An Intrepid Australian Titanic Survivor

Titanic Memorial Voyage

Imagine the scene.  You're in a crowded lifeboat with no lantern, water, or provisions on a freezing night.  Shots are ringing out all around you, and men and women are fighting with each other to get on the lifeboat, which is already full.  You can see the Titanic sinking. This terrifying scenario happened to Charles Dahl, an Australian survivor of the Titanic.

Born in Norway in 1866, Dahl was one of eight children.  He emigrated to Australia in his twenties to work as a joiner, and lived in South Australia.  Dahl decided to return to Norway, but he changed his mind, and chose to visit his mother and some of his family in South Dakota instead.  He joined the Titanic as a third-class passenger on the way to South Dakota.




On the day of the crash, the sight of rows of icebergs worried Dahl.  He counted nineteen.  One was five miles long, he said.  He stated that no ship could cut a path through the sea, because it was 'full of icebergs'.

However, Dahl was in bed when the crash occurred.  He put on warm clothes, and raced to the deck, but he was surprised to find that he was in one of the lifeboats later.  He said that he must have jumped into it.  His whole fortune was in a wallet on board the sinking ship.

After visiting his mother and family, Dahl travelled for two years.  He returned to Norway and married a Norwegian lady.  They then moved to Australia.  Dahl died at 76 in 1933.

Hello everyone,
I'm having a bad time at the moment, but I hope to write a new post soon.

Oscar Hammerstein's Beautiful and Successful Australian Wife, Dorothy

This isn't an Edwardian story, but I couldn't resist it.  I was astonished to learn that Oscar Hammerstein II, the famous lyricist and librettist who wrote such musicals as South Pacific and The Sound of Music with Richard Rodgers, married an Australian!

Born in Tasmania in 1899, Dorothy Blanchard was brought up in Williamstown in Victoria.  The daughter of a ship's captain, she lived a comfortable life at a house called Mandalay with her four sisters.  As a young girl, she loved to wander around the quaint shops in the town, including an antique shop.

At just 23, Dorothy won a beauty pageant and decided that she wanted a career in the movies.  The intrepid young woman set out for London, but she eventually lived in America.  There she won a part in a musical called 'Charlot's Revue'. She married Henry Jacobson in 1925, and she had two children.  However, she fell in love with the unhappily married Oscar Hammerstein II on a cruise, and they married in 1929.  This marriage was supremely happy, and they had a son, James. They lived in a six-story New York townhouse full of servants, a very different life from her life in Australia.

Dorothy was not only beautiful and married to a famous man; she also had her own highly-regarded career.  She became a sought-after interior designer, and furnished houses for many stars, including Norma Talmadge.  She said on a visit to Australia that: 'She was crazy for colour'. The successful interior designer also remarked that young people should be surrounded by colour, and not live like their grandparents.  One wonders if the antique shop with its 'dim,  mysterious recesses' that continuously fascinated her influenced her decision to become an interior designer.

 Dorothy Hammerstein's Obituary in The New York Times described her as 'formidable', but Christopher Plummer thought that she was a 'lovely and warm Australian lady'. (Maybe he didn't find her formidable, because he is formidable!) She died in 1987.  Her grandson, Andy, is extremely interested in her story, and he visited her old house when he came to Australia recently.



Dorothy is third from the left.


Here is a beautiful picture of the couple on their wedding day.

Unfortunately, the present owner of the heritage-listed house is having trouble maintaining it: Historic House Alive With The Sound Of Crumbling

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I am really sorry that I haven't posted for so long.  I hope to write a new post next week.

The Dorothy Restaurants

Isabel Cooper-Oakley, the ‘personification of the New Woman of the eighties’, founded her Dorothy Restaurants in the late 1880s.  A theosophist who attended Girton College in Cambridge, Cooper-Oakley started the restaurants when her millinery business founded.  These restaurants were for women only.  One of the restaurants was for ladies and the other was intended to be for working women.

The first Dorothy Restaurant on Mortimer Street, decorated with cream-coloured walls, Japanese fans and umbrellas, may have been the one for shop girls and other women who were employed in the city.  Here they could eat cheap, wholesome fare, after paying an eightpenny dining ticket at the entrance.

The exotically-dressed and beautiful Constance Wilde and other celebrated women attended the opening of the second Dorothy Restaurant on Oxford Street in 1889.  Many of them apparently smoked while they waited to enter.  This restaurant was much more lavish.  It was decorated with rich Indian curtains, a deep red ante-room and it also featured a large luncheon room with tables covered with pristine white tablecloths and vases of fresh flowers.  Obviously the one for ladies!

Our Australian Titanic Heroine

Evelyn James, nee Marsden was a true Australian heroine.  A stewardess on the Titanic, she played a large part in helping the passengers on Lifeboat 16 stay safe.

Born in South Australia in 1883, Evelyn was brought up in the remote town of Hoyleton.  When she was a teenager, she stayed with a farming family at Murray Bridge where she learned to row and joined the rowing club. She even learned to row against the tide, a difficult feat which would prove useful. 

The country girl, ambitious to have a career, worked as a nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.  She then decided to travel, an unusual desire for a single woman in those days.  She travelled to England and fell in love with the ship’s doctor, Dr James, on the voyage.  She joined the White Star Line to be with her young and handsome boyfriend. However, just before the voyage of the Titanic, Dr James was transferred, and Evelyn sailed alone.

The 28 year-old shared a cabin with Miss May Sloan, and worked as a stewardess.  She also did some nursing work for the First Class passengers.  Shocked by the collision, the women accepted soothing glasses of whiskey and water from the ship’s doctor.  After this, Evelyn hurried up to the deck where she helped as many people as she could into lifeboats, not thinking of her own safety.  She was one of the last to get into Lifeboat 16.

The nurse helped row the passengers to safety, even though she had to hold a baby.  Her great-nurse said that her hands were rubbed raw from rowing.  Evelyn was so thankful that she had learned to row, she returned to the farm to thank the family for teaching her.

When the news that Evelyn had been saved by the Carpathia, and that she was safely in New York, legend has it that her father ran through the town shouting, “Evelyn’s alive. Evelyn’s alive”.

Julian Fellowes told Channel 7 that: 'Of course, if the doctor hadn't been taken off the Titanic, he woul've died because the highest death rate was among second-class men, almost all of whom died, and the doctor would have been travelling in second class'.

Dr William James and Evelyn rushed to the altar, marrying in July in Southampton.  They returned to South Australia.  Sadly, they didn’t have any children, but Evelyn’s relatives are very proud of their Titanic heroine.