Free Irish Aboard Titanic by Senan Molony Page B

remembered by his surviving family.
    He had ten sovereigns in his pocket when he left his picturesque home place to travel to Edgeworthstown to catch a train to Queenstown. A man cannot live on scenery, even in lovely Garvagh, especially in a large household. It was a house that was repeatedly touched by tragedy. A brother, Jimmy, died aged seven on the kitchen table when undergoing a primitive operation to remove a growth on his jaw. Another brother, Robert, was killed in action in the Great War. A third brother died at the hands of the IRA. Willie Charters, nephew of David Charters, remembers that his Uncle Willie was taken out of the same homestead by an IRA flying column in 1921 and later executed for alleged informing. His body, ‘riddled with bullets’ in his nephew’s phrase, was found in nearby Gorteen Lake. A fourth brother, Alec, died young of a brain haemorrhage, and a sister, Anne, died in childbirth.
    The bad luck began with the Titanic. Described as a general labourer, David was going to join his uncle David Vance at an address in New York city.
    Two of David’s brothers, Alec and Dickie, later risked the long walk and emigrated to America. The latter lived to age 94, having begun by sweeping the streets that he had been led to believe were paved with gold, earning enough to progress to owning a small shop on Long Island.
    1911 census – William (52) and Marianne (42). Married 20 years, with ten children, all still living. David (19) , general servant; Annie (14), John (12), Sarah E. (11), Richard (8), Mary Jane (6), Alexander (4), James W. (2).
    Patrick Colbert (24) Lost
    Ticket number 371109. Paid £7 5s.
    Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
    From: Kilconlea, Abbeyfeale, County Limerick.
    Destination: Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada.
    Patrick was going to Canada to become a religious brother. But he was also concerned with the things of this world. He was off to serve God, but retained an affection for mammon. He took an extraordinary sum out of the bank before he left – some say it was as much as £600, but this seems truly fanciful – and carried it with him on the Titanic. His father had argued that he should take only a little, for his needs, and transfer the rest when he was safely settled. But Patrick took the money in cash – and after the shock and grief of bereavement, it somehow rankled in the family ever afterwards that such a fortune could have gone down in the Atlantic.
    Patrick was one of the ‘praying’ Colberts, as distinct from the ‘fighting’ Colberts, a family of cousins with whom they shared land – one of whom, Edmond, was an All-Ireland tug-of-war champion in 1910. Patrick, one of whose brothers was already a Christian Brother in Cork, was due to stay with his brother Christopher – himself a man of the cloth and known to all as Brother Christopher – at a religious house in the Canadian industrial town of Sherbrooke on the Magog river.
    Why he should have needed to take all his money with him was beyond anyone’s understanding. In the wake of his death, there were stories in the locality of him being weighed down in the water by the sheer poundage of gold sovereigns. Others noted acerbically that it was not after all so hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.
    Pious Patrick Colbert had amassed his money as a railway porter in bustling Abbeyfeale, a short distance from his home place. The youngest of seven children, he was born on 5 November 1887 to farmer John Colbert and his wife Kate of Kilconlea, County Limerick.
    Patrick was one of those originally booked to travel on the strike-bound White Star liner Cymric.
    County Limerick victims, Abbeyfeale, Sunday
    The list of survivors published today contains no reference to the name of Mr Patrick Colbert, Kilconlea, Abbeyfeale, Mr James Scanlan, Rathkeale, nor of other young men said to have been on board from East and North Kerry.
    Pat Colbert, for whose parents and