those who had heard the previous (harmless) shots. As you can imagine, the net result very well would have been for many of the latter to imagine that what they heard was the fatal shooting and if newspapers later added incentives for their stories, you have a classic Spaghetti Western type climax that Sergio Leone could not have improved upon.
That story you mentioned of Alice Cleaver being a child killer as claimed by a fellow survivor, is already really intense and the kind of story I had in mind
Understood. For the record, both Sarah Daniels and Alice Cleaver were from London and were hired by the Allisons around the same time. It is not known whether the two women knew each other from before, but I have read a lot of accounts that there were issues between them during the voyage. It might well have been related to their job descriptions like some have conjectured. But the bottom line is that
Baby Trevor's nurse was Alice
Catherine Cleaver who had worked as a nursemaid for rich and influential families since her teens and had a squeaky clean record. She would have had to for a methodical man like
Hudson Allison to not only hire her as a nursemaid for his heir, but also entrust almost all responsibility for the baby's care to her. It could be that was what started Sarah Daniels' resentment towards her younger colleague, compounded by Alice's refusal to allow Sarah access to
baby Trevor on board the
Carpathia. Being from London herself, Daniels would have known about the recent case involving Alice
Mary Cleaver, only some 2 years older than the nursemaid and the actual woman who reportedly killed her own illegitimate child when under a fit of depression. IMO (and that only), Sarah Daniels used that bit of information to extract her revenge against Alice Cleaver after the survivors reached New York.
Speaking of similar lies by survivors, there is the strong probability that Elizabeth Dowdell, nanny to Virginia Martin-Emanuel, told one such story when she (Dowdell) was a guest at a special screening of the film
A Night To Remember in the late 1950s. As you know, Dowdell and her charge Virginia Martin were Third Class passengers on the
Titanic and were both rescued in Lifeboat #13. Upon reaching New York, the then 6 year old Virginia was taken charge of by her maternal grandparents, Mr & Mrs Weil, and soon lost contact with her nanny. Elizabeth Dowdell, who had complained about having to rub shoulders with Chinese survivors on board the
Carpathia, went back to working as a domestic maid in New York and downsized her age from 52 to 35 years when she married salesman Harry Fierer in 1933. During the aforementioned special screening of ANTR in 1958, Dowdell is supposed to have claimed that her former charge, Virginia Martin-Emanuel, was now living in London under the name of
Vera Hanson. The real Virginia Martin actually had died in 1936 aged only 30 years as Phil Hind's research has proved beyond any doubt, but that did not stop a woman really named
Vera Hanson from claiming that
she was actually Virginia. Considering that the claim was first made a few years before the film was released, one has to wonder if Elizabeth Dowdell was somehow involved in the scam.
Unfortunately, some poorly researched books have contributed to the infamy of some of the lies perpetrated by survivors. Andrew Wilson's
Shadow Of The Titanic gives pathetically silly "evidence" to support Vera Hanson's claim while the truly terrible
Titanic: Women And Children First by Judith Geller is even worse, making all sorts of melodramatic accusations against poor Alice Cleaver amongst other things.