One of the things both Commando and I had been missing since the world closed down was parkrun. Obviously, Commando missed his Saturday morning 5k run, along with all his parkrun friends. Running has never been my thing. I tried it years ago, long before Commando started running actually. I downloaded the couch to 5k app to my phone and I did most of it. What it taught me was that I could run, I just didn’t like it at all. Running made me miss all the interesting things I see when I’m walking. It also made me hot and bothered. Even so, I missed the camaraderie of parkrun, all the people I chatted to before and after the run and the lovely quiet walks I took when the mad people were all running.
Closing down parkrun was a sensible precaution in the middle of a pandemic. Southampton parkrun is one of the biggest in the country with over a thousand runners every week and often many more. To give the park runners something to keep them going, the parkrun people had come up with the idea of Not parkrun. It was a stroke of genius and probably kept a lot of runners sane. Sadly, it didn’t have the same appeal to me and, although Commando had been doing it, I hadn’t gone along. On 23 May 2020, he decided he was going to do his Not parkrun on the normal parkrun course at the common but a little later in the day. As it was sunny, I decided to go along for a walk.
There were a few other people who’d had the same idea at roughly the same time but not enough of them to make social distancing an issue. It actually felt a bit sad. It was Saturday morning, we were on the Common, my brain said we were at parkrun but there was no finish funnel, no setter uppers, no marshals, no signs, in fact none of the normal parkrun things. It made me realise exactly how much I missed it all. To cheer myself up I wandered off to the ornamental lake. The water and the bright yellow flag irises cheered me up a bit.
I thought I might have seen Commando running around the course. I’d planned to give him a cheer if I did. As it was, I didn’t and I thought cheering random runners I didn’t know might not be a good idea. Instead, I decided to take myself off to the Old Cemetery. It’s always guaranteed to make me feel better.
Usually I walk across the flats from the start/finish line to the cemetery gate but my detour to the lake meant I came at it from a different direction. There is another gate quite near to the Hill Lane part of the cemetery wall, which was where I was by this time. For some reason it is always locked. It had also become very overgrown with nettles since I last walked this way. So, I walked along the boundary wall until I came to the normal gate. By now I was running out of time but there was a particular grave I wanted to see so I decided to take the risk of keeping Commando waiting and visit it anyway. Really I shouldn’t have stopped to look at the rhododendrons blooming but I couldn’t resist.
The Newman family grave was easy to find. I’d seen it many times before, but one of the family members played a small part in the writing project I’d been working so hard on and I’d been thinking about her so much I felt compelled to stop and pay my respects. In late 1912, Miss Ethel Maude Newman, who lived in Hawthorn Cottage on Southampton Common, was appointed as the sole ‘lady visitor’ to the Titanic widows and their families in Southampton. She was given an annual salary of £100 and travelling expenses.
She became a familiar sight on the streets of the town, riding around on her bicycle with her Dalmatian dog running behind. She was remembered fondly by many. John Bartlett May, a child dependant on the fund, recalled that she would wave to people and was very nice to the children. She acted as a kind of social worker and did a great deal to help family members find employment. The Newman family grave is well tended and the cobalt blue glass chippings make it stand out. It was recently restored by the Friends of Southampton Old Cemetery and there is a blue marker to show that this is a Titanic grave. Despite my lack of time, I paused for a few moments and thought about the lady who served the Titanic families so diligently for twenty eight years, until her death on 6 March 1940.
As I left the grave and headed back towards the flats to meet Commando I imagined what it must have been like for the poor widows Miss Newman visited. There is no doubt that they were treated very badly and suffered greatly. Had such a tragedy occurred today things would have been very different. The Relief Fund raised £413,000, an eye watering sum of money back then. The families of the five hundred and forty nine lost Southampton men should have been well provided for but the way the Relief Fund Committee administered the money left a great deal to be desired. The members were mostly clerics, financial experts and judicial leaders and included the Mayor and the Southampton manager of White Star. They were products of the Victorian era who looked down on the poor, especially poor women.
The widows weren’t considered competent to manage their own money, especially not the large sums they would have received had the fund simply be divided up amongst them. There may have been an element of truth in this. The families of the crew were not well educated and they may well have become prey to conmen, or suffered resentment from their peers if they’d simply been given hundreds of pounds. In the end the money was dished out in dribs and drabs and it was never enough. The widows had no chance to budget or plan for the future, especially as they had to prove they were deserving to get each small morsel. The slightest whiff of perceived moral looseness, or drunkenness (quite understandable in the circumstances) meant that their money stopped.
Unsurprisingly, Miss Newman was not universally loved by the Titanic families. There are stories of her bicycle being thrown into the river and she must have borne the brunt of the ill feeling that should really have been directed towards the management of the Relief Fund. In 1940, the committee members placed on record their sorrow at her passing. The families might not have felt quite as sad but she undoubtedly devoted her life to helping those affected by the tragedy.
Walking towards the cemetery gates to meet Commando, it dawned on me what a difficult job Miss Newman had had. She must often have felt torn between the needs of the widows and the wants of her employers. Neither could every truly understand the position of the other and poor Miss Newman, stuck between them, must have taken flack from both sides. Her position was not unlike that of the politicians and advisors handling the current crisis. They have had to take difficult decisions and some were now being vilified for them. As the lockdown slowly eased, the criticisms and differences of opinion seemed to be gathering like a dark cloud. It struck me that it is easy to be a critic when you are not party to all the information and bear no responsibility for the results.
I did notparkrun for a bit, then it became irrelevant. I was doing longer runs and I kept forgetting to look at my watch when I was close to 5k. At that point I was running 3 10ks a week, waiting until I could start training for my half again.
I’ve seen that photograph of Miss Newman before. There’s some suggestion that it was staged and Mrs Hurst already knew that her husband was safe. Given the state of photography in 1912, that’s probably true. You could hardly expect a woman and her children to wait around while the photographer set himself up and then pose to hear bad news. I didn’t realise that she’d had such a bad time. There’s a novel there, I think.
You’ve done really well with your training. I’m sure the half will be a doddle. If It’s Southampton, I might see you there, Commando is running the 10k, I think, as there are no pacers this time so he’s not required.
I think the photo probably was staged. As you say, photography wasn’t as easy then as it is now. I’m sure Mrs Hurst didn’t mind though, given that she’d got good news. I think Miss Newman did get a lot of grief from some of the families. You could be right about the novel. She only plays a small part in mine though.
The half was a doddle. That day a year ago when I saw you on the Common was my second. I’d be doing the Southampton marathon next month if I wasn’t doing the Manchester 10k. It was a Christmas present in 2019 and I should have been running it last May, then last September. It looks as if it really will happen next month.
Miss Newman probably deserves a whole novel. When you’ve got your family history out of your system, she might be a good place to start again.
Manchester is a nice course, I think. Commando did the marathon there a few years ago. It started and ended at Old Trafford.
I think Miss Newman, the Titanic widows and the way they coped would make a good story, although there are a lot of relatives still around so it could be a challenge.
You’d have to write it as a fictional account.
Very interesting story about Ethel Newman. Thank you for researching this and writing about it.
I’m glad you found it interesting. The research was for something else I’m writing but, as half of these things never make it into the finished article, I thought some of it was worth sharing.
I hadn’t heard of Ethel Newman before so thank you for the interesting account. I always learn something from your posts!
I found out about her originally when I stumbled on the grave in the Old Cemetery. Googling is a wonderful thing, and the more I found out the more interesting it became.