Exhibit Gives Belated Honor to Titanic’s Mail Clerks

Among the 1,500 people who died on the doomed Titanic were five mail clerks, men who gave their lives trying to drag huge mail sacks up to the deck of the sinking liner in the vain hope of transferring them to another ship.

The National Postal Museum opened an exhibit last month recalling their sacrifice.

Entering the exhibit, a visitor hears a strange sound like radio static. A pattern quickly emerges --static and quiet, static and quiet, static and quiet.

The sound of the great ship’s dying cry for help is heard again.

“It’s not the click-click-click you associate with Morse code. That’s a telegraph,” explained museum director James Bruns. “We’ve re-created the actual Marconi radio signal that would have been heard by other vessels that night.”

As that signal raced through the air, alternating the new distress call S0S with the older CQD, a band of men working on a slower but more lasting means of communication struggled to save the mail from rising water.

Steward Albert Theissinger, who survived the sinking, reported helping the clerks bring mail to the deck for a while. He turned to other tasks when the frigid water in the mail room reached waist high, he recalled, but the mail clerks worked on, trying to save the letters and parcels.

The exhibit opens with portraits of the five and a discussion of the vessel’s sinking and rediscovery.

Nothing on display at the National Postal Museum was raised from the ocean bottom, Bruns stressed, pointing out that the Smithsonian Institution considers the wreck a memorial to those who died that should not be disturbed.

But visitors can see the cracked pocket watch that belonged to one of the clerks, John Starr March, recovered from his body found floating in the sea. The watch stopped at 1:27 a.m. the morning of April 15, 1912.

More artifacts came from the body of clerk Oscar Scott Woody-- his miniature watch, four postal “facing slips” used to mark bundles of mail, travel orders instructing him to sail on the Titanic, his pocketknife, his mail chain and keys.

Once these items were gathered together in a small white bag stamped with a blue “167,” designating Woody’s as the 167th body recovered. His belongings were placed in that bag for shipment to his wife.

The bag is included in the exhibit, with the official notification card informing his wife that his body had been recovered and telling her how to obtain his effects.

The exhibit also touches those who survived, with a giant red-and-white-striped mail sack of the type used at the time for general mail shipments.

As the liner Carpathia arrived and began picking up survivors, its crew found that many women with infants and small children could not climb rope ladders up the side of the huge ship. A mail sack from Carpathia was used to lift the children safely aboard.

A video shot by a submersible visiting the wreck includes scenes of the flooded mail room and some of more than 3,000 sacks of mail still there.

There have been discussions of trying to recover the mail, Bruns said, but it raises complex legal questions.

During the trip the mail clerks were in the process of transferring the mail from British to U.S. custody. The question arises as to whether the U.S. Postal Service or the Royal Mail would take possession, he said. In addition, few who sent mail, or were to receive it, would be alive today, so who would receive it would get complicated.

On the other hand, he said, when an item is mailed there is a promise of delivery.

Besides Woody and March, the mail contingent on Titanic included William Logan Gwinn--all three were American--and British mail clerks James Bertram Williamson and Richard Jago Smith.

The exhibit “Posted Aboard R.M.S. Titanic” will be on display until June.