In the spring of 1912 Annie C. Funk was far from Hereford Township, Berks County. But then, India was exactly where the 37-year-old Mennonite missionary wanted to be. Since 1906 Funk, who was the first woman in her denomination to serve in the then British ruled sub-continent, had been running a residential school for orphan girls in the town of Janjgir-Champa in the eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh and had learned Hindi. “When parents died,” recalled 87-year-old Saroj Singh in 2019, “there were no medical facilities…villagers brought their orphan girls to the school…Miss Funk looked after them and provided education.”
Funk was born on April 12, 1874, to James B. and Susanna Funk on a farm in Hereford Township in what was known as Butter Valley. Her mother’s father was Rev. Christian Clemmer. She was active in the church’s Sunday School and the Christian Endeavor Society. According to one source Funk was “quiet and diffident by nature.” But she taught Sunday School for many years. After attending the West Chester Normal School, now West Chester University, she went south to aid a mission for Black people in Tennessee and later as house secretary to the YWCA in Patterson, New Jersey.
When a new Mennonite mission was being established in India, she expressed a strong interest to help with it. Funk left America to take up her post in November of 1906. “I shall always remember vividly the picture of her standing on the deck of the great steamer ‘New York’ waving adieu to her pastor and some Patterson and New York friends who had come to see her off,” wrote A.S. Shelly in a Mennonite publication. But in 1912 Funk’s life changed when a telegram arrived that said her mother was seriously ill. She had to see her for perhaps the last time. And so began her journey, a tragic one she was never to complete, for fate led her to the Titanic where along with 1,500 others on the night of April 14/15, 1912, she died in the sinking of the so-called unsinkable ship.
Annie Clemer Funk
Over the last 111 years since its sinking the Titanic still fascinates and attracts. Most recently Magellan Ltd., a deepwater seabed mapping company, used two submersibles named Romeo and Juliet to map “every millimeter” of Titanic’s wreckage as well as the three-mile debris field, everything from unopened champagne bottles to a bathtub, that lies 2 miles under the sea and 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. Atlantic Productions is working on a documentary about the digital imaging project. “We’re now going to write the proper science of the Titanic,” Anthony Geffen, the chief executive and creative director of Atlantic Productions, told the New York Times.
Ever since it was rediscovered in 1989 by Robert Ballard, the Titanic has become a major tourist attraction for those well-heeled enough to pay for a dive to the bottom. But long before that the sunken ship was part of the popular culture. Before the year 1912 was out Titanic survivor and movie actress Dorothy Gibson was appearing in a silent film “Saved From the Titanic” that was a box office success in the United States, England and France. Alas, all copies of it were destroyed in a fire.
With World War I and World War II to think about, the Titanic was on the backburner. The Germans made a film in 1943 called simply “Titanic” full of Nazi propaganda about evil British shipowners. The release of the 1953 film “Titanic” with Barbara Stanwyck and Clinton Webb in lead roles renewed interest with a dramatization of the sinking. It won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay that year. Perhaps the final scene with everyone stoically and tearfully singing “Nearer My God To Thee” as the ship goes down instead of running around panicking because they were about to die clinched it.
Historian Walter Lord’s book “A Night to Remember” and a British film of the same name in 1958 gave a more detailed and accurate view, based on survivors’ accounts of the sinking. And James Cameron’s 1997 “Titanic” added a vivid technological feel to the love story that it depicted. The sinking has also played a role in television dramas and programs too numerous to mention.
Yet it was the shock of the event that seemed to have been what kept it in the popular mind. Asked in his 80s what was more of a shock, the start of World War I or the Titanic sinking, my grandfather, who had already made one trans-Atlantic crossing in 1910 with his family and was 18 in 1912, gave it to the Titanic, hands down. “Everybody was expecting a war,” he said, “nobody was expecting that.” The “that” was said with emphasis.
And nobody indeed was expecting that. Captain E. J. Smith of the Titanic was asked several years before by the press what he thought about the possibility of a major ship sinking and he dismissed the idea, saying something like shipbuilding was so far advanced that “it is almost impossible for a modern ship to founder,” i.e., sink. A crew member on the Titanic, trying to reassure a passenger before sailing said, “lady, God himself couldn’t sink that ship.”
