In 1913, a year after the disaster, a memorial tablet for Smith had been placed in the Town Hall in his hometown of Hanley and Smith’s widow, Eleanor, had written a letter to the editor of the Staffordshire Sentinel newspaper thanking the people of Hanley for their generous contributions to the public fund to pay for the construction, and placement, of the memorial.Ī similar fund was raised for a statue of Smith to be sculpted and, during this fund raising, a committee was put in place to select a location for the placement of the statue. Smith had married Sarah Eleanor Pennington in 1887 and they had one child, Sarah Melville, the family living in Highfield, Southampton, where the majority of the Whie Star Line ships sailed from, although the company offices were in Liverpool.
He joined the prestigious White Star Line shipping company in 1880, moving swiftly up the ranks, and becoming their Commodore (senior ship’s captain) in 1904. After leaving school he joined the Merchant Navy and then the Royal Navy Reserve. Smith had no link to Lichfield and had never, to anyone’s knowledge, even visited the city prior to his untimely death – so why was Lichfield chosen as the location of the statue installed in his memory?Įdward John Smith was born in January 1850 in Hanley, one of the towns that make up Stoke on Trent, to his parents Edward and Catherine. Just over two years later, in July 1914, a large crowd gathered in the Museum Grounds (now Gardens) of Lichfield’s Beacon Park to witness the official unveiling of a statue dedicated to the memory of Edward Smith. The commander of the ship, Captain Edward John Smith, went down with the ship, refusing to leave it, along with a number of his senior officers and crew.
Did the captain of the titanic died series#
Tragically over 1,500 of the 2,200 passengers and crew lost their lives, mainly due to a series of miscaculations, lack of life-boats, poor organisation and, probably, an arrogant view held by the ship builders that an accident of such a scale could never happen to a vessel described as ‘unsinkable’ (although it was later stated that this term was never applied to the Titanic prior to it setting sail, but only after its disastrous demise). In the early hours of 15 April 1912 the RMS Titanic sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg just a few hours away from reaching the coast of the United States of America on her maiden, and ultimately final, voyage from Southampton to New York City. On 29 July 1914 a statue was unveiled in the Museum Grounds of Beacon Park which started over 100 years of debate as to why it stands in a Lichfield park rather than 30 miles away in a town of Stoke on Trent – the statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the ill-fated RMS Titanic…
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