The Titanic at Queenstown

The last land the Titanic ever touched was Cork. Just before noon on Thursday 11 April 1912 the new liner dropped anchor off Roches Point at the mouth of the harbour, two miles out from Queenstown, the town now called Cobh, to take on her final passengers and the Irish mail before the open Atlantic. One hundred and twenty-three people went out to her on the Cork tenders that morning. Four days later most of them were dead, and the pier they walked down to has been called Heartbreak Pier ever since.

The last port of call

Titanic had left Southampton on the Wednesday, called at Cherbourg that evening, and crossed overnight to Ireland for her third and final stop. She was far too big for the quays, so she anchored out in the roads and two paddle tenders, the Ireland and the America, ferried passengers, mail and a few late deliveries out to her. Most of those who boarded at Queenstown were travelling third class, young emigrants from Cork, Kerry, Mayo and Longford heading for jobs and relations in America, the same crossing this harbour had been sending people on for seventy years. Vendors rowed out alongside to sell lace and linen to the first class passengers at the rails. Seven people got off here, among them a young Jesuit called Francis Browne, whose camera had been busy since Southampton and whose photographs are the last ever taken aboard the ship.

A piper and a parting

For about two hours the harbour buzzed around the great ship. Then the tenders cast off and pulled for the town. At half past one the Titanic raised her anchor, and as she turned for the open sea a young man from Athlone called Eugene Daly stood on the stern of the third class deck and played a lament on his uilleann pipes for the country sliding away behind him. People on the tenders heard it across the water. Daly survived the sinking. The pipes did not. The ship cleared the Old Head of Kinsale in the late afternoon, and that was the last anyone in Ireland ever saw of her.

The people who boarded that morning carried the ordinary hopes of emigrants. Most were young, most were in steerage, and most were going to work rather than to a new life of leisure. They had no reason to think this ship was anything but the safest and grandest way to make the journey. Cobh keeps their names, because what should have been one more emigrant sailing became, four days later, the disaster the whole world remembers.

What Cork remembers

On the night of 14 April the Titanic struck an iceberg, and in the small hours of the 15th she went down. Of the hundred and twenty-three who had boarded at Queenstown, fewer than half lived, and the third class passengers fared worst of all. The harbour that had launched so many hopeful crossings became part of the most famous disaster at sea. Cobh keeps the memory close. The old White Star Line office on the quay, where the passengers checked in, is the Titanic Experience now, and behind it the rotting timbers of the pier they boarded from still stand in the water. Nobody has rebuilt it, and nobody has knocked it down.

On the walk

Cork's harbour story runs through the tour. We carry it down to Cobh, the last port the Titanic ever called at, and the quay where so many took their final step on Irish ground. The train from Kent Station takes twenty-five minutes.