General Lying-In Hospital
York Road, Lambeth, S.E. LondonApril 1st/1912
Dear Grandmother,
Enclosed is a picture of some English nurses for you and the folks there to take a peep at. Finish my course here in the Hospital tomorrow. Leave London soon - am going to sail on one of the biggest ships afloat; the Titanic. . . . - Love to all, Irene Colvin Corbett
Family photographs, mostly of young adults, adorn the surface of a gleaming black grand piano in a Salt Lake home. Framed in silver, a 9-decade-old oval portrait of a woman has been placed prominently in the foreground.
"Wouldn't Grandma Irene be proud of her posterity?" asks Don M. Corbett with a sweep of his hand.
Corbett, perhaps more than most, understands a key factor behind the insatiable interest in the ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic - a fascination stirred tremendously by the hit James Cameron movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett. Although the love story central to the film "Titanic" is fictional, the tragedy is true - real people lived; so many real people died.
One of those lost was Don Corbett's grandmother, Irene Colvin Corbett, a nurse from Provo, Utah, . . . the young woman whose black-and-white portrait is in the oval frame on his piano. For Corbett, this link has fueled a lifelong interest in the Titanic - and in his grandmother's sad tale. He hopes to write a book about her.
Renae Salisbury, too, has been mesmerized by the story of the Titanic since childhood, when she saw an earlier movie about the sinking, "A Night to Remember." Today she communicates that interest to her seventh-grade reading students at West Jordan Middle School, where, even before the movie "Titanic" was released, the two weeks allotted to a fall unit on the 1912 disaster more than doubled.
Salisbury gave her students "boarding passes" - tickets - onto a hypothetical Titanic, assigning to them names of actual passengers. The children were divided into "classes," as were the people on the ships: first class for the wealthy, second class for those of moderate means and - the majority - third class, or steerage. Many of these passengers were immigrants coming to America.
The children read a chapter about the tragedy in their course book, but expanded their study to documentary videos, books, National Geographic articles and even a CD of music played by the band on the ship. They discussed the Sept. 1, 1985, rediscovery of the Titanic, two miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, by Robert D. Ballard, Jean-Louis Michel and their U.S.-French exploration team, as well as subsequent attempts to recover items from the wreckage and proposals to raise the ship to the surface.
The students learned as much as they could about "their" passengers, who ranged from millionaires like John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim to Utahn Irene Corbett and a baby in third class. But not until toward the end of the unit did Salisbury reveal to them the fates of the Titanic passengers.
They were shocked that some lived and so many died. The children had come to know these people.
"It is so touching to the kids," their teacher said.
Slashed by an iceberg southeast of Newfoundland on its first and only voyage, between Southampton, England, and New York, the Royal Mail Ship Titanic sank early in the morning on April 15, 1912. The White Star liner - the largest ship of her time and described in newspapers of the era as "unsinkable" - did not carry enough lifeboats for the 2,220-plus passengers and crew on board; it was not required to. As a result, by some counts, 1,517 people died that night.
But the legend never has.
"Patently destructible in life," historian John Maxtone-Graham wrote, "the Titanic has proved indestructible in memory."
Indeed, the ship and its fate "took shape as one of the great mythic events of the 20th century," said Steven Biel, author of "Down With the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster" (W.W. Norton), an examination of the grasp the disaster has had, with ebbs and flows, upon the popular imagination for almost 86 years.
In the sensational tragedy's immediate aftermath, newspapers and magazines couldn't print enough about it. Then commentators - religious, ethnic and political - seized upon the event to champion or denigrate certain positions. "While we like to think," Biel wrote, "that the disaster's resonance is timeless - that it has to do with universal themes of humans against nature, hubris, false confidence, the mystery of the sea, hydrophobia, heroism and cowardice - the Titanic seared itself into American memory not because it was timeless but because it was timely."
Books, some of them wildly inaccurate, were quickly published (Renae Salisbury has one of the earliest in her growing collection, "Story of the Wreck of the Titanic," offered before the year was through). Poets good and bad tackled the subject, and folksingers reworked the tale - one such song giving Biel the title for his book. The first movie, "Saved from the Titanic," featuring survivor Dorothy Gibson, was in theaters a month after the accident. Eventually, though, interest subsided.
A 1953 film, also titled "Titanic" and starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck, freshened interest, but Walter Lord's 1955 book "A Night to Remember" is credited with rekindling widespread fascination. A television version, then a movie with Lord's title, starring Kenneth More, followed, as did a Meredith Willson musical and film, the latter starring Debbie Reynolds, about one of the most famous survivors - "The Unsinkable Molly Brown."
