An Irishman's Diary

THAT Catherine Connelly lived to be almost 110 was remarkable in itself. That she spanned three different centuries was unusual too. But the defining event of her extraordinarily long life was the work of a few fraught minutes on the morning of June 15th, 1904, when she was only 11.

Then, along with her mother, brother, sister, and at least 1,300 others, she was a passenger on the General Slocum: an old wooden paddle-steamer that ran pleasure cruises on New York's East River. They were making what they hoped would be a day-trip from their native Manhattan to Long Island for a picnic. Instead, en route, the ship caught fire. And what followed would be the worst disaster in New York history until 9/11.

The official death toll was 1,021 of the 1,342 on board: most of the dead being women and children. As with 9/11, however, the exact figures are unknown. A recent book on the tragedy suggested that both passenger numbers and fatalities were grossly underestimated and that more than 2,000 may have died. Many of their bodies were washed out to sea or buried in the river mud.

The story provides a grim footnote to this week's Bloomsday celebrations, because it occurred on the eve of June 16th, 1904, and so featured prominently in the newspapers of that morning. Immortalising the date in Ulysses, Joyce faithfully included a reference to the New York tragedy: albeit briefly, and filtered through the casual chat of Mr Kernan and the publican Crimmins.

"Terrible affair that General Slocumexplosion. Terrible, terrible. A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the fire hose all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that . . . Now you're talking straight, Mr Crimmins. You know why? Palm-oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look at that. And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we were bad here."

The paragraph touches on most of the event’s many controversies and cruelties. These began with the fact that it was a religious-run outing, the vessel being chartered by a Lutheran Church for members of its Sunday school and their families. Hence the high numbers of women and children on board.

But the awful death toll would have been much smaller had not the ship been almost devoid of working safety equipment. Lifeboats were rusted into place. Worse still, the life-jackets disintegrated in water: so that horrified mothers who threw their children to what they thought was safety watched them sink instead.

There were men who performed heroically: including some who drowned while trying to carry too many others to safety. One of the happier stories featured a very fat policeman who floated ashore on his back with multiple children clinging to him as a human raft. But as Mr Kernan suggests, many male crew members scrambled to save themselves first in the panic. The ship’s captain was among the survivors, although he was later jailed for 10 years.

Then there was the longer-term effect of the catastrophe on a part of Manhattan which, thriving beforehand, would disappear as a result. Despite Catherine Connelly’s surname, it was not an Irish community. She only became a Connelly through marriage (and to further confuse, she had spent most of her early life as a Gallagher, after her widowed mother remarried). But she was an Uhlmyer by birth. Because, like most on that doomed day-trip, she was of German stock. The “Little Germany” area of Manhattan, now East Village, was effectively destroyed by the disaster. On June 18th, 1904 alone, it saw 156 funerals. More than 600 households lost family members. In the shattered community left behind, many bereft widowers and fathers resorted to suicide. Others just moved away from a place overwhelmed with unhappy memories.

Catherine Connelly was the only one of her family party to escape the ship alive. And having been born in April 1893, she went on to become, before her death in October 2002, the last-but-one survivor of the General Slocumfire. She was certainly the last who could remember the event, since the sole survivor to outlive her had been a seven-month-old baby at the time.

And remembering it was very important to Mrs Connelly, as her grand-daughter Maureen Enright recalled in 2006: “She talked about it often when we were growing up, particularly around the anniversary. She was afraid people would forget [because those involved] were poor immigrants, not famous and wealthy people, unlike the Titanic.” In fact, this was the tragedy’s final insult. It was quickly, and almost completely, forgotten: overshadowed by the somehow more glamorous Titanic disaster, which inspired many books, films, and documentaries, and still fascinates us today.

By contrast, the General Slocum's cinematic history is a short one: namely the opening scene of a 1934 film, Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable: now mainly remembered as the movie that gangster John Dillinger had just watched before he was shot dead outside a Chicago cinema. There has been the odd book and documentary too. But the General Slocum's greatest artistic memorial, arguably, is a fleeting paragraph in Joyce's famous but little-read novel: itself inspired by the story of a mythological Greek and his adventures as the sole survivor of a shipwreck.