Margaret Tobin Brown: The Real Heroine of The Titanic

That she did not sink with the Titanic is fact. That Jack Dowson, who met her on the ill-fated liner, is fiction. But the stories that go with Margaret Tobin Brown that she ran for the Senate when women did not have voting rights and that having rolled into millions, she died penniless—are pure flesh – enough meat. We came to know all about the real side of the legendary actress, philanthropist and crusader, Molly Brown, as she is popularly known, on reaching Denver – ‘the Mile High City’ in Colorado.
Boarding the shuttle on Downtown D&F Tower, built as a general store in 1909 which was the tallest building on the west of Mississippi then, we reached the terminal close to the State Capitol. Everyone seemed to know the famous house of Molly Brown at Pennsylvania at the 17th Street. The structure is identifiable from a distance since it has a Victorian stamp and boasts of its antiquity – unsullied and intact.
The Entry Hall has one of Margaret’s Blackmoor Statues. From here, a staircase takes you to the upper chambers.The parlour, the dining room, the library, sunrooms, bedrooms, study etc are preserved with tapestry and upholstery all of which is not claimed to be original, but ‘very close’. Very well niched are the artifacts and souvenirs, brought by Margaret from far and wide, almost from all corners of the world. “These paintings and photographs of the Titanic and the Boat Number Six are attractions that all the visitors evince keen interest in” the tour guide tells us. The old cooking tools and utensils in the kitchen including a state of the art pressure cooker besides the cutlery are rare antiques meriting a look.
‘Molly’—the calling—though was a later day Hollywood invention yet the amount of marketing this new ‘Avtar’ did, in once again living the legend of the ‘unsinkable Molly’, was remarkable, whether the field was best selling fiction, or movies, or thrillers. Margaret had married a miner J.J. Brown at the age of nineteen, when the man she took by her side was thirty-two. She bore him six children. JJ’s sudden switch over, and exploits in the mining trade, made him rich over-night, and the couple bought a house in1894, which is now the Molly Brown Museum.
The House allows a peep into an era brought alive with exotic flavors from Egypt, China, France, Greece, Belgium and also India. JJ wasn’t much fond of travelling while Margaret had it as a passion besides being an actress and a socialite. During a tour of Europe, Margaret had to board The Titanic at Cherbourg, France, compelled by the circumstance of hearing about her grand child’s suffering, in New York. Her daughter, Helen’s decision to stay back in London, and not boarding The Titanic, on that fateful day of April 1912, made her afford a chance to live till the age of ninety-seven. She died in Greenwich in the year 1993.
Although Margaret Tobin Brown had enough stuff, as reflected in the elements combined and put together in her persona, and as obtained all through her life, before she survived the sinking of The Titanic, yet the way she exploited for good, the later part of her life, particularly the last twenty years, till her death in 1932, for promoting causes of women suffrage, juveniles, labor, maritime laws and human rights, is remarkable.

Befittingly thus then, Molly Brown has very much been part of the ‘Historic Denver’. She fought for women’s rights and organized women’s clubs but was, quite ironically though, ostracized in testifying, during the hearing of The Titanic, since she was a woman. But her courage and conviction were undefeatable and she proved her mettle in all walks of life she stepped in; most of them found in her a harbinger and a leader.

Again it is a big irony of ‘impressions and perceptions’ that when The Titanic sank in the Atlantic, the master of ‘Boat Number Six’, Robert Hichens, deserted the boat, fearing the women in it might not be able to row as fast, to steer out of the suction effect of the ship. It was here that Margret took up cudgels, and goaded her women compatriots, to fight till the finish. She shared her blanket, offered her stockings to other women and put her stoll around the neck of a raft-mate at the same time speaking words of encouragement, like war cries, and believe us, even singing.

They rowed for two hours continuously in dark hours after Molly, who just a little while before was reading a book smugly in Dock B, when the Titanic crashed into the iceberg seconds after the seaman Frederick Fleet rang a bell thrice, from the Crow’s Nest of the ship and shrieked “Iceberg right ahead!” They were all lapped up by the waiting ship Carpathia after the ordeal. All thereafter is history. Her great sense of humour later made her recollect and exclaim "After being brined, salted, and pickled in mid ocean I am now high and dry...!” and that “Water was fine and swimming good..!” She died in New York in 1932 of brain tumor.
Indian Express published an abridged version of this article which is reproduced below....

Our group with the Mayor of Baton Rouge

Baton Rouge photos by Rajbir Deswal...and more...

The State Capitol
Baton Rogue Plantations
Mardi Gras Gaiety

Bobby Jindal's Baton Rouge

When Rajbir Deswal
was made Honorary Mayor of
BOBBY JINDAL'S Baton Rogue
reminiscences published in Indian Express
(click image)

R U Game !

A wishlist- Hindustan Times
A wishlist for all be it cops, journos, politicians, Blueline drivers, Gen-X brats or lawyers, writes Rajbir Deswal.

