Cavalier heroine Edna Watson is escorted off the Monarch of Bermuda by Captain Leslie Banyard.
Photo: The Bermudian
Three die, ten survive in
Cavalier crash
January 21, 1939
The flying boat Cavalier, one of the most luxurious airliners of its day, crashed into the waters of the Atlantic, two hours after it took off from Port Washington, New York bound for Bermuda.
A total of 13—eight passengers and five crew members—were on board. Three died within the first few hours of the crash and the remaining 10 spent a harrowing 11 hours in the open sea, 388 miles off Bermuda, awaiting rescue.
The U.S. Coast Guard and Navy led the frantic search for survivors. Shortly before midnight, a U.S. oil tanker found the 10 clinging to six life preservers, which they had fashioned into a makeshift raft.
The three Bermuda passengers—accountant Nellie Tucker Smith, guesthouse owner Edna Watson and Catherine Ingham—all survived the crash.
The disaster, which received extensive media coverage in Bermuda and the U.S., began at around 1 p.m. on Saturday, January 21 when the Cavalier, operated by Imperial Airways, was nearly halfway into the five-hour flight to Bermuda.
The survivors recounted their ordeal to reporters after reaching the safety of dry land in New York two days later. Edna Watson told the New York Times the airline had flown through snow and hail squalls early in the flight, but the first sign of trouble occurred when an engine slowed down.
Another passenger, New Yorker Charles Talbot, said that the flight became bumpy at 12,000 feet. Then plane began to lose altitude, its engines failed and it hit the water. There was a mad dash to get everyone out of the plane. Airplane steward Robert Spence began grabbing as many life preservers as he could. The plane hit the waves at 2.14 p.m., sank within minutes and the long wait for rescue began.
The whole ordeal took its toll on Spence, who was the last person to leave the plane and died of exposure and exhaustion trying to keep Donald Miller afloat. Miller and fellow passenger Gordon Noakes, who sustained a head injury when the plane hit the water, drowned.
The 10 sang and talked to each other to keep their spirits up in the cold and rough seas and fought off fears of being attacked by sharks.
Montrealer Edna Watson, a physiotherapist who had lived in Bermuda since the 1920s, emerged as the heroine. Passengers later called her “the bravest woman alive”. She saved the life of the Cavalier’s captain, Roland “Roly” Alderson, by helping to keep him afloat after he gave his life preserver to another passenger.
Watson also led the group in song and swam among them, massaging their muscles as they seized up in the cold waters of the Atlantic. Captain Taffy Powell, Bermuda station manager of Imperial Airways, was credited for his navigational skills. His estimate of the likely position of the survivors proved accurate. The oil tanker made its way to the area and heard voices in the dark of night.
When news of the rescue reached Bermuda, a special service was held at the Anglican Cathedral. One week later, the Bermuda passengers and four crew members were greeted with cheers when they returned to Bermuda on board the Monarch of Bermuda.
An inquiry into the cause of the crash was highly critical. It revealed that ice on the carburetor had caused the engines to fail and that no one was wearing life preservers when the plane hit the water.
It called for Imperial Airways, the forerunner of British Airways, to adopt procedures that were standard for Pan American Airways, which operated flying boats on the same New York-Bermuda route. They included wearing of seat belts during take-off and landing, improvements in instructions given to passengers about the use of life preservers and the carrying of a life raft, emergency rations and flares.
In August of the same year, Governor Sir Reginald Hildyard presented Edna Watson with the Royal Humane Society’s silver medal for her heroism. She went on to have a distinguished life of public service as one of the first two women elected to Parliament in 1948 and a founder of the Committee of 25 for Handicapped Children.
Cavalier captain Alderson visited her in Bermuda a month before her death in March 1976. Alderson died in 1993.
The crash inspired the novel Flight of the Cavalier, published in 1980 by Bermudian author Brian Burland.
Sources: Reports of the Cavalier crash in The Royal Gazette, January 23, 1939; New York Times, January 24, March 28 and August 4, 1939; The Flying Boats of Bermuda by Colin Pomeroy.
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Francis Landey Patton
January 22, 1843-November 26, 1932
Author, theologian, university president
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Patton (right) with Paul Harris, the founder of Rotary International.
Photo: The Bermudian
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Francis Landey Patton, a man whose roots in Bermuda go back to the 1720s and after whom Francis Patton School is named, enjoyed a 50-year career in the United States as a theologian, author and educator.
