No story captures the enormity of the Titanic disaster quite like the story of the unknown child. When the crew of the recovery ship MacKay-Bennett found the toddler’s body floating amongst the Titanic’s wreckage, there was no way to identify him aside from his clothing and having fair hair. When no one came for the boy, the crew of the MacKay-Bennett took care of the little child’s funeral arrangements and carried him to his final resting place in Halifax’s Fairview Cemetery, placing a copper pendant in his coffin that read "Our Babe."

It wasn’t until 95 years after his death that DNA testing identified the child as British toddler Sidney Goodwin. Sadly, Sidney’s entire family – his parents and five siblings – also perished in the sinking and were never found.

Visitors are still moved by the death of Sidney Goodwin, who has come to represent all of the 53 children lost in the disaster. Flowers, teddy bears and coins are just a few of the small items often left at his gravesite, which are then gathered by the cemetery attendants and donated to the Children’s Wish Foundation in Sidney’s memory.

Photo: Unknown child's grave at the Fairview Cemetery

The Titanic disaster isn’t the only connection the White Star Line has to Nova Scotia. Much of the company’s growth and strategies were the result of direct competition from the Cunard Line, which was founded by Halifax resident Sir Samuel Cunard. White Star struggled in its early years – even declaring bankruptcy in 1867 – until an English businessman by the name of Thomas Henry Ismay took it over and set about building a new class of steamships to rival those of his competitors. However, the Cunard Line continually bested White Star when it came to getting passengers across the Atlantic faster. Ismay made the decision to instead focus on comfort and luxury, which was the decision that led to building large ships such as the Baltic, Adriatic and the Titanic – the largest ship in the world at the time of its sinking.

During the Great Depression, both the White Star and Cunard Lines faced intense financial difficulty as passenger volumes dropped. In 1934, under the direction and financial support of the British government, the two companies merged to become Cunard White Star Limited. After the Second World War, the owners of the original Cunard Line purchased the remaining assets of White Star and the company became simply known as Cunard. The company continues operating today with luxury liners such as the Queen Mary II and the Queen Elizabeth. In his home town of Halifax, the memory of Sir Samuel Canard and his contributions to the shipping industry are honoured in a statue of the man adjacent to the Cunard Centre, along the city’s waterfront, where it greets the many cruise ships that dock nearby.

Photo: Statue of Cunard, courtesy Halifax Port Authority

Hilda Slayter was born in 1882 to Dr. William and Clarina Slayter and grew up with 10 siblings in a house on Argyle Street in Halifax. In 1902, Hilda went to Europe to pursue a musical career and visit her brother, who was the captain of Queen Victoria’s private yacht. While she was travelling in England, she met Reginald Lacon, who was the son of a British MP and baron. Harry immediately fell in love with the girl; he proposed to her with the hope that she would join him as his wife on an island off the coast of British Columbia. Hilda accepted and prepared for her voyage back to Canada.

Unfortunately, that voyage was to take place on the Titanic. Hilda boarded the ship with her wedding trousseau and settled in for what she thought would be a comfortable crossing of the Atlantic.

Instead, Hilda would become one of the last persons safely off the ship, making a perilous escape on Lifeboat No. 13. In describing those last moments of the Titanic, she recounted how the cook’s boys took the oars to row the lifeboat away from the ship. After three-quarters of an hour, Hilda and the survivors watched the Titanic, aglow with lights, go under the water with a loud moaning wail. She said that they heard two explosions from the ship and, although they expected high waves, the water remained still.

Hilda would survive the Titanic sinking and go on to marry Reginald in British Columbia, where they lived together for over fifty years. She returned home to Halifax in 1964, where she died a year later and was buried in the family plot at Camp Hill.

Photo: Mayflower Club, Halifax, courtesy Nova Scotia Archives

George Henry Wright was born a farmer’s son in Dartmouth’s Tufts Cove. However, instead of following in his father’s footsteps, he became a publisher of trade directories and guides, earning a fortune through the sale of Wright’s World Business Directories.

