27

The Long Night of Ellen Betty Phillips

When I sailed with Robert Ballard and Haraldur Sigurddson to the volcanic spreading centers of the East Pacific Rise in 1985, the first photographs and videos of the Titanic wreck site were brand new. At night, discussions about popped rivets and separated seams as the final cause of its sinking sometimes seemed irrelevant. The more we studied its watertight compartments and construction, the more we appreciated the Titanic as a beautiful machine, abused by people who drove it at psychopathic speed toward a fleet of icebergs on a moonless night.

From a certain point of view, the Titanic was the metaphor of a beautiful child born full of promise and then abused. In the dynamic by which the cycle of abuse continues through subsequent generations, Ellen Phillips, the baby born to Kate Phillips as Mrs. Marshall, would have to become a true survivor type—not only in the sense of surviving in the shadow of Titanic, but also surviving a mother driven insanely cruel by the Titanic.

Two decades after Ballard's Argo-RISE expedition, my daughter Amber would befriend a classmate who was surviving terrible emotional torture by a parent. Their teacher, it turned out, had survived such abuse herself. Amber and her friend and their teacher began what seemed to me insightful and instructive discussions about becoming a survivor type.

“As Amber told it,” I wrote to Roy Cullimore, “each child comes into this world as a delicate piece of freshly blown glass. Usually a parent leaves a finger smudge on the glass, somewhere along the [child's] way to adulthood. Sometimes a parent leaves scratches. And sometimes a parent becomes a hammer and breaks the glass so that it can never be put back together again.

“I thought about it, and remembered what my mother had said about some of the cruel people around us, as I was growing up: ‘The same hammer that breaks glass can also forge steel.' I guess what I need to tell the kids is that no one can do very much to change the behavior of the hammer. All we can determine is what our own reactions shall be. Are we really just glass? Or can we be steel?

“I know. I know,” I told Cullimore. “The Titanic was steel. And look [at] what our beautiful little rusticles have done to her (to say nothing of a little frozen water).”

• • •

Kate Phillips “Marshall,” penniless, pregnant, and scandalized, attempted to make a home for herself in the land to which she had been headed with Henry Morley Marshall. In 1912, even the child of an unmarried mother was reduced to Scarlet Letter status and cut off from many of the usual rights of being human. The social groundswell of the times could easily have driven people mad—which, in Kate Phillips's case, it did.

Phillips returned to her parents' home in Worcester, England, where Ellen was born on January 11, 1913. The birth certificate listed Phillips as the mother and, as was consistent with the custom of the time, left blank the space for the name of the father. As soon as Ellen was born, Kate fled the town, leaving her parents to raise the child.

In later years, Ellen would take the birth date as an indication that she was the youngest Titanic survivor, believing that she had actually been conceived aboard the ship on or about April 11, 1912. However, visible signs of pregnancy were the reason that Phillips had been rejected by a network of Titanic-aid volunteers in America, giving her no choice but to return home. Her departure from New York aboard the Adriatic on May 2, 1912, indicates that Ellen was most likely conceived about three weeks prior to the Titanic's April 10 sailing. Phillips's discovery of a missed menstrual period would have been consistent with what by all accounts was a hastily arranged departure, attended by Henry Morley's brother and Phillips's parents—none of whom expected to see her again.

Although it seemed inordinately important to Ellen that she had been conceived aboard the Titanic, as “proved” by her birth date, pregnancies were much more likely to run two or three weeks early or late rather than to end exactly nine months after the date of conception. Given what happened throughout the rest of Ellen's life, most people would be able to understand why she eventually clung so desperately to the romantic notion that she had been conceived during the voyage itself, as the very last remnant of a father she loved dearly but never knew.

Ellen's first nine years were quite happy while her mother stayed away and allowed her to be raised by protective and kindly grandparents. Their house was located on the River Severn. “My earliest memory,” Ellen wrote decades later, “is of sitting in the family punt [boat] while my grandfather strapped me in. ‘We'll make sure you don't drown,' he would say. But I [didn't] know what he meant.” Those first nine years with her grandparents were the happiest years—the last truly happy years—of Ellen's life.

One day each year, a strange woman started visiting “and smothered me with kisses,” Ellen recalled. “But I didn't know her and I hated it.” By then, her grandparents had moved to a new town and had started calling her Betty, instead of Ellen, to spare her the locals' gossip and stares.

