4:02pm Wednesday 25th April 2007
By Steve Sowden
THIS month commemorates the 95th anniversary of the sinking of RMS Titanic. Overnight April 14-15, 1912, the luxurious passenger liner sank en-route to New York from Southampton on her maiden voyage. Some 1,496 people were lost at sea, while only 712 passengers and crew members survived. One of those who did survive came from Yeovil.
Marion Wright was born in May 1885 and moved to live in Yeovil with her family when very young.
Her widowed father, Thomas, a farmer, remarried in the late 1880s to a Miss Huntley and Marion spent her young years as carer to her three step-sisters.
In 1912 she was living at The Park in Yeovil.
On a visit to her friend who lived at West Park in Yeovil she first met Arthur Woolcott who was later to become her husband. He had originally gone to America in 1907 and worked as a draughtsman, but had the opportunity to buy an 80-acre fruit farm near Cottage Grove in Oregon.
After much correspondence between Marion and Arthur their engagement was announced and it was arranged that the wedding would take place in America.
Marion, now 26, boarded the Titanic at Southampton as a second class passenger and shared a cabin with Bessie Watt and her daughter Bertha who were from Aberdeen.
On the evening of April 14, 1912, Marion sang solos at a hymn service on the Titanic presided over by Rev Ernest Carter.
Marion described the ship's fatal collision with the iceberg as like a 'huge crash of glass' followed by the stopping of the engines which alarmed her even more. "The stopping of the engines on an ocean liner creates such a calm, such a painful silence, that it inpsires passengers that something is not exactly right," she later said.
She was assured there was no danger, but the large throng of passengers hurriedly putting their lifebelts on told a different story. Marion said it was impossible to see what was happening at one end of the deck from the other and she was surprised when she heard an officer call out 'any more ladies.' She went over and was able to get into a boat, she estimated there were about 35 people on board lifeboat number nine.
Marion watched the liner sink and claimed to have still heard the band playing. In the boat besides herself and the other women were six men, but said the boat could have held at least 15 more.
At around 6.30am on April 15 the boat tied up alongside the Carpathia and she clambered onboard.
In a letter written on the Carpathia she said: "It was terrible and I don't think I will ever forget. The Titanic must have had her bottom nearly taken away by the iceberg, from the first class to the steerage, for she went down gradually, bit by bit.
"Whe she broke in two, which she did a few moments before she sunk, going down with a huge explosion, the cries of the people left on board were heart-rending."
She eventually arrived in New York and was met by Arthur and they finally married.
But Marion said: "I don't think I shall ever want to cross the ocean again just yet. It has been sad losing all I had, wedding presents and everything I had worked so hard at, but they are nothing in comparison to all the lives that were lost."
In Oregon they successfully ran their farmstead, but never raised enough money to return to England. Her survival led to a 53-year marriage, three sons John, Russ and Bob and eight grandchildren.
Marion's husband, Arthur, died in 1961 and Marion in 1965 aged 80.
In a corner of the Cottage Grove Museum there is a memorial to its adopted daughter's involvement in the most famous sea voyage ever made.
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