By Keysha Drexel
Journal editor
Julie Williams grew up sitting at her great-uncle’s knee completely mesmerized by his account of surviving the most famous shipwreck in history.
But it wasn’t until she was doing research for her book “A Rare Titanic Family” that the Samford University professor of journalism learned the whole story of how Albert Caldwell ended up on the Titanic.
“I knew Albert well–he lived to be 91 and told me the story of the Titanic dozens of times,” Williams, a native of Ohio and North Carolina, said. “It was a true story as he told it to me, an accurate story. However, as I researched this book, I slowly came to realize that I had hardly known the story at all.”
Williams will share what she learned while researching the book when she gives a dramatic presentation based on the book to the Hoover Historical Society on Jan. 21. The presentation will be at 2:30 p.m. at Artists on the Bluff.
“I appear in costume–I dress like my great-uncle’s wife, Sylvia, who also survived the Titanic,” Williams said. “In Hoover, I’ll be performing my one-woman show where I appear as Sylvia, who will tell the story as though it’s a few months after the Titanic. As far as Sylvia knows, it’s still 1912.”
In April 1912, Sylvia Caldwell boarded the Titanic with her 26-year-old husband, Albert, and their 10-month-old son, Alden.
“They were Presbyterian missionaries in Siam, what we now know as Thailand, and my uncle always told me that they had to leave their mission work because Sylvia had health problems and the doctor told her she needed to go to Naples, Italy, to rest and recover,” Williams said.
But as Williams researched her family’s history, she learned that there were rumors at the time that Sylvia was faking her illness and just wanted to come back home to the U.S.
“After being asked if I knew if Sylvia was faking her sickness by several people during my research, I decided that I had to find out why this rumor even existed. So I went to the Presbyterian archives and was shocked to discover that my aunt and uncle were fleeing their jobs,” Williams said.
In her research, Williams said, she discovered that the Board of Foreign Missions didn’t believe Sylvia was actually sick and planned to have her examined by one of their doctors.
“If they discovered Sylvia was healthy, then she and Albert would either have to pay the Board back for their trip home or return to Siam to make up the cost of the trip,” she said.
Williams said she also learned another dimension to the story her uncle had told her until she was a senior in high school.
“I had long heard how they toured Europe on their way home to the United States, but I didn’t know that it became a cat and mouse chase around the globe where they were the mice,” she said.
After leaving their mission work in Thailand and following orders to get rest in Italy, the Caldwells arrived in Naples but left almost as soon as they arrived because of a cholera outbreak.
But instead of taking the ship docked at Naples back home to the U.S., the Caldwells made the fateful decision to travel instead to England to board the Titanic.
“It was the Carpathia that was docked in Naples, and Sylvia took one look at it and said she didn’t want to be on another small ship. They’d traveled from Siam to Naples on a small ship, and she said she was tired of being seasick,” Williams said.
The young family saw a placard for the new luxury ship, the Titanic, and decided it would provide a smoother trip back home for Sylvia.
“Their whole motivation was that the Titanic was a lot bigger than the Carpathia,” Williams said.
Williams said based on the accounts she heard from her uncle, the Titanic was truly a spectacular sight to behold.
“My uncle said it was as opulent as they say it was. He said there was beautiful music everywhere and tables piled high with every delicacy you could want,” she said.
On April 10, 1912, the Caldwells boarded the Titanic in Southampton, England. There, Williams said, her aunt provoked one of the most famous quotes associated with the Titanic and one that is attributed to several different people in movies and books about its sinking.
“As someone is carrying their trunk in for them, she says, ‘Is this ship really unsinkable?’” Williams said “He answers, ‘Yes, lady. God himself cannot sink this ship,’ and my research shows that it was Sylvia that said that and everyone else has been stealing her line for 100 years.”
On the Sunday the ship sank, Williams said, the Caldwells attended a worship service in the dining room and that her uncle would always remark when he retold the story that the people at the service had no idea how soon they would meet their maker.