Loosely flipping through half a dozen newspapers, my friend said to me, yawning a bit too wide, “Nothing really exciting!” “What happened? There is enough these days to mull over. And be happy about it!” I contorted mischievously when he said, “Complacence. Isn’t. Can’t we send them all to Coventry?” “Whom?” I asked. “To begin with the likes of you—Cops!” he concluded with all the contempt hurled at me and my tribe.
And he unfolded his intent to banish all the policemen of the country to the “Island of the naked” to learn a passive resistance, a la Gandhi, having no temptation and situation, when they should be able to rob anybody of their belongings. “Leeches all!” he said.
“And what about you, journalists? Should they all be not packed off to jungles—even Abdul Kalaam, kind of, suggested that—where being unable to sneak in private lives of people, they can experience not stinging themselves, but being stung by wild scorpions, snakes and black widows. Only then they would be able to concentrate on issues related to environment and nature and spare Uma Khuranas.” I said and quizzed my friend, winking, if he had any solution for the politicians.
Presto, he propounded a wonderful idea. “These moral lepers be made to spend a year or two in Universities and Centres of Excellence. “ To improve their qualifications?” I quipped poking fun at my friend’s proposition but he said matter of factly, “No! For the simple reason that they should learn how our academicians fight—and on issues that are so trivial that put to shame even the infants in their pans. The politicians may thus, learn to take up issues in larger public and national interests. You know how party politics is, where action begins exclaiming, “1,2,3…!” and finishes claiming, “ Lo! We’ve done that”.
“Look buddy, this gives me enough food for thought and I suggest that all our Blue line drivers should spend atleast a fortnight sleeping in a mortuary; the Gen-X brats be bundled off to old age homes to hammer a point in their psyche that they themselves would grow that old and infirm; the Bollywood brokers be sent to factories making furniture lest they learn that the ‘couches’ are for comfort and not ‘kaam front,” I philosophised.
“Makes lot of sense!” my friend exclaimed and with his tongue firmly in his cheek said, “Let all the lawyers go to Pakistan, where they can atleast learn to ‘really’ fight. “What about the religious bigots?” I asked and my friend had a ready answer, “To the abattoirs and butcheries where they may have a change of heart and develop aversion to spilling blood.”
When this tete-e-tete between me and my journalist friend was going on, I flashed back to the time when I myself was once sent to Coventry. From the nearby Rugby Police Training Centre, we were taken to downtown Coventry from where we strayed into some sidelanes. Here we encountered some junkies and one of them tired to snatch my camera. We looked for the cops around but were later told that even for the police that was a ‘no visit area’. Was it really a part of our training to feel the helplessness of a victim? Or, were we to know the real meaning of being “sent to Coventry” I still wonder.
Dashing down to earth form my fanciful flight of thoughts, I urged myself to make a point, “And …!” But I was checked by my friend, “Hold on dude, for everything else Judiciary hai naa!” I laughed and quibbled “but atleast the middle writers need not be sent anywhere for they are already there, where they should be.”

(What you just saw is the detailed version. HT used the smaller version)

This is what The Tribune said in its Magazine Spectrum

Gripping tale of survival

There, Where the Pepper Grows

by Bem Le Hunte

HarperCollins

Review by K. Rajbir Deswal
Follows...

This is a masterly work of purposeful fiction in the backdrop of a historical perspective, advocating tolerance and fellow feeling. A saga of atrocity, intensity, conflict and despair, it finds a happy ending; while throughout the narrative, the uprooted Jewish characters had "no sense of belonging" to any place in the world till they reach Calcutta by chance, and the place becomes their "Palestine and Jerusalem."
The story has two settings—one in the war-ravaged Warsaw and the other in the refugee capital Calcutta. The timeline has World War II in it.
Compelled by Nazi persecution, a Jewish family fights a battle for survival and manages many an eventful escape from Poland via Russia and Japan to reach India—the land of peace and tolerance. Interwoven in the tale is the exuberance of platonic love and horrific details of torture meted out to the Jewish community by the German army.
Benjamin, the hero and a young doctor, attempts a near fatal and silly misadventure in taking on the might of the invading German tanks in Warsaw. Thereafter, leaving his love Eva and his parents behind, he moves on to a small town called Piaski, where he finds work under Dr Ruben, who has a widowed daughter, Rivka, and her six-year-old son, Daniel.
Dr Ruben is taken prisoner by the authorities for writing an "offending" communication to them. When the fate of Dr Ruben remains unknown, Benjamin has to flee from Piaski with Daniel, and Rivka taken as his wife.
From here begin the hair-raising accounts of atrocities committed in Nazi camps. People are uprooted, dragged out of their dwellings, humiliated, tortured and killed. The heart-gripping narration compels the reader go biting nails.
The most pathetic is the scene when Rivka, like half a dozen other members of the party escaping through a tunnel, hits Daniel with a chair, to test if he would scream and wake up the guards. Benjamin’s parents are shot dead and his house taken over in Warsaw but he is able to bring along Eva for moving to some safe place out of Poland.
When Benjamin, Rivka, Eva and Daniel disembark in Calcutta with other refugees, with their boat Asma Maru developing some problem, they are very well received by the local Jewish community. With two women staying with Benjamin, one his wife and the other his childhood friend and old flame, Eva, they encounter some conflict when the man confesses he still loved Eva. But then she finds a match in Joel, turns to Judaism, and migrates to New York.
The author Bem Le Hunte was born in Calcutta and he has described the details about the city with mastery of an indulgent chronicler. Daniel grows here to become a proud Indian while Benjamin practices medicine with a local doctor and spends about 50 years in the City of Joy, with Rivka.
The couple is quite surprised to find that in a country of many faiths, the Jews and the Muslims live together with others. Local hospitality impresses the refugee Jewish family from Poland and they make India their home and hearth.
However, a small patch of desperation again proves traumatic to the family when towards the Indian Independence, Hindu-Muslim riots breakout and the fear of Japanese bombing the port of Calcutta keeps looming large on their minds. Once again, Benjamin has to treat men and women attacked by the warring communities but soon peace prevails. Benjamin and Rivka have children and grandchildren and ultimately, on insistence from their children, they decide to migrate to New York.

Published in The Tribune on October 7, 07