Cameron's "Titanic" initially gained notoriety as the most expensive motion picture ever made, but has since proved mega-successful. It received a record 14 Academy Award nominations last week, including one for best picture, and has already become the third-biggest domestic moneymaker of all time, having earned more than $370 million. Many predict it will become No. 1, topping "Star Wars" and "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial."
But bolstering interest are a number of fan clubs and historical organizations, including the New England-based Titanic Historical Society; an unending stream of books and magazine articles; and an amazing proliferation of sites on the World Wide Web, from art-oriented pages like Paul Quinn's "In Memoriam: R.M.S. Titanic" (www.wwa.com/(tilde)dsp/titanic) to Philip Hind's incredibly detailed "Encyclopedia Titanica" (www.titanic-online.com/links/).
The latter includes separate pages on many of the great ship's passengers and crew members, including one on Mrs. Walter H. Corbett - Don Corbett's "Grandma Irene."
Auburn-haired Irene Colvin Corbett "was a venturesome, courageous woman and one who sought out a good education," her grandson says today. But a decision to go to England to further her medical education divided her family and her community.
A former teacher at Payson's Peteetneet School, Irene Corbett, then 30 and the mother of three - Walter C., 5; Roene, 3; and Mack, 18 months - had become a nurse and midwife. Provo's physicians encouraged her to improve her knowledge of obstetrics, said Don Corbett. "They needed the help, and she was willing. It would help the family, but she was also interested in being good to her fellowman and serving the community."
Her father and mother, Bishop and Mrs. Levi A. Colvin of Provo's Pleasant View Ward, had also encouraged Irene, and supported her interest to go to London's General Lying-In Hospital for a six-month course of study. In fact, according to family papers, they sold their property to raise money for her expenses.
Her husband, Walter Harris Corbett, however, and his family did not want her to go overseas. Her mother-in-law was a niece of Joseph F. Smith, and, in a meeting with Irene and her father, the LDS Church leader recommended that she get training in Philadelphia instead.
"But she said, `No, I want to go to London, where they do the best training,' " Corbett said.
He wouldn't describe his grandmother as "headstrong." He knows she was interested in the women's suffrage movement of the time, in both the United States and England. "She was assertive, we would say," Corbett said, "and firm in her position as to what she should be doing and what her own destiny should be."
So off she went, in late 1911, leaving the children with her parents.
The journey to England was fraught with obstacles and delays. "On the way over, in Wyoming actually, the train was stalled by a vicious snowstorm," Corbett said. Fog delayed her on the St. Lawrence River, and her outward liner, the S.S. Virginian, had to turn back to the coast after encountering high seas. She was one of the few aboard not to become severely seasick, her grandson added.
Once in England, Irene Corbett tackled her studies with typical energy. She described her experiences in a letter to her sister Kady on Feb. 28, 1912. She wrote:
"You would be alarmed if you knew what little time I have to think of home and the children. Can just hear little Mack. How I do love that baby. . . . Am doing three weeks on district instead of two weeks because that suits me better than night duty. One little fat mother gave me twins to care for the other day. I am walking and riding around in the slums of the Southeast part of London - now each day. Working like at home and getting real experience. The poor creatures live in tucked up rooms and sometimes little or nothing to eat. There are little fleas or black bugs in their houses that get on you and go home on you. I'm all bit up with the beastly things. Am giving one mother 2 pence everytime she has the baby washed because when I take it on my lap they jump on me. . . ."
By April, Irene Corbett had finished her classes and was ready to go home. She booked passage again on the Virginian, planning to return with some LDS missionaries. But then she had an opportunity to cross the Atlantic on a new White Star oceanliner, the Titanic, which she described as an American ship, as the line was owned by financier J.P. Morgan. "She tried to book first class," her grandson said. "It was full, and she had to take second class."
She sent one last letter home on April 1, 1912. Don Corbett still has it, passed along to him after his father's death. She wrote in a steady cursive script about her homeward plans on a postcard picturing Picadilly Circus, "a place in the best part of London." Instead of putting a stamp on it, she placed the card in an envelope with a photograph of her 15-member graduating class at the London Lying-In Hospital.
In the message to her own grandmother, Mary Colvin, the young nurse said:
I think you would much rather live in Utah than here in England. I would anyway. But I am so glad to have this privilege and shall enjoy the trip home, which will be quite different to the one my dear grandmother took years ago with little comfort.
