Iceberg was just a tragic life advice for the daughter of the Titan Captain | History | News

A former spy of Mi5 is found dead by a shotgun wound by a terrified maid who shouts when he sees him lying in a pool of blood on his luxurious floor in London. A partially blind widow is attacked by a taxi outside her Kensington home. He was holding an umbrella at that time and only a couple of months before his 70th birthday.

A young RAF pilot is shot down and dies crashing into the sea, his body never recovers. Three years later, his twin sister dies, by polio, only one year after marrying.

It is difficult to imagine a family so harassed of drama and tragedy, but this is the story of Helen Melville Smith, known as Mel, and the tragic legacy of her family, which began with the most deadly maritime disaster in history.

Smith lost his mother, husband and two twins before being 49, but not before she lost her beloved father as a child. At age 14, he witnessed his first family tragedy of an unimaginable scale.

As hundreds of others, he was on the dock in Southampton desperate for news after the Titanic, the world’s largest oceanic lining, had hit an iceberg and sunk on his inaugural trip. Mel’s father was not only on board at that time, but he was the captain of the ship, and finally responsible for the 1,517 souls lost in the sea.

Captain Edward Smith became famous, or rather infamous, for his role in front of the unfortunate Titanic, the disastrous end of his previously successful career in the sea.

The British luxury passenger lining sank on April 14, 1912, on the road to New York City from Southampton, which resulted in the death of hundreds of passengers and crew, including Smith, who believes he shot himself or has fallen with the ship.

Only 706 people survived. Since then, countless books and films on the tragedy have been made that seeks to download its many myths and questions. But now a new book draws the legacy of the family that Smith left behind, in particular his only daughter, daughter.

Titanic Legacy: the captain, daughter and spy, by Dan E Parkes, is both a family memory and another book about the Titanic.

He deepens the life of Captain Eleanor’s widow, before being hit and killed in the street, the only son of the couple, and the fascinating riddle that surrounds the death of his son-in-law Sidney Russell-Coooke, a rich broker, Spy and Cambridge that seems to have had a relationship with the economist Maynard Keynes.

Through private and family photographs never published before, the book also tells how its inspiring daughter came out of the shadow of misfortune to fail her own path. Mel Smith died in 1973, at 75, a unique child, so Captain Smith’s lineage ended that day, but not before having led a full and fascinating life.

Author Dan Parkes insists: “Mel’s 75 years were not simply scored by tragedy. He led a full life, growing with a loving and attentive father, becoming a private pilot, a driver of fast cars, an artist muse and collector of Fine Arts, and living inside a “family” of suffragists, politicians, royalties, Russian spies, yacht tamping, gay lovers and spectacularly rich.

“This is the intriguing story of a legendary captain, who ironically said that once” it was not very good material for a story “, and a daughter who came out of the shadow of the misfortune of carving her own path.”

Helen Melville Smith was born on April 2, 1898 in 20 Alexandra Road, Waterloo, near Liverpool, the daughter of Master Mariner Edward John Smith and Sarah Eleanor Penington. He had just spent his 14th birthday when the Titanic left and would never see his father again. His body was never recovered and, worse, she and her mother Eleanor had to endure Smith becoming the focus of the fault of the disaster.

“A few days after the arrival in New York, the survivors of the titanic’s sinking already criticized Captain Smith. The women who lost their husbands saw the captain as responsible for their loss by not allowing their husbands to enter life boats, ”writes Parkes.

“It was reported that the second -class passenger, Mrs. Amin Jerwan, said on April 19, 1912, ‘All on the ship blamed the captain. The sailor who remailed our boat told me that he had followed the sea for 45 years and that he had never been in any type of accident before, except in the Olympic when she got into the hawk. That was under the same captain. ‘”

Under the head of ‘Sympathy for the Captain’s family’, the Philadelphia press of April 19, 1912 wrote: “There is no more pathetic figure in Southampton than Mrs. Edward J Smith, widow of the commander of the sick Titanic. The Smiths and her only daughter, a girl with golden hair and so far Vivaz of thirteen years (sic), are absolutely prostrated. They refuse to see any friend other than an intimate friend. “

The afflicted widow of Duel published a message outside the offices of White Star Line in Southampton that was subsequently reprinted by local and national newspapers under the heading ‘Moving message of the captain’s wife’.

