Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Mark Baber, post: 275945, member: 79063"] [B]The New York Times, 6 October 1946[/B] CAPT. HADDOCK DEAD, OLYMPIC EX-MASTER --- SOUTHAMPTON, England, Oct. 5 (AP)---Capt. Herbert James Haddock, a former commodore of the old White Star Line, died today. His age was 85. During the first World War he commanded a dummy fleet of wooden dreadnoughts and battle cruisers. As commodore he served with the Britanic, (sic) German, (sic) Cedric, Oceanic and Olympic. Captain Haddock, a former aide de camp to the King, was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1902. In 1893 he married Mabel Bouchette of Quebec, who died in 1935. In April 1912, Captain Haddock was in command of the White Star liner Olympic en route from New York to Southampton when her sister ship, the Titanic, westward bound, while making her maiden voyage, struck an iceberg and sank in one of the greatest ocean disasters. The Olympic was 500 miles away and hastened to the rescue but resumed her course when 100 miles from the scene of the sinking when informed there was nothing to be gained by continuing to that point. For a time the Olympic wireless room acted as a sort of clearing housefor radio messages relating to the accident. Captain Haddock was an exceedingly modest man who hated to see his name in the newspapers. -30- (MAB Note: Like E.J. Smith, Haddock was never officially designated as White Star's Commodore, but, also like Smith, was frequently referred to as the commodore in deference to his status after Smith's death as the line's senior commander. Haddock commanded Olympic from April 1912 until the beginning of World War I, and was Olympic's commander during her failed effort to rescue HMS Audacious in October 1914. Olympic was then laid up, and the Admiralty placed Haddock in charge of a dummy fleet of merchant ships, stationed at Belfast. According to Mills' HMHS Britannic: The Last Titan, Harold Sanderson tried to have Haddock re-assigned in 1915, to command Britannic II when she entered service as a hospital ship, but could not succeed in convincing the Admiralty to release Haddock from his Belfast duties. As far as I can tell, Haddock did not return to White Star, at least in a command position, after the war. I have no post-1914 reference to him in my White Star history notes, and don't recall coming across any references to him in any post-war research.) MAB [/QUOTE]

Verification: In which year did the Titanic sail?