NOW THAT the countdown to the centenary has begun, maybe it’s time for another attempt to clear up one of the last remaining mysteries of the Titanic, the true identity of the passenger known as “John Horgan”, who for 99 years has been as silent as the depths into which the ship sunk.
It is of course a common Irish name. And that a person so christened held a passenger ticket (Third class, No. 370377) for the doomed vessel is beyond doubt. So is the fact that somebody used that ticket to embark from Queenstown on the fateful day.
But the problem is that John Horgan’s apparent demise in the North Atlantic did not merit a single newspaper reference, other than his inclusion in the supposed passenger lists. Nor was he the subject of a compensation claim against the ship’s owners.
Nor was any charitable disbursement made in his name from the relief funds set up in the tragedy’s wake.
There was no death notice anywhere either. And if the late John Horgan had an estate to administer, there is no trace of related legal action. So it seems fair to assume that, whoever he was, John Horgan was safe on dry land somewhere when the Titanicwent down.
An obstacle to identifying ships’ passengers at the time, after all, is that this was the era before passports became an indispensable part of international travel. Thus passenger tickets could be, and were, freely transferred.
Anyone who saw the 1997 cinema blockbuster will recall that Jack Dawson (Leo DiCaprio) wins his Titanicticket in a dockside card game. And although this was not based on the story of any real-life passenger, it's hardly the least credible part of the story of his love affair with Kate Winslet.
Journalist and Titanicexpert Senan Molony, author of several books on the subject, says that in common with 20 other passengers on the ship, Horgan had originally been listed to sail on a different vessel, the Cymric. This was scheduled to leave Queenstown on Easter Sunday – April 7th – 1912. When it couldn't sail, ticket holders were instead booked onto the Titanicfour days later.
Somebody using Horgan’s ticket did travel on that day, and – suggests Molony – may have done so in the company of one Patrick Dooley. At any rate, they had sequential tickets among those allocated to the rescheduled passengers. On the other hand, Dooley’s family had no knowledge of his friendship with any Horgan. So their proximity may have been mere coincidence.
Dooley, who had been home from Chicago to see his elderly father, was from Patrickswell, Co Limerick. And when listing presumed victims, New York’s Irish World newspaper would later credit Horgan as being from Limerick too. Limerick is where the ticket was bought and the person holding it was, along with six other passengers from that county, among the last to board at Queenstown (it’s known that the connecting train from Cork was late arriving on the day).
ASSUMING THE real John Horgan had sold his ticket after failing to sail the previous Sunday would certainly explain the lack of newspaper references to anyone mourning his death. It later emerged, for example, that a Cork publican, William O’Doherty, had bought the ticket assigned to one James Moran, and so died in the latter’s name.
O’Doherty may in fact be a key to the mystery. He was said to have been friendly with another tavern worker, 19-year-old Timothy O’Brien, whom the Cork newspapers also insisted had gone down with the ship. The two were inextricably linked in newspaper reports.
The Cork Examinerof April 17th, 1912, in an item headed "Believed Passengers", referred to "William Doherty [sic], 12 Old Market Place, employed by Messrs W.F. O'Callaghan, Daunt's Square, and Timothy O'Brien, billiard marker at the Oyster Tavern." The rival Cork Constitutionnewspaper made the same connection. But Timothy O'Brien does not appear on the list of passengers. It could be, therefore, that he had followed O'Doherty's example and bought his ticket from someone else, perhaps from John Horgan.
The censuses of 1901 and 1911 provide clues about the identity of passengers, although they may also add to the confusion. The 1901 version shows a Timothy O’Brien, aged 8 and one of six children living at 196 Blarney Street, northwest Cork city, with their parents Denis and Margaret.
This would have made him 19 in 1912. He doesn’t appear in the 1911 census in Cork, however. Instead there is a Timothy O’Brien of the same age working as a servant in a big house at Rockwell, Co Tipperary, where, incidentally, there is another young employee by the name James Landers, age 18. And while, as noted earlier, the Mansion House relief fund does not feature John Horgan among its Irish cases in a March 1913 report, it does list a mother with the surname Landers.
The aforementioned James Landers appears to come from Tullamain, Limerick, his mother being a widow in the 1911 census. Molony speculates that perhaps Horgan sold his ticket to O'Brien, who in turn sold it on to Landers, who was the unfortunate man to sail. But if anyone has new information on the case, he's waiting to hear from you now at the Titanicincident room: e-mail sennbrig@indigo.ie