Eleanor wrote: “To my poor patients. My heart overflows with pain for all and is loaded with sadness that you overwhelm with this terrible load that has pushed us. May God be with us and consue us all. Yours in deeper sympathy, Eleanor Smith.

She paid tribute to her lost husband at the beginning of an annual tradition: on the day of St. Jorge, she would send the mayor of Southampton a ‘eyelet of red and white roses’ in her memory.

His only daughter Mel, who, according to family letters published in the book, seems to have dealt with the death of his father more easily than his mother, married the rich runner of Sidney Russell-Coooke runners and the Simon and Priscilla twins, the grandchildren, the bad captain Smith, he should never know.

Mel married Cooke in Mayfair in 1822.

According to all the reports, his was a happy marriage, but she was in the hospital recovering from a minor operation when she died of a gunshot wound on July 3, 1930. It was known that she suffered a crash of shell, since she was then called after her time fighting in France during the First World War and had suffered a nervous background.

Several theories were presented in his research on whether he intended to shoot or was simply cleaning his weapon with the security capture when he shot, shooting him in the stomach. Interestingly, Cooke had gathered for lunch with his former lover, economist Maynard Keynes, just before his death. The couple had been together in Cambridge.

The companion Biographer Gary Cooper, who wrote the life and times of Captain Edward J Smith and the prologue of the new revealing book, commented: “One has to ask when reading the story how much Mel knew about her husband’s affairs and what she thought of her curious and inoporous death, which excited a lot of speculation.”

There is, of course, another possibility that the Russians killed Cooke, speculate the book. Unknown to most, possibly even for his wife, Cooke was a Mi5 spy, described as a “James Bond prototype.”

But only one year after losing her husband in such horrible and mysterious circumstances, Mel lost her mother. The partially blind Eleanor was hit and killed by taxi outside his home in Kensington in 1931.

When World War II broke out, Mel Simon’s son was an officer at the RAF. On March 23, 1944, the 20 -year -old flying officer was on a mission to attack a shipping convoy against Bremangerlandet, Norway.

He thought of fire, hit an engine and the plane crashed into the sea.

“Mel, of course, would have hoped to have survived in some way and return. But like his grandfather in 1912, his body was lost in the ocean and never recovered,” says Parkes.

Still recovering for the death of her husband, mother and son, three years later, Mel had to lose her only son. After only two years of marriage, Priscilla died on October 7, 1947 in Galashiels in Scotland, after a “short disease”, with only 24 years. It was confirmed that the disease was an acute paralitic polio.

Somehow, despite all these unimaginable tragedies, Mel managed to survive and prosper.

“She was the last survivor of the Smith line, but did not withdraw from the world, or let her life be measured by the penalties she had suffered,” says the biographer Gary Cooper.

“She reduced and submerged, organizing parties in her new home and enjoying her many and varied passions, while in the 1950s, when the interest in the Titanic was revived, she played her role in adding Gloss to history.

“In fact, Mel’s story brings the complete circle of the History of Titanic, from the sad days after the disaster, through the thin years in which people only tried to forget and forgive, until that time in the 1950s, when he put the paper pen and recalled what he could of his father for Walter Lord Lord, author of a night to remember, the book that possibly announced the Titanic in the popular culture.”

More books would continue, films were made and Titanic’s history would enter popular culture. Captain Smith’s own story, and that of his tragic family, would generally be subsumed … until now.

* Titanic Legacy: Captain, daughter and spy, from Dan E Parkes with a prologue by Gary Cooper (Amberley Publishing £ 25) is now available.