CAMPAIGN GROUPS AND PAIRS
'What are you sending?' he asked. 'CQD' Phillips replied.
The humour of the situation appealed to me. I cut in with a little remark that made us all laugh, including the captain. 'Send SOS,' I said. 'It's the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.' Phillips with a laugh changed the signal to SOS."
Both operators stayed at their post after their release, but were forced out onto the deck by the water surging into the wireless room: "I noticed as I came back from one trip that they were putting off women and children in lifeboats. I noticed that the list forward was increasing. Phillips told me the wireless was growing weaker. The captain came and told us our engine rooms were taking water and that the dynamos might not last much longer. We sent that word to the Carpathia. I went on deck and looked around. The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great scramble aft, and how poor Phillips continued to work through it I don't know. He was a brave man. I learned to love him that night and I suddenly felt a great reverence to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody else was raging about. I will never live to forget the work of Phillips during the last awful fifteen minutes. I looked out. The boat deck was awash. Phillips clung on sending and sending. He clung on for about ten minutes, or maybe fifteen minutes after the captain had released him. The water was then coming into our cabin. While he worked something happened I hate to tell about. I was back at my room getting Phillips's money for him, and as I looked out the door I saw a stoker, or somebody from below decks, leaning over Phillips from behind. Phillips was too busy to notice what the man was doing. The man was slipping the life belt off Phillips's back."
Bride and Phillips managed to deter the stoker and left the wireless room and headed out to the boat deck: "From aft came the tunes of the band. It was a ragtime tune, I don't know what... Phillips ran aft and that was the last I ever saw of him alive. I went to the place I had seen the collapsible boat on the boat deck, and to my surprise I saw the boat and the men still trying to push it off. I guess there wasn't a sailor in the crowd. They couldn't do it. I went up to them and was just lending a hand when a large wave came awash of the deck.
The big wave carried the boat off. I had hold of an oarlock and I went off with it. The next I knew I was in the boat. But that was not all. I was in the boat and the boat was upside down and I was under it. And I remember I realised I was wet through, and that whatever happened I must not breathe, for I was underwater.
I knew I had to fight for it and I did. How I got out from under the boat I do not know, but I felt a breath of air at last... I felt I simply had to get away from the ship. She was a beautiful sight then. Smoke and sparks were rushing out of her funnel. There must have been an explosion, but we heard none. We only saw the big stream of sparks. The ship was gradually turning on her nose, just like a duck does that goes down for a dive.”
Bride recalled that he could hear the band playing right up to the end. He also recollected that there was little suction when the ship went down. He was finally able to climb aboard the upturned hull of Collapsible B: "There was just room for me to roll on the edge. I lay there not caring what happened. Somebody sat on my legs. They were wedged in between slats and were being wrenched. I had not the heart to ask the man to move. It was a terrible sight all around - men swimming and sinking. I lay where I was, letting the man wrench my feet out of shape. Others came near. Nobody gave them a hand. The bottom- up boat already had more men than it would hold and it was sinking."
Harold Bride had survived but but suffered from badly frozen and crushed feet, due to the effects of the cold and the position in which he was sitting on the collapsible’s hull. He described the rescue by the Carpathia: "One man was dead. I passed him and went up the ladder, although my feet pained terribly. The dead man was Phillips. He had died on the raft from exposure and cold, I guess. He had been all in from work before the wreck came. He stood his ground until the crisis had passed, and then he collapsed, I guess. But I hardly thought that then. I didn't think much of anything. I tried the rope ladder. My feet pained terribly, but I got to the top and felt hands reaching out to me. The next I knew a woman was leaning over me in a cabin and I felt her hand waving back my hair and rubbing my face."
On the voyage to New York aboard Carpathia Bride worked together with the Carpathia’s wireless operator to send countless personal messages and names of the saved to land. After a spell in hospital in New York he returned to England and finally returned to work as a wireless operator. During the First World War, he served on the steamer Mona's Isle as a telegraphist. After the Great War he married Miss Lucy Downie in 1919, and they had three children, including Craftsman John Bride, who served during the Second World War with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He died in Scotland on 29 April 1956.
Sold together with White Star Line ‘Life Buoy’ belt buckle, gilt and enamel, minor blue enamel damage; a silver prize medal, the obverse inscribed ‘ Lucy D. Downie -Dux 1903-4- Stranraer Academy’, the reverse inscribed ‘Presented by Robert Young, Esq., Stranraer’; and a R.E.M.E. cap badge.
398
Pair: Private F. G. Fox, Royal Marine Light Infantry
BRITISHWAR AND VICTORYMEDALS (CH.20149 Pte. F. G. Fox. R.M.L.I.), with R.M.L.I. Cap and Collar Badges, and a Helmet Plate converted into a brooch, generally good very fine (lot)
£60-80
Frederick George Fox was born in Nottingham, in March 1898. He attested for the Royal Marines at the city of his birth, in August 1915. He served with the Royal Marine Brigade in the French theatre of war from May 1917, and received a gun shot wound to the left hand, 2 September 1918. Fox was discharged 21 October 1919.
Sold with group photograph including recipient in uniform.
www.dnw.co.uk
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