THE BEST OF THE BEST
Sea post clerks were highly skilled and respected postal workers who sorted, canceled and redistributed the mail in transit. Most were selected from the ranks of the Railway Mail Service or the Foreign Mail Section. Regarded as the best of the best, these men typically sorted more than 60,000 letters a day, making few errors. Their hard work and efficiency allowed the mail to be delivered immediately or forwarded directly to other destinations at the end of a voyage. Titanic had five sea post clerks aboard: three Americans and two British.
Oscar Scott Woody, a native of Roxboro, North Carolina and an ardent Freemason, had 15 years’ experience with the Railway Mail Service before joining the Sea Post Service.
At 48, John Starr March was the oldest of the American postal clerks assigned to Titanic and appeared to carry a curse of bad luck. During his eight-year career as a sea post clerk, his ships were involved in eight separate emergencies. His two adult daughters implored him to seek safer work after their mother died in June 1911, he had grown accustomed to the sea and was unwilling to give up his grand voyages.
William Logan Gwinn spent six years as a sorting clerk in the Foreign Mail Section before going to sea. He was originally assigned to sail on the American Line’s SS Philadelphia, but requested an earlier voyage upon learning that his wife Florence was gravely ill at home in Brooklyn. He was transferred to Titanic. Florence Gwinn recovered, but her family kept the news of Will’s death from her for many months.
Woody, March, and Gwinn worked alongside British clerks James Bertram Williamson and John Richard Jago Smith. Both Williamson and Smith were bachelors who financially supported their siblings and aging parents.
POSTAL LIFE ABOARD TITANIC
On April 9, 1912 March and Gwinn toured their new ship and found much to like. Titanic’s mail sorting room was far superior to any they had ever worked in before. Most mail sorting rooms of the time were far removed from where the mailbags were stored, often relegated to a cramped and poorly ventilated space. The mailbag storage compartment aboard Titanic, however, was conveniently located directly below the mail sorting room.
The mail clerks objected to their sleeping and meal arrangements among the third-class passengers, however, and secured alternate accommodations and permission to dine in a private area.
MOVING TITANIC’S MAIL
In all, 3,364 mailbags were brought aboard Titanic at three points — at its embarkation port at Southampton, England (1,758 bags); at Cherbourg, France (1,412 bags); and at Queenstown, Ireland (194 sacks) — before the ship headed for its final destination of New York City. Before sailing, the clerks carried out the routine tasks of checking the mail sacks and storing those that did not require their attention during the voyage. As Titanic set sail, the five postal workers began sorting the mail, distributing letters and packages into mailbags according to their final destination. Their goal was to dispatch Titanic’s mail immediately upon arrival at the Quarantine Station in New York Bay, where all incoming ships were detained for health inspection purposes.
THE MAILROOM BEGINS TO FLOOD
The five postal clerks were celebrating Oscar Scott Woody’s forty-fourth birthday in their private dining room when Titanic crashed into the iceberg. Realizing that something was terribly wrong, they rushed to the mail sorting room and found the starboard hold already beginning to flood. Beginning with the registered mail, they began hauling mail sacks to the upper decks. John Richard Jago Smith was dispatched to the bridge to report on conditions, but his report only confirmed what Captain Edward J. Smith already knew: Titanic was sinking.
Mail was considered a precious cargo. Steamship companies and the postal system went to great lengths to ensure its safety. Sea post clerks were expected to protect the mail at any cost. During Titanic’s sinking the five clerks onboard tried desperately to save the mail and, in the process, forfeited any chance they may have had to escape the doomed ship.
RECOVERED AT SEA
None of Titanic’s postal clerks survived the sinking. Only the bodies of Oscar Scott Woody and John Starr March were recovered from the wreck site. Due to its poor condition, Woody’s body was buried at sea. March’s remains were shipped home on May 3, 1912 and interred at Newark, New Jersey. Read more
The cost of building and operating such a ship, says Daniel Piazza, a curator at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, was too great to cover with passenger fares alone. So the giants of the White Star and Cunard lines carried mail, maybe a million individual pieces on any given voyage. Aboard Titanic, there were five postal clerks and a fully operating mail-sorting facility—a rarity, since ocean liners more typically carried closed mailbags from one port to another. Among other things, the Titanic’s sorting facility allowed passengers to send postcards and letters when it docked in Ireland and France.
Mail clerk might sound like a menial occupation, but it was in fact a plum assignment. “You had to pass a test and only the top percentage would qualify for this sort of a job,” says Piazza. And they were paid accordingly, he adds, with salaries “somewhere between $1,000 to $1,500 a year, which is a lot of money in 1912.”
In the hierarchy of the ship’s crew, the mail clerks were somewhere in the middle. Initially, they were housed in third-class quarters, and expected to take their meals with that group, but after some protest they were moved, and given a private dining room. On the evening of April 14, they had gathered to celebrate the 44th birthday of another American mail clerk aboard, North Carolina-born Oscar Scott Woody.
A ship’s officer who rushed to the mailroom after it had become clear the vessel was in serious trouble later told a Senate hearing investigating the disaster what he saw. “I looked through an open door and saw these men working at the racks, and directly beneath me was the mail hold and the water seemed to be then within two feet of the deck we were standing on….And bags of mail floating about.”
Like the chamber orchestra, which reportedly continued to play until just before the ship sank, March and his colleagues apparently performed their duties amid the chaos and tried to save as much mail as they could. Piazza suggests they would have started with the registered mail; and indeed, survivors later reported seeing the clerks hauling mailbags up to the deck, evidently in an attempt to keep them dry until help arrived. Help did not materialize until after the ship went under, of course, and in some accounts people huddling in lifeboats later reported seeing mailbags bobbing in the inky-black water. Read more