In 1922, the strange woman arrived again, announced that she was Ellen's mother, told her that she had recently married, and—with legal documents in hand that allowed the transfer of not only the child but also monthly support payments from Henry Morley's brother—said that she was taking her away. Rather than being reunited with a loving mother, Ellen was ripped from the happy home in which her grandmother had delighted in designing and sewing her dresses and was thrown into a pit with a woman who could not look at her child without seeing a bitter reminder of the Titanic.

“Don't look at me like that!” Kate Phillips would often yell. “Your eyes! That's the way your father used to look at me—how he looked at me on that last night.”

To all outward appearances, Phillips was a friendly and compassionate pillar of her new community. Inwardly, she had evolved into the sort of beast who would draw the curtains before the beatings began so the neighbors would not see. She made an exception to such secrecy with her parents, who were allowed to visit every August. Phillips would hit the child in front of them, as though daring them to say or do anything about it.

“The shock of the Titanic must have disturbed my mother's mind,” Ellen would say in 2002. The Russians aboard the Keldysh were less understanding or forgiving of Phillips. Coming from a country whose people took their pessimism in stride, they judged that mental illness and drunkenness only brought out the real personality that hid behind one's everyday facade. In the Russian view, Ellen's mother must have been the sort of child who would have crushed a butterfly or kicked a puppy when she thought no one was watching.

“She used to cane me on the back of my legs as I walked upstairs,” said Ellen, who in defiance of her mother began calling herself Betty, the name her grandparents gave her. “[I] had fleece-lined knickers down to the knees and the fluff [the sheep's wool] would stick to the cuts. I kept pulling at them, and one day my friend Elsie asked what the matter was.”

Betty (as she insisted people now call her) broke down and told her friend for the first time what was happening at home. Her teachers had seen the wounds and had asked what caused them, but for too long a time for any child to bear, Betty kept the truth inside.

Elsie had a choice: take the easy path and keep the secret or take the brave path and tell someone. Elsie's mother then had to face the same choice. She went to the headmistress of the neighborhood school, who called Betty to her office.

“I cried,” Betty recalled. “I was so worried about what my mother would do, but the headmistress said, ‘She'll never touch you from this day.'”

Betty wished, then, more than anything, as she would wish or pray for the rest of her life, that she could be returned to her grandparents. But the law of favoring the natural (biological) parent no matter what prevailed. Betty's stepfather provided the court with a written guarantee that she would be looked after properly and that his wife would never harm her again.

“And she didn't,” Betty recalled. Not physically, that is; at every opportunity, Phillips blamed Betty for ruining her life and attempted to convince her that she was ugly, stupid, and worthless.

Then one day Betty's stepfather left, and Betty was forced to care for her increasingly angry and bedridden mother.

“About that time,” Betty recalled, “my mother gave me a diamond and sapphire necklace and a [leather] purse with a pair of room keys inside. I didn't realize their importance, because she could never speak to me about the Titanic. Years later, I was told by her sisters that my father gave her the necklace as a token of love just before she was ordered to get into lifeboat 13.”

The whole story was as strange and almost as distressing to Betty as it had been for her mother. “She was cruel to me, her own child; yet [as Phillips's sisters told it], while she was being rescued from the Titanic, she cradled a baby, Millvina Dean, in the lifeboat.”

Every night before Betty went to sleep, she would kiss the photograph of the father she never knew. Despite her love for him and for the last symbol of a love destroyed and a future derailed, by 1999 economic hardship forced Betty to sell the necklace, the purse, and the keys to a dealer of Titanic memorabilia, who made them available for exhibition in Freemantle, England.

Clearly taking advantage of the blue sapphire surrounded by diamonds and set in platinum—and of its outward similarity to the central prop in Jim Cameron's blockbuster film involving a necklace with a stone named the Heart of the Ocean, entwined around a story of forbidden love—a promoter evidently named Betty's previously unnamed necklace the Love of the Sea. According to Betty's friend John Hodges, the dealer gave her a pittance for the necklace—barely more than the weight value of a sapphire, small “old cut” diamonds, and platinum-gold alloy.

Hodges had come to know Betty through a shared sense of tragedy. He lost his son in 1998 and missed him beyond words. He and the boy had been planning to start a restaurant together, but after he died, “there did not seem a lot of point,” Hodges said, so he began to immerse himself in the Titanic. When Hodges met Betty, the bond between them was instant. He too, had grown up without parents.

