By Diane Wailes
If you’d met Robert Triggs it wouldn’t have taken you long to work out what he did for a living! With an anchor tattooed on his left arm, and another on his right hand, it was clear the sea was in Robert’s blood.
It was 1912 and for Portsmouth lads like Robert, who’d made a career in the merchant navy, the new ship in port – nicknamed ‘The Millionaire’s Special’ – looked like a dream job. The ship didn’t have a permanent crew, but in just a few days 699 men and women signed up as casual crew members. Robert secured a job as one of the ship’s fireman stokers, on a decent wage of £6 a month, so life must have felt pretty good. The ship’s name was the Titanic.
It took an hour from Titanic striking the iceberg until the first lifeboat was lowered into the sea. Lifeboat 3 was on the starboard side and the fourth boat to be launched. The old rule ‘women and children first’ had come up against the realities of the Edwardian social class system, so it was no surprise that into lifeboat 3 went American tycoon, Henry Harper, his wife, his manservant, and their Pekinese dog, Sun Yat Sen. With no other women willing to get in and the lifeboat only half full, a handful of the ship’s firemen were also allowed to jump in at the last minute. Robert didn’t hesitate and that split-second decision saved his life.
With Titanic starting to list, the lifeboat descended in terrifying fits and starts as the lowering ropes became stuck in the pulleys. The descent to safety must have felt like an eternity.
There was no light on board, so the passengers burned what they could find to try to make themselves visible to rescue ships, as they waited in freezing conditions. They were eventually picked up by the RMS Carpathia – built on the Tyne by Swan Hunter – and taken to New York, where they arrived on 18th April, just eight days after leaving Southampton.
After the sinking, Robert returned to the UK and resumed his seafaring life. When war broke out in 1914, he joined the Army Service Corps and was sent to France, to the horrors of the Western Front. After the war he returned to what he knew best – a life working at sea. His final ship was the British Enterprise, which arrived in the Tyne in January 1931. Robert must have been quite ill when his ship docked as he was immediately sent ashore to the Infirmary on Hawkey’s Lane, where he died a few days later.
His newspaper obituary said, “Robert Triggs, marine fireman, who has died in hospital, at North Shields, was a survivor of the disaster to the White Star liner, Titanic, in the Atlantic, in 1912, when 705 people were saved out of the 2,203 who were on board. After his rescue he went straight to sea again.”
With no close family, Robert was buried in Preston cemetery in an unmarked grave, his eventful life largely forgotten. Years later a member of the Triggs family spotted the unusual name in the Titanic records, tracked down his grave and paid for a black granite marker, which reads simply, ‘Robert Triggs, 1871-1931, Sailor, Titanic Survivor’.