Titanic
So, it was with that confidence in mind that the White Star Line conceived of three large liners: the Olympic, the Titanic and the Gigantic, later re-named the Britannic. The Olympic served out its role magnificently, finally scrapped in 1935. The Britannic served as a troopship until it was sunk in the Mediterranean during World War I. A floating palace on the sea, Titanic was dubbed by passenger Archibald Gracie “a summer resort.” Artist Frank Millet, crossing with his Washington, D.C. housemate, presidential aide Major Archibald Willingham Butt, wrote a letter to his friend Alfred Parsons in England that it was the best space on a ship he ever had. “She has everything but taxicabs and theaters. Table d’ hote restaurants a la carte, gymnasium, Turkish baths, squash court, palm garden, separate smoking rooms for ladies and gents…The dining rooms fittings are on the order of Haddon Hall.” Millet forgot to mention the indoor swimming pool. That letter was mailed on April 11 and sent from Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, the Titanic’s last stop before heading out to sea. For Millet this was not entirely a pleasure cruise as he was working on the designs for murals for several state capitols and ideas for a committee on the Lincoln Memorial on which he served. Both Millett and Butt perished in the sinking.
For most of the wealthy crossings were so routine that the Cunard and White Star lines were known as the “Atlantic ferryboats.” Lord notes that in the first week of April 1912 rich American had started to leave their usual winter haunts on the Riviera, “Cannes, Nice, Menton, and above all Monte Carlo” for Paris. “One by one the great houses were opening, and the usual round of salons and soirees began. The hotels were filling, too, crowded with people returning from the south—Lord and Lady Decies at the Meurice…the John Jacob Astors at the Ritz.” The Meurice, founded in 1814 was known for hosting European royalty, among them the queen of Spain. The Ritz, founded in 1897, was the “new” money wealthy.
Lady Decies was the daughter of American railroad multi-millionaire and speculator Jay Gould. The New York Times noted with reference to Astor’s pregnant young wife, “They will return to America where an interesting event is likely to occur,” the society page writer coyly wrote. Astor would perish in the sinking, never to see his future son.
But missionary Annie Funk had something else on her mind. She had to pack her steamer trunk for the long land and sea voyage ahead to the other side of the world. First there was the train to Bombay (now Mumbai) virtually on the other side of India. With many stops and in the heat, Funk may have been exhausted. Funk’s next stop was to the offices of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company. Here she booked passage on the SS Persia. Built in 1900, she could make 18 knots and was known as one of the best ships in the company’s service. But like the Titanic the SS Persia was to meet her own tragic fate. On December 30, 1915, during World War I, she was returning to India from Britain when she was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the island of Crete. The Persia sank in 10 minutes or less, taking 343 of her 519 passengers and crew to their deaths, among them were perhaps as many as 50 children of British governmental employees traveling from England to India. Also lost was a large quantity of gold and jewels belonging to the Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of the princely state of Kapurthala in India. A world traveler and well-known Francophile who had a palace modeled on Versailles, the Maharaja fortuitously had left the Persia in Marseilles before the sinking. The ship was found in 2003 but attempts to recover the Maharaja’s jewels have so far proved mostly futile.
Sinking of Titanic
But in that peaceful year of 1912, except for the always restive Balkans, Funk had no reason to fear. Her ship of choice to America was the SS Haverford of the Red Star Line, part of the International Mercantile Marine Co., a group of shipping companies that included the White Star Line, the owners of the Titanic and controlled by American mega investment banker J.P. Morgan’s interests. What probably drew Funk to the Haverford was that her home port was Philadelphia. Her name, and that of her sister, the SS Merion, were taken from Philadelphia suburbs. No Titanic, it was a non-glamourous, one-stacker ship that left from Liverpool rather than Southampton. But Funk was apparently not one for frills.
Her plans were interrupted when she was confronted by the results of a coal strike. It had been a hard winter in Britain. Although the strike was over in April the coal supplies, especially for ocean liners, were extremely low. Apparently wanting to make a big splash arrival the White Star Line took the coal from its older liner, the Oceanic, and put it on board the Titanic. Because it was new there was some reluctance on the part of the ocean going public to sail on Titanic, an untried ship. The Titanic was only half full when she sailed. Having well known people like the Astors, Millet and Butt on board was a boost; they could be called very early “influencers.”
So, in talking to Funk, the ticket agent offered her what would today be called an “upgrade” to the Titanic. It was an offer that would get her there faster and it would be safer, he might have said. Funk, apparently persuaded, handed him her 13 pounds for the fare and received a second-class ticket, No: 237671.
Second-class accommodation on the Titanic was equal to first-class accommodations on just about any other ship afloat. Funk would have found a combination library and lounge paneled with sycamore wood and furnished with comfortable mahogany chairs open to her. The dining room, which stretched the length of the ship, had large, long tables with swivel chairs. Most ships had them in first class at the time in case of rough seas. The menu was not as spacious as the ship’s ala carte restaurant with rarities like plover’s eggs, but its food was prepared in the same kitchen as first class. Dinner menu for second class on April 14, 1912, began with a consommé and a choice of curried chicken and rice, spring lamb with mint sauce, roast turkey, and cranberry sauce. Plum pudding, coconut sandwich and ice cream were offered for dessert.
