Mike Herbold wrote:
> It does my heart proud to think
>that good old George Brayton-Bradley-Braden-Brereton did not spend all
>his waking hours trying to bilk rich passengers and might have had time
>to walk with a lady on deck on a chilly, star-filled night.
Hi, Mike!
It's quite possible you're being too charitable to our hero; don't forget Brereton's 'innocent' conversations with Henry Stengel on board the Carpathia and how those conversations led to Brereton's later attempt to bilk Stengel in a horseracing scheme (the same scheme that Henry Gondorf used in the film "The Sting.") Brereton's shipboard acquaintance with Mrs. Brown might not have been quite as innocent as it seemed.
>It interests me, though, that Mrs. Brown mentions Brayton by name. As
>much as I like good old George, its seems more reliable that Mrs. Brown
>mentions him by name rather than vice versa.
I have no doubt that Mrs. Brown was acquainted with Brereton on board the Titanic and that she mentioned his name to the newspaper reporter. However, the outlandishness of the Denver Post interview convinces me that Mrs. Brown's entire account (including her walking with Brereton at the time of the collision) was distorted beyond all recognition by either the reporter who recorded the interview or by an editor who messed around with the interview after it was filed at the office. For that matter, the account says that Mrs. Brown was sobbing and crying during the interview, too, so it's possible that she herself was too hysterical to give a calm and rational account of the sinking. (In a paragraph that preceded her mention of Brereton, Mrs. Brown supposedly claimed that "Every baby of a tender age has died. Think of it! Right here in this room (on the Carpathia) a score of little babies have died of insufficient medical treatment, and their mothers have cried hideously for three days.")
For what it's worth, I think Mrs. Brown's later detailed account (in which she said she was in bed during the collision) is far more reliable than the interview we've just been discussing. (That being the case, I also think that Brereton was seated comfortably in the smoking room playing bridge whist with Homer, Romaine and Clark at 11:40 p.m.)
> Do you know if the New York Sun and Denver Post were related?
I'm afraid I don't know, old chap.
Muffet Brown wrote:
>Brown's nieces kept only the first page of the Denver Post article in
>their scrapbook clippings
> The family did not keep the continuation of it on p.6, so it
>must have been pretty bad.
Hi, Muffet!
It sounds like I was in good company to judge the page 6 segment as not being worth a dime.
All my best,
George