Margaret "Molly" Brown

Born

18 July 1867, Hannibal, Missouri

Age in 1912

44

Aboard

First Class, boarded at Cherbourg

Fate

Survived, Lifeboat 6

Died

26 October 1932, New York

Resting place

Holy Rood Cemetery, Westbury, New York

Before the voyage

She was the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants in Hannibal, Missouri. Her parents put all their children through the eighth grade, the girls included, and she later studied literature, language and drama at the Carnegie Institute. She stripped tobacco leaves for a living before she was eighteen.

In Leadville, Colorado, she married J. J. Brown, a mining engineer. When his company struck gold in 1893 they gave him a seat on the board and twelve and a half thousand shares.

By 1912 she was a founder of the Denver Woman's Club, a campaigner for women's suffrage, and a worker with Judge Ben Lindsey on the juvenile courts. She was in Europe when word came that her grandson was ill, and she booked the first ship home.

That night

She left in Lifeboat 6, the second boat away on the port side, under Quartermaster Robert Hichens. She helped row it.

What she is famous for is not in the record. Hichens testified that he kept the tiller, that an unnamed young woman held it only briefly and let the boat come athwart, and that he took it back. The argument over who commanded the boat was with Major Peuchen, a man. Asked directly whether the women urged him to turn back toward the ship, Hichens answered, "Not that I remember, sir."

On the Carpathia she did the work she is least known for. She formed the survivors' committee, was elected its chair, raised nearly ten thousand dollars for people who had lost everything, and used her French, German and Russian to go among them. She stayed until every survivor had been met by family, a friend or a doctor.

What is said, and what is known

Almost everything popular about her is invented, and most of it was invented after her death.

She was Maggie as a girl and Margaret as a woman. Nobody called her Molly. A Denver reporter named Gene Fowler used the name in a 1933 book, a year after she died, in a chapter he called "The Unsinkable Mrs. Brown." A booklet, a radio serial, a Broadway musical and a 1964 film did the rest.

Fowler also invented the tornado at her birth, the drunken father and the illiteracy. A later writer invented the fortune burned in a stove. She never worked in a saloon. She never met Mark Twain, who left Hannibal fourteen years before she was born. There is no evidence of the opera cloak, the corset or the pistol.

She did not command Lifeboat 6, take the tiller or overrule Hichens. What is supported is that she rowed, and that she wanted the boat to go back.

Afterward

She was never called to testify. Women did give evidence to the Senate inquiry, so it was not a rule, she simply was not asked. So she wrote her own account instead, published it in three parts in the Newport Herald, and used it to attack White Star's conduct. It was reprinted across the country. The woman the inquiry would not hear got the last word in print.

In 1914 she ran for the United States Senate, eight years before women could vote in a national election, and withdrew to direct relief work in France. She was awarded the French Legion of Honour in 1932.

She died that October in her sleep at a hotel in New York, aged 65.

The painting

Artist

Dirk Strangely

Year

2026

The panel

16 x 20 inches, wood

The paper

Pages from a 1912 edition of The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters, published months after the ship went down

The paint

Winsor & Newton acrylic

The artifact

Authenticated coal recovered from the wreck of RMS Titanic, ground into pigment and applied to the pupils and the signature. This is the Artifactism™ element of the work.

The gold

24k leaf on her earring

The texture

Heavy impasto through the feather of her hat

Status

Original, reserved for exhibition

The squared pattern across the painting is the 1912 pages beneath the paint. A small area of her hat is left unpainted, where the page and its printed text remain visible.

She came up out of that water alive. The coal in her eyes did not.

Sources: Hichens, US Senate Inquiry · Molly Brown House Museum, the myths · Encyclopedia Titanica, Boat 6 · Encyclopedia Titanica