It was Annie Funk’s 38th birthday on April 12, 1912. As she left no account it is impossible to know what she did but almost certainly spent time thinking of her mother and praying for her and perhaps remembering birthdays past with her. Funk may well have joined the hymn sing held in the second-class dining room on the Sunday evening of April 14th conducted by the Rev. Ernest Carter and featuring young soloist Marion Wright whose version of “Lead Kindly Light” was said to have brought many in the room to tears. At the end of the service Rev. Carter expressed the hope that many such services would be held there in the future.
Annie Funk was probably asleep on the evening of April 14 at 11:40 pm when the Titanic had its encounter with the iceberg that was to send her to the bottom. Exactly where the Titanic’s hull hit the iceberg and how it took place has been and continues to be debated. Was it a graze that popped rivets? Was it over a heated coal bunker fire that weakened it? Was it just the fast speed it was traveling? Why didn’t the men in the crow’s nest have binoculars? Why were there not enough lifeboats? In fact, there were a few more lifeboats than were required by law, but that law had been written before giants like the Titanic were imagined. And why would an unsinkable ship need them anyway? One theory is that J.P. Morgan cancelled his reservation because he knew about the fire in the coal bin. The part of the hull that hit was in or near the bow and it landed deep in the muck which apparently cannot be seen. Maybe someday science will discover it but the debate goes on.
Annie Funk gravestone
An account attributed to another missionary who is anonymous says Funk was sitting in the lifeboat when she gave up her seat so a child could take it to be next to her mother. Apparently after that she walked away and was resigned to what she undoubtedly and devoutly believed would be God’s will.
Of the 1,500 that died on the Titanic 700 were crew members. Of the third-class passengers 710 died and 174 survived. Almost all the children that died in the sinking, roughly 60, were from the third-class. Only one was lost from first-class. Locked gates separated the third- class, aka “steerage” from the first-class, a not uncommon practice at the time. When the third-class could finally work their way to the upper decks most of the lifeboats were gone. One female first-class passenger later noted she did not know how serious the situation was until she saw third-class passengers on the first-class deck.
In her exhaustive study of the Titanic’s passenger lists, “Who Sailed on Titanic?” Debbie Beavis has uncovered the presence of 8 Chinese sailors as third-class passengers. They were employees of the Donald Steamship Company and on their way to New York to join the British steamship, Annetta, chartered by the United Fruit Company that was to sail for Cuba. Two died in the sinking. The others, Ah Lam, Bing Lee, Tang Lang, Hee Lang, Chip Chang and Foo Cheong, were not allowed, under the Chinese Exclusion Act, to land at Ellis Island. They were kept aboard the Carpathia and transferred to the Annetta and on the next day were on the Atlantic once again.
Seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer, whose father John Thayer, a vice president with the Pennsylvania Railroad who was still on the ship, watched the ship’s sinking while floating in the water. He later gave this dramatic account as the Titanic rose into the air:
“Her deck was turned slightly toward us. We could see groups of almost fifteen hundred people aboard, clinging in clusters or in bunches, like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great part of the ship, two hundred and fifty feet of it rose into the sky till it reached a 65 to 70 degree angle. Here it seemed to pause and just hung for what seemed like minutes…I looked upward; we were right under the three enormous propellers. For an instant, I thought they were sure to come right down on top of us. Then, with the deadened noise of the bursting of her last few gallant bulkheads, she slid quietly away into the sea.”
It was Thayer who insisted that he saw the Titanic split in two against testimony of others that she went to the bottom whole. It was Ballard’s discovery that finally proved him correct. Thayer never got over what he saw that day. In On September 20th 1945, deeply depressed over the death of his son in World War II and the death of his mother, on the anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking in 1944 he drove his car to a West Philadelphia railroad station and committed suicide.
The last person off the Titanic to survive the sinking was Chief Baker Charles Joughin. At the very stern end of the ship, he later described it as like riding an elevator. As the Titanic went under, he simply stepped off into the water and paddled away without even getting his hair wet. Joughin was picked up the next morning by the Carpathia holding on to an overturned lifeboat with other survivors simply paddling in the freezing water. He attributed his survival to having fortified himself with gulps from a “tumbler half full of liqueur.” British born, he later moved to America and settled in Patterson, N.J. dying in 1956.
Funk’s body was never found. When word reached Berks County about Funk’s death on the Titanic the church went into deep mourning. On May 4, 1913 a memorial stone was erected to her memory in the Herford Mennonite Cemetery with an inscription that read in part: “Her Life Was One Of Service In the Spirit Of The Master—Not to be Ministered Unto But To Minister.”