Sylvia was in bed with baby Alden and Albert was asleep in a bunk in their room when they felt the ship hit the iceberg, Williams said.
They gathered some of their things but left behind a trunk filled with $100 in gold coins that they couldn’t find the key for at the time.
“The trunk didn’t make it and is probably resting at the bottom of the Atlantic,” Williams said. “Albert always promised I could have the American gold pieces he and Sylvia left on the Titanic, should anyone ever find the ship at the bottom of the Atlantic. I doubt I will ever see a nickel of the gold, but I surely have a treasure in my great-uncle’s story.”
Another part of the story of the Titanic that Williams said she hopes her book sets straight is the myth that men weren’t allowed to board the lifeboats.
“Oh, I hear that all the time, and people think that no men at all survived the sinking, but that’s just not true,” she said.
Williams said early in their voyage, the Caldwells had taken a tour of the Titanic’s engine room, and her uncle, a photography enthusiast, had taken a photo of one of the coal stokers.
That photo, Williams said, may have saved her uncle’s life.
Just after the Titanic hit an iceberg, Williams’ uncle was on deck trying to get Sylvia and his infant son into a lifeboat.
“By all accounts, Sylvia was very ill, very weak and couldn’t hold the baby,” Williams said. “That’s when one of the officers they encountered on the engine room tour where they took the picture noticed they were having trouble and had been up and down the decks looking for a lifeboat for Sylvia and the baby. That’s when the officer told my uncle to get in the boat with his wife and hold the baby.”
The Caldwells boarded Life Boat No. 13 and were taken to safety. Williams said her great-uncle often talked about watching the boat sink.
“He said the lights were still burning underneath the water and that the stern rose higher and higher until they heard a gentle swish, and the ship was gone,” she said.
More than 1,500 people lost their lives when the ship sank in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912 in the middle of the north Atlantic.
Later, the Caldwells would end up on the same ship they had avoided taking in Italy–the Carpathia.
The Carpathia was the ship sent to pluck the Titanic survivors from the icy waters after the shipwreck and take them to safety.
“I wryly say now that they were destined for the Carpathia,” she said. “That irony is probably my favorite part of the story because if they had taken the Carpathia in the first place, they wouldn’t have been on the Titanic at all.”
Williams said she thinks hearing her great-uncle’s wonderful retelling of his survivor story inspired her to pursue a career in writing.
Williams has written several academic books and also authored a book on the time the Wright brothers spent running a flight school in Montgomery called “Wings of Opportunity.”
But the idea to set her great-uncle’s epic tale of surviving the Titanic down in a book didn’t occur to Wright until after she had completed the book on the Wright brothers.
“I had been telling the story to people forever and even wrote a play about it when I was in the fifth grade, but I didn’t think about turning it into a book until someone who contributed to my first book said, ‘Too bad you didn’t write about the Titanic,’ and the light bulb just went off and I contacted my publisher.”
The publishing company told Williams they were all behind the idea for the book on her family surviving the Titanic–if she could get it to them in eight months.
Williams completed the book and needed only one deadline extension.
“On the day it was due to the publisher, the grandson of the Caldwells discovered the descendant of one of the missionaries Albert and Sylvia worked with, and we were able to get a week’s extension on the deadline,” she said.
The book was published in 2012, the 100th anniversary of the disaster.
Williams said her great-uncle Albert and Sylvia divorced in the 1930s, and Albert married Williams’ great-aunt in 1936. He continued to tell the story of surviving the sinking of the Titanic until his death in 1977.
All of his Titanic memorabilia, including a postcard he purchased just minutes after getting off the Carpathia after being rescued, went to Williams when he passed away.
Among the treasures left to her by her great-uncle was a photo of the Caldwells on the deck of the Titanic.
The photo is on the cover of Williams’ book.
“I’ve learned a lot about the Titanic and about my family researching this book, and I’ve learned a lot by presenting it through Sylvia’s eyes,” she said. “It’s a story I’ve loved for many years, now made richer by so many long-held secrets coming into view.”
For more information on the book, visit www.newsouthbooks.com/titanic.
