The most famous British person among the 1,500 casualties of the Titanic disaster was W.T. Stead, the second editor of The Northern Echo.
Stead was just 21 and working as a clerk on Newcastle’s Quayside in 1871 when he was offered the editor’s chair, and he spent the next decade blowing the Liberal trumpet, campaigning against social injustices and sensationalising the story of the West Auckland mass murderer, Mary Ann Cotton.
In 1877, he organised scores of ‘atrocity meetings’ in which ordinary people demanded that the Conservative government should stop the Ottoman Empire slaughtering its Bulgarian subjects – a campaign that led directly to W.E. Gladstone’s Liberal Party winning the 1880 General Election. Gladstone rewarded Stead by promoting him to the Pall Mall Gazette in London, where he triumphantly campaigned against the trade in young girls in the capital’s brothels.
Stead had become fascinated with spiritualism while in Darlington, and in 1912 he was sailing on the Titanic to New York to address a spiritualist peace conference with the US president, William Taft. He was in cabin C89 when the iceberg struck and he was last seen, with the deck listing perilously, asking the ship’s orchestra to play his favourite hymn, ‘Nearer My God to Thee’.
The cheese press to which he used to tether his pony is now a memorial dedicated to him outside Darlington library.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2012)