Wright was an extensive traveller and known to have visited Australia, India, China, Japan, as well as the continents of South America and Africa. He eventually returned to live in Halifax and developed several businesses and properties. Many of his buildings can be seen today, including the St. Paul Building and Wright’s Marble Building on Barrington Street, as well as his residence at 989 Young Avenue.

Wright was in France when he learned of the Titanic’s maiden voyage and booked a berth on the ship. Little is known of his fate. His friends would later speculate that Wright might have slept through the alarms, as he was known to be a heavy sleeper. His body, if recovered, was never identified.

With his death, much of his $250,000 estate was left to family members and to several charities, including the National Council of Women of Canada. He also bequeathed $20,000 for a building to be erected to use as a place for people to enjoy ‘clean amusement’. Years later, the YMCA was able to access the funds to be used in building their new building in Halifax.

Photo: George Wright, courtesy Nova Scotia Archives

According to Halifax resident Hilda Slayter, a passenger aboard one of the last lifeboats to escape the Titanic, the band did indeed play on while the ship sank into the North Atlantic. There were two bands aboard the ship: a string quintet that played for the first class passengers and a string and piano trio that played near the a la carte restaurant. After the Titanic struck the iceberg, the musicians came together near the lifeboats on Deck A and played Ragtime and other selections to uplift passengers’ spirits.

While there is much dispute over whether or not they played “Nearer My God to Thee” as the boat sank beneath the waves, there is no doubt that the eight band members were heroes who went down with the ship. Two of those band members – John Clark and Jock Hume – are buried in Halifax. Clark was buried at Mount Olivet and Hume was interred at Fairview Cemetery, during which a military band played “Nearer My God to Thee” as a perhaps fitting tribute.

Photo: Band member's grave site at Mt. Olivet Cemetery

Among the Titanic’s passengers were immigrants seeking a new life in America, including a Lebanese family traveling to the New World. Nicola (Nicholas) Yarred was planning to sail with his two children to meet his wife and the rest of his family in the United States. However, Nicholas was not allowed to board the ship due to an eye infection. He instructed his 12-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, Elias and Jamila, to sail without him, reassuring them that he would follow on another ship to America. One the night of April 14th, the children were shaken awake by a large jolt. After being alerted to the ship’s perilous

situation, they made their way up from steerage to the second class deck. When they discovered the gates to first class locked and guarded, they climbed an iron ladder to reach the deck beside the lifeboats. Elias would later state that it was Jacob Astor IV, of the wealthy Astor family, who helped him and his sister into a waiting lifeboat. After arriving in New York City, the children were met by an older brother, Isaac Garrett, who took them to his home in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. The children lived with their uncle and aunt in Liverpool for a brief time before reuniting with their parents in Florida.

Photo: Recovered children's shoes at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic

Among the popular media stories in the days after the Titanic sinking was that of the Titanic orphans. Two young boys, aged two and four, survived the sinking but, without any identification, their identities remained a mystery. It wasn’t until their mother recognized their photographs in a local newspaper and travelled to New York to reclaim them that the story behind their voyage on the Titanic became known.

The boys’ father, Michel Navratil, was a Slovakian tailor living in France. When he separated from their mother, she took custody of the boys, though they were allowed to spend time with him on special occasions. One of those occasions was the 1912 Easter weekend. However, when the mother came to collect her sons after the holiday, the father and boys, Michel and Edmond, were no where to be found.

Navratil had assumed the name Louis Hoffman, given the boys new names of Louis and Loto, and booked second class passage on the Titanic from Southampton to New York. As the ship sank, the passenger known as Louis Hoffman passed his sons to crew members to put them on the Collapsible D life boat, which was later rescued by the ship Carpathia. It was the last they would see of their father.