He was a Presbyterian minister who rose up the ladder to become president of Princeton University in 1888, serving in the position for 14 years.
Descended from a long line of seafarers, Patton was the eldest of three sons of George Patton, a sea captain, who used a portion of the fortune he earned from a life on the high seas to purchase Carberry Hill, on Keith Hall Road, Warwick, as his family home.
Patton was born and raised at Carberry Hill—a property that is still owned by the Patton family—and attended Warwick Academy. He received his religious education at Christ Presbyterian Church in Warwick, where Rev. Marischal Keith Frith became a major influence and the inspiration for his future calling as a minister.
He was sent off to boarding school in Ontario, Canada, then moved on to Knox College, a Presbyterian seminary, and the University of Toronto, although he did not graduate from either institution. He earned his academic credentials in the U.S., graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary, in Princeton, New Jersey in 1865. It was a milestone year for the newly-minted man of the cloth. Patton was ordained as a Presbyterian minister and on October 10, at the historic Brick Church in Manhattan, he married Rosa Stevenson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister.
Manhattan was his base during his first years out of seminary. He received his first posting to the Eighty-fourth Street Presbyterian Church—now known as West-Park Presbyterian Church—where he held forth with fiery sermons and espoused a conservative doctrine.
His reputation as a teacher and theologian and his popularity as an after dinner speaker grew rapidly, according to the Princeton University publication, The Presidents of Princeton, which also observed: “Even those who disagreed with his rigid conservative Presbyterian views admired his intellect and wit.”
He became the darling of conservative Presbyterians, who were opposed to liberal views of religions that were emerging around the late 1800s. When millionaire and conservative Presbyterian Cyrus McCormick established a chair in didactic and polemical theology at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Chicago, Patton was appointed to the post.
While in Chicago, he continued to do battle against the forces of modernism. In 1874, he brought charges of heresy against a minister whose liberal views alarmed him. The case made national headlines, but Patton came out the loser.
He continued his rise up the church hierarchy. He became editor of a church paper The Interior, and was elected moderator of the church’s general assembly. And Patton, who published his first book The Inspiration of the Scriptures in 1869, continued to churn out books.
In 1881, he moved back to New Jersey to become a professor at his alma mater, the Princeton Theological Seminary, which historian Duncan McDowall described as “a bastion of old-school Presbyterianism.”
Seven years later, he was appointed president of Princeton, which was then known as the College of New Jersey and had a long connection with the Presbyterian Church.
Patton’s appointment was not universally welcomed and his legacy was mixed. He oversaw Princeton’s expansion, with the construction of new dormitories, a gym, infirmary and auditorium and hired more professors including Woodrow Wilson, a future president of the U.S., but he did not light any fires as an administrator. The high point of his tenure was presiding over the school’s 150th anniversary celebrations, which saw its name officially changed to Princeton University. U.S. President Glover Cleveland attended the festivities.
He is described in The Presidents of Princeton as a “wonderfully poor administrator.” He lacked “initiative in important policy matters, resisted meaningful curriculum reform and was lax in matters of discipline and scholarly standards.” Historian Duncan McDowall said his legacy “was shaped as much by what he didn’t do as by what he did.” Students were still required to take Greek in an age that demanded more practical skills, and Patton resisted calls to establish a law school and a graduate school.
Woodrow Wilson, who was pushing for the law school, became so frustrated he threatened to resign. In the end, Patton was done in by his resistance to change. He resigned in 1902 and Woodrow Wilson replaced him as president. After that it was back to Princeton Theological Seminary for Patton. He was president until 1913. Despite his shortcomings, Patton was popular with students. In 1906, they petitioned to have a dormitory named after him. Every year, Princeton’s Class of 1891 sent his wife a birthday telegram.
Patton lived out his last years at Carberry Hill, where over the years he welcomed high-flying visitors from home and abroad, including Woodrow Wilson, Canadian prime minister McKenzie King, Rotary Club founder Paul Harris, and James Morgan, the owner of Southlands Estate in Warwick.
Patton’s son George, whom he controversially hired to be a secretary at Princeton, followed him home to Bermuda, where he was appointed inspector of schools. Patton, who became totally blind in his old age, became known as the ‘Grand Old Man of Bermuda’. He was routinely showered with tributes in the press on his birthday.
Reporting on his death in its December 1932, The Bermudian magazine said: “He was a mighty intellectual, a brilliant theologian, philosopher and speaker of mesmeric and tremendous power, and an inspiration to a morally confused world by reason of the perfect inner harmony of his life.”
