Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 22, 1993 TAG: 9312220094
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND LENGTH: Medium
"He put mother and me in a lifeboat and said, `I'll see you in New York.' We never saw him again," Haisman, 97, said Tuesday.
A company salvaging wreckage of the sunken ocean liner presented the watch to her at a hotel in Southampton, where the Titanic embarked on its fateful maiden voyage in 1912.
The little watch is blackened, and its hands are stopped at 11:05, not known to be a significant time.
"I recognized the watch, which my father wore on a gold chain on his waistcoat," said Haisman, who was 16 when the ship sank.
She is believed to be the oldest of about nine survivors living in Britain, the United States, France and Sweden.
"I was in lifeboat No. 13. I always remembered that. My father was waving to us and talking to a clergyman, the Rev. Carter," said Haisman, a frail, white-haired woman who attended the ceremony in a wheelchair.
Haisman, who lives in a nursing home in Southampton, spoke deliberately and carefully about the night of April 14-15, 81 years ago, when the Titanic was sliced open by an iceberg.
"I remember everything, and it was terrible," she said.
"The Titanic went into the ice, and I heard three bangs. Before we hit, there had been terrific vibrations from the engines during the night as the ship was really racing over the sea.
"As the lifeboat pulled away, we heard cries from people left on the ship and in the water, and explosions in the ship. There were lots of bodies floating. We kept on rescuing people and trying to cover them up against the cold. We were in the lifeboat nine hours.
"I kept looking in the water for my father, and when we reached New York, we went to the hospitals to see if he had been picked up."
The Titanic, then the world's largest liner, went down with the loss of 1,500 lives. Lifeboats got away with 700 crew and passengers as the vessel broke up and sank nearly 2 1/2 miles to the ocean floor, 560 miles off Newfoundland.
Haisman's wealthy father, Thomas William Solomon Brown, was taking the family from South Africa to Seattle, Wash., where he intended to start a hotel business.
Edith, his only child, married the late Frederick Haisman, an architectural engineer, in South Africa, and they had 10 children and more than 30 grandchildren.
Haisman identified the watch after salvors employed by a French-American group recovered it and other relics with a submersible robot. Her family said she agreed the watch eventually should go to a museum, probably in Southampton.
Ownership of the Titanic relics is the subject of a legal dispute in the U.S. courts.
by CNB