Ruth Becker
Ruth Becker was 12 years old in 1912 when she and her family travelled on the Titanic. After the sinking, Ruth attended high school and college in Ohio, after which she taught high school in Kansas.
She married a classmate, Daniel Blanchard, and after her divorce twenty years later, she resumed her teaching career. Like most survivors, she refused to talk about the sinking and her own children, when young, did not know that she had been on the Titanic.It was only after her retirement, when she was living in Santa Barbara, California, that she began speaking about it, granting interviews and attending conventions of the Titanic Histrorical Society. In March of 1990, she made her first sea voyage since 1912, a cruise to Mexico. She passed away later that year at the age of ninety.
Richard Becker
Richard Becker was Ruth's younger brother and was two years old at the time of the disaster. Richard became a singer and in later life a social welfare worker. Widowed twice, he passed away in 1975.
Nellie Becker
Nellie Becker was the children's mother. She was married to a missionary stationed in India and her three children were sailing to America for treatment of an illness Richard had contracted in India. Once in America, she and her three children settled in Benton Harbour, Michigan, until her husband's arrival from India the following year. It was apparent to him and the children that her personality had changed since the disaster. She was far more emotional and was given to emotional outbursts. Until her death in 1961, she was never able to discuss the Titanic disaster without dissolving into tears.
Marion Becker
Marion contracted tuberculosis at a young age and died in Glendale, California in 1944.
Olaus Abelseth
Olaus tried vacationing in Canada to calm his nerves following his ordeal with the Titanic, but found that simply going back to work was just what he needed. Returning to the South Dakota farm he had first homesteaded in 1908, he raised cattle and sheep for the next 30 years before retiring in North Dakota where he died in 1980.
Madeline Astor
Madeline inherited from her husband the income from a five-million-dollar trust fund and the use of his home on Fifth Avenue and in the Newport so long as she did not marry. In August 1912, she gave birth to a son with whom she was pregnant on the Titanic, and she named him after her husband, John Jacob Astor. She relinquished the Astor income and mansions during World War I to marry William K. Dick of New York, and by him she had two more sons. She divorced Dick in Reno, Nevada in 1933 to marry Italian prize fighter Enzo Firemonte. Five years later this marriage also ended in divorce. She died in Palm Beach, Florida in 1940 at the age of 47.
Richard and Sally Beckwith
Ricahrd and Sally continued to travel and entertained frequently at their homes in New York City and Squam Lake, New Hampshire. Richard died in New York in 1933 and his wife in that city in 1955.
Joseph Boxhall
Joseph was 4th officer on the Titanic and attained a command with the Royal Navy but was never made captain while in the merchant service. He left the sea in 1940 and in 1958 acted as technical advisor to the film "A Night To Remember." Following his death in 1967, his ashes were scattered over the ocean in the vicinity of the Titanic's sinking place.
Harold Bride
Harold Bride was the Titanic's wireless man. He kept a very low profile in the years following the disaster. World War I found him as a wireless operator on the tiny steamer, the Mona's Isle. He later embarked on a career as a salesman before retiring to Scotland where he passed away in 1956.
Molly Brown
Molly's life took a surprising turn after the sinking. Previously, her efforts to be accepted by the Denver society had been unsuccessful, the selflessness and heroism she had shown on the Titanic prompted her neighbours, for a short time, to open their doors to her. In 1914, she was named a otential candidate for Congress. As time passed on, however, she grew increasingly eccentric. Her husband died interstate and she found herself at odds with her children over his money. In 1932, at the age of 65, she died suddenly in New York City after a stroke. It was only after her death, when she became the subject of the hit Broadway musical and film, "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" that she gained some of the fame she would have so enjoyed in life.
Fredrick Fleet
He was the lookout who first sighted the iceberg that sank the Titanic. He left the sea in 1936. He worked for Harland and Wolff's Southampton shipyard during World War II, after which he became a night watchman for the Union Castle Line. As he moved into old age, he sold newspapers on a street corner in Southampton. In 1965, despondant over his finances and the recent loss of his wife, Fleet took his own life.
J. Bruce Ismay
Ismay retired as planned from the International Mercantile Marine in June 1913, but the position of managing director of the White Star Line that he had hoped to retain was denied him. Survivng the Titanic disaster had made him far too unpopular with the public. He spent his remaining years alternating between his homes in London and Ireland. Because Ismay had never had many close friends, and subsequently had few business conatcts, it was mistakenly easy to assume that he had become a recluse. He did enjoy being kept informed of shipping news but those around him were forbidden to speak of the Titanic. He died in 1937.
[Back]