Bradford Wellman thinks his mother would be overwhelmed and baffled by all the attention the Titanic is getting 100 years after it sunk in the North Atlantic.

After all, she rarely spoke of the night a century ago next Saturday when she was nearly one of the more than 1,500 who lost their lives after the ocean liner hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage.

“I don’t know what she’d think of all of this,” said Wellman, who lives at Piper Shores in Scarborough.

Wellman, 80, said his mother, Mary Lines Wellman, like many survivors, didn’t dwell on the tragedy.

He remembers when he was a child and his mother explained the significance of the flashlight that was kept in a cabinet in the living room. It was her light, Wellman said, and she used it in the lifeboat after the crew failed to provide one in the hurried attempt to get the lifeboats away from the sinking ship.

But after that, she almost never spoke of the Titanic — at least not until the publication of the best-seller “A Night to Remember,” by Walter Lord, in 1955. The book failed to list her as a survivor, so his mother fired off a letter to the publisher, making sure it was corrected for subsequent editions.

Wellman’s mother was 16 and living in Paris when she and her mother took the journey to attend her brother’s graduation from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. She was never clear on how she learned that the Titanic had hit an iceberg and was sinking.

She had said a steward alerted the Lineses, telling them, “this is real, you need to get on deck and you need to take your life jacket.”

But at other times, she said they were awakened by Percival and Richard White, a father and son from Brunswick who had struck up a friendship with the Lines family during the voyage.

The Whites were aboard because Richard White had graduated from Bowdoin College in December. While waiting to attend the graduation ceremony with the rest of his class, Richard White was taken on a trip to Europe by his father. Impressed by he Titanic’s sister ship Olympic on the trip to Europe, Percival White decided to buy tickets on the Titanic for the return trip.

The two perished when the Titanic went down. Richard White’s body was recovered, but his father’s body was never found.

Wellman said his mother talked of getting in the lifeboat and it being lowered into the water, even though it wasn’t full. That apparently wasn’t unusual, at least until it became clear that the gash ripped open by the iceberg was going to take down the ship.

“A lot of people were ignoring it” because “this was a ship that couldn’t sink,” Wellman said.

But the Lineses got into the lifeboat and crew members rowed it away from the sinking ship.

Wellman said his mother remembered the frightening and heart-rendering sound of people crying for help and the sailors refusing to take the boat back because they were afraid it would be swamped by people trying to climb on.

She also recalled being well cared for by both the passengers and crew of the Carpathia, which picked up 705 survivors of the ship and took them to New York.

Wellman, who came to Maine in 1957 to work in his wife’s family forestery management business, said he has attended some displays of Titanic memorabilia over the years, including one in London of items recovered near the wreck. He said the personal items struck him most deeply, especially a ring that was the last item on display.

“I was fine until I saw that,” he said. “It could have been hers.”

Wellman said the family’s only Titanic mementos are the flashlight, a ticket stub for a deck chair reservation and a shipping list of clothing that Wellman’s grandfather sent to New York for his wife and daughter after the sinking.

Wellman said he’s fine with explorers collecting items from around the wreck, but said they shouldn’t go inside.

“It’s a grave. We ought to leave it alone,” he said

Wellman thinks much of the interest in the Titanic today is because of the blockbuster 1997 movie, centered on a fictional romance between a wealthy socialite and poor would-be immigrant. Wellman said he hasn’t seen it.

But he said he knows why the sinking was such big news in 1912, beyond the fact that it took the lives of some of the world’s most wealthy and powerful people, including John Jacob Astor, a summer resident of Bar Harbor.

It was a time of huge strides in science and technology. “Everything was bigger and better and faster,” he said. “And this kind of stopped it, this great machine that didn’t work.”

Wellman said he thinks there are parallels today, which such huge advances in technology in the last few decades and many wondering whether it has really improved our lives.

 

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