Irene Corbett's family is said to have received the letter on April 15, 1912 - the day the Titanic sank, but before news of the disaster had reached them.
The Utah nurse was, notes the Web's Philip Hind, "one of 14 second class women who perished in the sinking." The family believes that, as a nurse, she felt compelled in the midst of the mayhem "to think of her family, but also of those in need," Corbett said. "Maybe she thought, `I can do this and make it safely off and take care of people who need medical attention.' "
In the aftermath, custody of her three children eventually fell to her parents, who had moved from Provo to Loa in central Utah. Her husband, Walter, remarried two years later, but he died in 1917 on the operating table during surgery following a mine accident.
Her oldest son, Walter C. Corbett, lives still in a Salt Lake nursing home. Roene, who also became a nurse, and Mack, once a sports writer for the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune who went into public relations with the Atomic Energy Commission, have passed away.
Don M. Corbett is the son of "little Mack," who was only a toddler when his mother, Irene Colvin Corbett, died in the wreck of the Titanic.
Renae Salisbury asked the children in one of her West Jordan classes to raise their hands if they'd seen the movie "Titanic." Almost all did so. "How many have seen it again?" she asked. Several excitedly responded - some have seen it four or five times.
"There are a few whose parents won't let them go see it," the teacher said, acknowledging the students who had not been to the epic film at all.
But most of what the 12- and 13-year-olds know about the Titanic they learned in school, or from books and videos they tracked down as a result of this monthlong unit.
"These kids can't get enough of it," Salisbury said.
And their teacher has found ways to make the tale applicable to a variety of disciplines, including mathematics and science, and especially history.
The children learned a great deal about social hierarchies, for instance, when they were divided proportionally into first, second and third classes.
In one lesson, Salisbury talked about the differing menus, and gave her students a firsthand experience: She served her first-class make-believe passengers chocolates; those in second class received Jolly Ranchers. The third-class pretend-passengers got saltine crackers. "I saw some long faces when we passed those out," she said.
The world at large also learned from the Titanic's destruction: Shipboard Marconi radios were subsequently manned around the clock; lifeboats were required for all aboard; an international iceberg patrol was established.
In addition, Salisbury's students discussed several moral questions considered by the world at large.
Should a captain go down with his ship, as Edward J. Smith did on the Titanic - his last official voyage before a scheduled retirement?
Should companies be held responsible for faulty construction? Researchers have discovered that the design, the steel plating and even the rivets may have been flawed on the Titanic.
Was false advertising involved in the tragedy? The Titanic was perceived as "unsinkable," though that may have been more the fault of the popular press than the White Star Line.
And, now that the wreckage has been rediscovered, should the drowned liner be left alone on the Atlantic seabed as a memorial to the tragedy's victims? That is the wish of rediscoverer Robert Ballard. Should some artifacts be removed? Or could, and should, the Titanic be raised again above the waves?
"How many feel it should be left alone?" Salisbury asked one class. Twenty-one hands went up. But a few disagreed.
"I'm kind of glad they brought some things up," said Jeniece Caulfield. There is much to be learned from such items, she added - but she does not think the ship itself should be refloated.
But mostly the children learned that the passengers and crew members on the Titanic were living, breathing people.
Again Salisbury asked the students to raise their hands if they - or rather their assigned passengers - lived. Then she asked if they died.
"I `died,' " said one excited boy. "Me too," said another.
Some of the kids had tales to tell of bravery and dramatic rescues: a man pulled into a lifeboat from the frigid sea; a baby thrown by one woman into the arms of another.
Renae Salisbury was moved by the new movie about the 1912 tragedy, and by the love story between the fictional lovers portrayed by Winslett and DiCaprio.
However, "I was probably one of the very few people in the sold-out audience who were not in tears while watching the blockbuster `Titanic,' " Salisbury wrote in a recollection passed along to the Deseret News. "Not because I'm old and cynical or hardhearted and unromantic, and certainly not because James Cameron failed to pull out every stop between soapy sentimentality and ultimate tragedy. You see, I had already succumbed to my emotions a few months earlier in September while poring over the passenger manifest in preparation of a unit I planned for my seventh-grade reading students at West Jordan Middle School."
She was searching for - and found - the name of Irene Colvin Corbett, "our Utah connection," and has been seeking more details about this other teacher and nurse ever since.
The movie's "Rose and Jack are interesting," Salisbury said during one class, "but it's the real stories that make me cry."