Hodges described Betty as “a grand old lady with a great sense of humor, and she has a very moving story. The only problem is that she insists on being the youngest survivor. I have had a chat with her on occasion stating that she has a great connection [with the ship]—and the story, with both [of] her parents on board the Titanic, and that she was born just nine months later.” Hodges tried to advise his friend that her story should have been enough, without any necessity of challenging Millvina Dean for the title of who was the youngest Titanic survivor.

In his letters, Hodges referred to Dean as “an equally grand and humorous lady (‘I never take ice in my drinks'), and equally strong-willed.” He believed, like most observers, that Betty's fight for Dean's title went back to the story of how, even before boat 13 reached the Carpathia, everyone including Phillips, wanted to touch the littlest Titanic victim.

The point at which Dean drew her own personal line in the sand was when British Titanic enthusiasts, ostensibly taking her side, circulated rumors that a DNA test had proved Betty to have been conceived by a man other than Henry Morley “Marshall” after the Carpathia reached New York and that she was therefore illegitimate by another man and not by Morley. “Poppycock,” Dean said in defense of her adversary, to which she added scornfully, “There are no ‘illegitimate' children.” As late as 2001, Betty was still trying to get the DNA test that would finally put Morley's name in the blank space on her birth certificate.

When Hodges read a letter to Betty from one of the scientists who was headed out on the Titanic XIII expedition, she enjoyed very much the mention of a hope to send a robotic probe into the second-class quarters. “And when I mentioned her father, her eyes filled with tears,” Hodges wrote. “I did ask which stateroom her parents would have shared, as they traveled under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Marshall (as shown on the passenger list), but she did not know.”

She had been in contact with relatives of her father's for several years, but they repeatedly (and rudely) refused to allow a DNA test.

Betty's story, Hodges wrote, had “obviously upset one or two people [in] the British [Titanic] Society.” The organization finally claimed that she (unlike Madeline Astor's unborn child), was not a survivor in any way, shape, or form. The word fraud was even bandied about, and she became the only Titanic survivor, or unborn child of a survivor, ever to have been expelled from a Titanic organization anywhere in the world on account of not having actually been aboard the Titanic. There was considerable mockery attached to the claim of having boarded the Titanic as a sperm and an egg and exited as a zygote.

Dean, who was nine weeks old when she survived the Titanic in boat 13, was, if anything, amused to be an honored member in a strange porthole-measuring and rivet-counting subculture of human beings who would be feuding into the twenty-first century over which of the Titanic's children deserved the title of youngest survivor or even legitimate survivor.

John Jacob Astor VI, who was born four months after the sinking, was universally accepted as having been present, albeit as a borderline last-trimester fetus. Joseph Lemercier Laroche was younger still: a first-trimester fetus when his mother, Juliette, boarded the Titanic. He was born on December 17, 1912, and was considered an unborn passenger of the Titanic. Only in the case of Betty, born (as Ellen) three and a half weeks after the Laroche child and most likely conceived about three weeks before her parents boarded the Titanic, was the status of any “unborn survivor” questioned.

There was no question that Betty had lived her entire life in the shadow of the Titanic. Her dispute with British Titanic scholars over which of Boat 13's children—Betty or Millvina—was “really” the youngest survivor was but another demonstration of the never-ending resonance of odd coincidence and even odder psychology that seemed always to have surrounded the Titanic.

Human thinking and the laws of clubs and organizations could try to make either-or arguments; but nature rarely works within humanity's either-or fallacy. Dean was the youngest already-born, breathing, and actively vocalizing survivor the night the Titanic went down. Astor, Laroche, and Ellen (Betty) Phillips were also aboard the ship. Betty was the wreck's Schrö dinger's cat scenario. To some historians, she was simultaneously there as the youngest Titanic survivor and simultaneously not.

By the spring of 2001, the combination of resurging interest in the lost liner and the scarcity of survivors had brought Betty invitations to attend numerous Titanic conventions, to address school groups, and to appear on talk shows.

And so it ended with debates about survivors and the ever present multigenerational scars of the unthinkable. In November 2005, Betty would die knowing that she deserved, to one degree or another, a rightful place in the roll call of Titanic survivors. After Betty passed away, Millvina Dean held the title of the youngest and—more significant—the last survivor, until May 2009, when, at the age of ninety-seven, she single-handedly carried the entire legend from the realm of living history into archaeological time frames.