On the night of 14/15 April 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, killing over 1,500 people. However, one of the lucky survivors of the terrible tragedy was Catherine ‘Kate’ McCarthy from Ballygorteen, Bansha, Co. Tipperary.
Catherine had decided to emigrate to America where her brother and sister were already living. She boarded the Titanic at Queenstown (now Cobh) on ticket number 383123 which cost her £7, 15s. On the night of the sinking, she recalled Tipperary man Roger Tobin calling to her cabin and telling her and two other Tipperary girls that she was rooming with to come up on deck and bring their lifebelts with them.
Catherine sensed the urgency and implored the other two girls to follow but she ended up leaving alone and she never saw the two girls again. In a letter to her father in May 1912, she recounted that ‘I was [put] in the last boat to leave the ship and was the second last person put into it. This was a short time before the ship went down.’
Later, she would recall hearing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ being played and the horrible cries of those struggling in the water once the ship had sunk. She also described the ship splitting in two in its final moments.
From her lifeboat, Kate was subsequently transferred to the Carpathia, which brought her to New York. There, she recovered in hospital for a few days before joining her sister in Guttenburg, New Jersey.
In 1914, Kate married Tipperary man John Croke. They spent some years in New York before returning home to Ireland in the early 1920s. In later years Katie was reportedly held in high esteem in her local community and was described as a very kindly and sweet-natured lady. During the summer of 1948 she suffered a stroke but lingered for three months before her death on 12 November 1948 aged 60. She is buried in St Michael's Cemetery in Tipperary Town.
Sources:
Martin Quinn, Tipperary People of Great Note (2020), p97.
https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/.../catherine-katie...
