Clodagh Finn: Why we need people like the ‘unsinkable Molly Brown’

One of those was a Frenchwoman of nobility: “She came on the ship the smartest, most perfectly gowned woman I ever saw. She escaped in her nightdress, and she was frantic with fear,” Molly, or Margaret Brown as she was in real life, said afterwards.

Catastrophe proved to be the ultimate leveller, although it is also true to say that first-class passengers were far more likely to get a place on the departing lifeboats than the misfortunate people travelling in steerage.

Margaret Brown hadn’t intended to get on the lifeboat at all but, as Elaine Landau recounts in Heroine of the Titanic: The Real Unsinkable Molly Brown, she was lifted and dropped four feet into the lowering lifeboat.

There were about 20 women on board and a terrified quartermaster who was put in charge.

He said the situation was hopeless because there was nothing they could do to stop the boat being sucked under with the sinking ship. The women, however, were having none of it. They picked up the oars from the bottom of the boat and started rowing.

When one of the three men in the boat continually repeated that, without water, food or a compass, they had no chance, Margaret listened for a while and then told him to be quiet. “I told him to be still or he would go overboard. Then he was quiet. I rowed because I would have frozen to death. I made them all row. It saved their lives,” she told The New York Times on April 20 in 1912.

All the while, she sang and talked to keep up spirits in the seven hours before the RMS Carpathia picked up the lifeboat. When asked how she had managed to survive, she apparently replied: “Just typical Brown luck. I’m unsinkable.”

The account of her life after — and indeed before — the sinking of the Titanic became the much-embroidered stuff of legend. This year marks the 60th anniversary of one of the best-remembered versions of her life: The Unsinkable Molly Brown, the hugely popular 1964 film starring Deborah Reynolds as the ebullient Molly.

Watch a clip — it’s still available online — and you’ll get a taste of a “big, brassy, bold and freewheeling” film, as one critic dubbed it, in which the heroine says things like: “I may give out, but I won’t give in.”

It’s an admirable sentiment and it is nothing short of joyful to see Margaret Brown portrayed as a spirited, vivacious, no-nonsense woman who went from rags to riches and later used her money to fight for — and fund — the underdog.

Her characteristic wit is captured by Elaine Landau in this glorious anecdote. When a monied friend of Margaret’s said that one should never wear diamonds in daytime, Margaret retorted: “I didn’t think so either until I had some.”

You’ll read other fanciful accounts of how she was born during a cyclone and how she nearly died when she fell into the Mississippi as a child. It took three donkeys three days to pull her out, according to the children’s book by Joan W Blos which, in fairness, has the wonderful title, The heroine of the Titanic: a tale both real and otherwise.

The making of Molly

While it is difficult to extract the truth from the many myths, it is the life and times of the real Margaret Brown that fascinate me. She was born in Missouri on 18 July 1867 to Irish immigrants John Tobin and Johanna Collins. They were an interesting couple; he was an abolitionist and she was a woman who believed in equality and education for girls.

Margaret went to a grammar school run by her aunt, Mary O’Leary. As a young teenager, she worked stripping tobacco and later moved to Leadville, Colorado, where she worked in a carpets and drapery department. In 1886, she married JJ Brown, a miner whose parents also came from Ireland. They had two children.

Margaret was an early advocate for women’s rights. When her children were young, she helped to set up a branch of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association. She also worked in soup kitchens to help miners’ families.

Her husband went on to become a very successful mining man. Wealth and good fortune followed. The family bought a house in Denver and had a summer house in the hills, but Margaret Brown continued to work for the underprivileged. She campaigned for education, votes for women and helped to establish the first juvenile court in the US.

She also studied literature, language and drama at the Carnegie Institute in New York. Much later, she used her knowledge of French, German and Russian to communicate with other survivors on board the Carpathia. By the time that ship reached New York in 1912, Margaret Brown had already helped to set up a survivors’ committee and had raised thousands of dollars to help them.

She had boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg in France after hearing that her grandson was ill. At the time, she had been travelling in Egypt with her daughter Helen. Her daughter stayed behind, though, and later her mother wrote to say: “After being brined, salted, and pickled in mid ocean I am now high and dry... I have had flowers, letters, telegrams — people until I am befuddled. They are petitioning Congress to give me a medal... If I must call a specialist to examine my head it is due to the title of Heroine of the Titanic.”

Nevertheless, she went on to use that ‘title’ to raise funds for other survivors and talk about the issues that she cared about; workers’ rights, women’s rights, education and literacy for children.

She was active during the First World War too, helping wounded French and American soldiers and raising funds to rebuild devastated towns and cities in France. She was awarded the prestigious French Legion of Honour for her work.

There was a later chapter too. A curtain call, if you will. She studied drama in Paris and performed on the stage in Paris and New York. She died, aged 65, in 1932. It’s time we made a film about that Margaret Brown, the unsinkable flesh-and-blood woman whose real life far outstrips the manufactured excesses of fiction.