Duncan McDowall wrote that “posterity has not been kind to the man who was Bermuda’s most known theological and pedagogic export”. His name lives on at Francis Patton School in Hamilton Parish. A plaque pays tribute to him at Christ Church.
In 2007, Patton, along with educators Adele Tucker, Matilda “Mattie” Crawford, Edith Crawford, Millicent Neverson, May Francis Smith, all of whose careers were on island, was honoured by the Post Office in a ‘Pioneers of Progress’ stamp issue.
Sources: ‘The Grand Old Man of Bermuda’ by Duncan McDowall, The Bermudian, Fall 2008; The Presidents of Princeton University, Princeton University website.
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Celebrations start with a bang!
Bermuda’s 400th anniversary celebrations began with a bang— a launch party on Front Street on January 3 that culminated in fireworks. There were live performances from a slew of groups including the gombeys and the Bermuda Regiment band, capped with aerial stunts from Animate Objects Physical Theatre, a Florida troupe with whom Bermudian Tyler Barker performs.
There was some griping from spectators about disorganisation and insufficient Bermudian content, but Conchita Ming, chair of Bermuda’s 400th anniversary steering committee, told the Bermuda Sun she was “thrilled” by the turnout and urged naysayers: “Rather than criticise, get on board and help make the year a success.”
Events have been planned for the whole year. The highlight is expected to be a Tall Ships visit in July, the anniversary month of the 1609 Sea Venture shipwreck that started it all.
This month and next, the main event is the Bermuda Festival, which is presenting the usual cultural attractions from abroad, with the addition of a sizeable Bermuda component. The Festival will conclude with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by U.S.-based Bermudian actor-director Joel Froomkin.
Jamestown exhibit spotlights Bermuda
A special exhibition that will explore the shared history and links between Bermuda and Virginia is set to open at the Jamestown Settlement Museum, Williamsburg, Virginia in March. ‘Jamestown and Bermuda: Virginia Company Colonies’, which will run from March 1-October 15, puts the spotlight on the island during its 400th-anniversary year.
It will trace Bermuda’s history beginning with the wreck of the Sea Venture in July 1609 en route to Jamestown, and highlight its strategic importance and its rise as a 20-th Century tourist resort.
More than two dozen artifacts from the Sea Venture archaeological site and objects associated with government and the Church of England in Bermuda and Virginia will be on display.
A companion lecture series will feature talks by filmmaker Lucinda Spurling and Tom Butterfield, executive director of the Masterworks Foundation, and historians Michael Jarvis and Lorri Glover.
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Royal recognition
Pioneering Bermudian actor Earl Cameron received a CBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list in the U.K.
It was given in recognition of his achievements as one of the first black actors to make it in film and theatre in Britain.
His big break came in the 1950 film Pool of London, in which he had a starring role. It was one of the first black films to have a positive portrayal of a black man. Numerous roles followed over the decades including parts in James Bond films.
Still working at the age of 91, Cameron appeared in the 2005 film The Interpreter [pictured above], starring Nicole Kidman, and The Queen starring Helen Mirren, which was screened in 2006.
Cameron, who will be presented with his award at Buckingham Palace, told The Royal Gazette: “I played an artist who painted Helen Mirren’s portrait in The Queen, so I have already had a trial run.”
Historic painting presented to Archives
Finally some positive news for the Bermuda Archives, which has been having something of a rough ride lately. A string of complaints about an alleged lack of access to public documents has led to an investigation by the Ombudsman.
But the acquisition of new watercolour by 19th-Century painter Edward James presented beleaguered archivist Karla Hayward with an opportunity for a photo op.
The watercolour, entitled ‘Confederate Blockage runners Maude, Campbell and Hansa in St. George’s Harbour’, was recently acquired in a joint purchase by the Bermuda National Trust, the Archives and private donors.
The painting, which depicts St. George’s Harbour during the height of blockade running in the 1860s, is the fifth James painting to be acquired by the Bermuda National Trust and will be stored at the Bermuda Archives.
Briton Edward James painted during his tenure as Bermuda’s Surveyor General. He lived in a small house on Town Square and developed a reputation for his eccentricity and wit.
Archivist Karla Hayward told The Royal Gazette: “James’ works are a rich source of detail of the American blockade at the east end of the island during the Civil War.”
The painting was said to be the most expensive James’ work acquired to date, but the Gazette report did not disclose the cost.
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