Most accounts of the Titanic end with the rescue ship, the Carpathia, sailing into New York harbour in thick fog. A new book Shadow Of The Titanic is concerned with how the disaster shaped the lives of some of its 705 survivors.
Dorothy Gibson reunited with her lover, the rich, married film pioneer Jules Brulatour upon arriving in New York and determined to make a film of the disaster starring herself while wearing the same outfit she wore the night she escaped. The film – Saved From The Titanic – was a huge hit. Soon afterwards, Gibson retired from acting and married Brulatour in 1917. Yet within a couple of months both started to seek out new partners. After Brulatour married the actress Hope Hampton in 1923, Dorothy decided to leave America for Europe. At first she enjoyed her hedonistic new existence in Paris. In 1934 she said, 'I fear it cannot go on like this always. I have had my dream life, and am sure a dark cloud will come and wash it all away.' Her fear was realized when the Second World War broke out eventually leading to her imprisonment in a concentration camp in Italy.
In 1914, two years after surviving the tragedy, 42-year-oldTitanic stewardess Annie Robinson was sailing across the Atlantic to visit her daughter in Boston when, on the night of 9 October, the ship became shrouded in thick fog as the liner neared its final destination. The booming sound of the foghorn outside New York triggered awful memories of that fateful night in 1912. She ran out of the dining saloon and up on to the deck the noise followed her like a death knell. She knew she had to end it all, and climbed over the rail and stepped out.
Annie was the first of ten Titanic survivors who committed suicide in the years after the disaster. Jack Thayer, who was 17 when he survived the Titanic, killed himself in 1945 when he was 50 by slitting his wrists and throat, after losing both his son Edward during the Second World War and his mother Marian Thayer, also a Titanic survivor. 'He started to suffer from depression,' his daughter, Julie Vehr, told me. 'It was a result of everything that had happened to him over the years. Eventually, it seems he suffered a nervous breakdown.'
Read on for more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2121744/The-Titanic-concentration-camps-suicides-breakdowns--The-terrible-toll-surviving-Titanic.html#ixzz1qiMPPtE5
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