The body of “Louis Hoffman” was recovered and laid to rest in the Baron De Hirsch Jewish Cemetery in Halifax. His true identity was sorted out in time to inscribe his real name as Michel Navratil on the grave marker. Many years later in 1996, his son Michel – then 88 years of age – came to Halifax to visit his father’s grave site for the first time. Michel reported that when he touched his father’s grave marker, he could hear the lullaby that his father used to sing to him as child.

Photo: Titanic exhibit at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic

After various attempts to discover the Titanic on the ocean’s floor, a Franco-American team located the images of the Titanic’s boilers on TV monitors in 1985. Since that time, various salvage expeditions have been sent to the site for the recovery of items from the ship. These expeditions have caused significant controversy as they conflict with the International Congress of Maritime Museums’ position that the salvage operations are disturbing a gravesite and an archaeological location. That position is also the one taken by the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax.

In 1991, a small Canadian-Russian team of scientists, including scientists from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia, went to the site in Russian Mir submersibles.

They brought up sections of the hull’s plates, which were then examined by the federal government and tested for what is termed conchoidal fractures.

It was determined that the metal became brittle when exposed to cold temperatures, such as those experienced in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. The finding could help to explain why the Titanic sank as quickly as it did.

This and subsequent dives also offered scientists the opportunity to observe the nature of the ocean floor and note the forms of life at depths that were once thought to be inhospitable.

The Bedford Institute of Oceanography houses a Titanic exhibit that includes a model of the Titanic as it appears today on the ocean floor and images from the 1991 expedition.

Photo: Titanic exhibit at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography

The port of Halifax was home to a number of ships that were specifically used to lay and repair underwater telegraph cables between Europe and North America. The men on these ships were experienced with the cold rough seas of the North Atlantic. Hours after the Titanic sank, the White Star Line commissioned these cable ships and their rugged crews to recover the bodies of victims.

The MacKay-Bennett was one such ship. It was dispatched with its crew and an undertaker, a chaplain, 125 coffins and 100 tons of ice and other supplies to aid in the recovery. They located 306 victims, buried 116 at sea and returned to Halifax with the others.

The Minia crew was not able to locate many victims, but they were able to pick up numerous pieces of wood debris. One of the crew members wrote to his sister that they picked up deck chairs, doors, chests of drawers, beautifully carved panels and other articles from the ship. Some of the crew members made personal items from the debris such as a picture frame and a cribbage board.

Crew diaries and mementos from their experiences with the aftermath of the Titanic sinking provide a touching reminder of her tragic end and the enormity of the disaster. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax will offer the opportunity to learn the significance of Halifax‘s role in the cable ship industry, the connection of the two cable ships to the Titanic story and global communications to the world in a special exhibit beginning in 2012.

Photo: Ship MacKay Bennett, courtesy Maritime Museum of the Atlantic

In 1997, director James Cameron released his blockbuster movie Titanic. The film renewed interest in the Titanic disaster and had fans and amateur historians alike poring over each scene to separate fact from fiction. So, when the grave of a “J. Dawson” was discovered in Halifax’s Fairview Cemetery, many people jumped to the conclusion that it was the real-life inspiration for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Jack Dawson.

In reality, J. Dawson was actually James Dawson, a 23-year-old native of Dublin, Ireland who signed onto the ship as a coal trimmer. Unlike DiCaprio’s American character who moved easily about the ship, the real Dawson toiled in the bowels of the Titanic, carefully moving piles of

coal from the storage area to the stokers – men who shovelled coal into the ship’s massive boilers to keep its steam engines running at full speed. It was hot, filthy and dangerous work, yet Dawson and his crewmates dutifully continued to keep the engines running as long as possible, even as the ship sunk.

Today, Dawson’s grave is one of the most visited sites in Fairview Cemetery. Titanic fans have been known to leave flowers and poems on his headstone, under the mistaken belief that he was the real Jack Dawson. While the truth is much different, there is no doubt that James Dawson and his fellow crewmen deserve the recognition for the sacrifices they made that fateful night in 1912.

Photo: J Dawson grave site at the Fairview Cemetery