Chronicler of everyday life Dr. Alec Gill talks about half-a-century capturing the same street.

Our maritime ceremonies correspondent Angus Young reports on a story that James Cameron entirely failed to put in his movie.

Joseph Boxhall knew his ship was in trouble when he came across a passenger holding a piece of ice. The Titanic’s fourth officer had been having a cup of tea in his cabin when an iceberg was spotted by a lookout. Moments later, as he made his way to the bridge, he felt a collision but it didn’t break his step.

Aged 28, Joseph was already an experienced seaman when the luxury liner’s maiden voyage came to an abrupt end. Born in Hull, he was a third generation seafarer who started his apprenticeship aged just 15 on a transatlantic crossing from Liverpool to Portland in Oregon. By the time he gained his Extra Masters’ certificate in 1907 after studying at Trinity House he had already sailed around the globe several times onboard ships owned by the Hull-based Wilson Line.

He then joined the White Star Line and was eventually offered a post as fourth officer on the newly-completed Titanic in March 1912, joining her for sea trials shortly afterwards.

Joseph’s encounter with the ice-carrying passenger came as he descended to the ship’s lower decks to check for signs of damage. In a memoir recorded in 1962 he recalled: “I took this piece of ice and walked along the upper deck on the starboard side to see where it had come from and there, just inside the ship’s rail, was a powdering of ice running along as though she’d compressed it.”

On a second search for damage he entered the ship’s mail room and saw clerks frantically pulling letters out of the racks, Standing at the top of a flight of stairs leading down to the main handling room he saw a mailbag float by beneath him. “I instinctively stooped down to try to pick it up. I just couldn’t reach it. I realised then it was serious,” he said.

Reporting back to Captain Edward Smith, he was ordered to start taking covers off the ship’s lifeboats before launching a number of distress rockets from the bridge. With all the rockets fired, Smith ordered him to take command of one of the lifeboats. “I tumbled into this lifeboat and we got lowered down,” he recalled 50 years later. “I found that I only had three of the ship’s crew – a steward, the cook and a sailor. I tried to count the passengers but it was difficult because they couldn’t speak English. I reckon I had about 30 onboard the boat. The captain looked over from the bridge and told me to go round to the starboard side to the gangway doors which were practically at the opposite side to where I was lowered. I had great difficulty in getting the boat round there. I was using the stroke oar standing up and there was a lady helping, she was steering the boat round the ship’s stern. When I passed round the boat to get to this gangway door her propellers were out of the water. I’m not certain if I didn’t pass underneath them.”

When Joseph reached the gangway doors they were crowded with people. “I didn’t dare go alongside because if they had jumped they would have swamped the boat. It was only small with no buoyancy tanks in her. I pulled away about a quarter of a mile. What struck me as being strange was that I couldn’t see any of the other boats.”

While his boat ended up on the ship’s starboard side, the other boats were on the port side. Seemingly alone in the ocean, Joseph and those in the boat could only watch as Titanic disappeared from view. “The sea was perfectly still when we left the ship. Every star in the heavens was visible but there was no moon so it was dark. For a long time we didn’t move the boat. You could see by the arrangements of the lights (on Titanic), all the lights were burning and you could see that she was going down. You could see that her stern was getting pretty low. We pulled, we got away clear of the ship and we just laid on the oars until we realised that she had gone and we heard all the screams. We couldn’t do anything. The screams went on for some considerable time.”

Their boat was eventually found by the British ocean liner Carpathia. They were the first of the 700 survivors of the disaster to be rescued. It’s estimated around 1,500 people lost their lives.

Joseph resumed his career with White Star until the First World War when he was commissioned to serve on a Royal Navy battleship before being given command of a torpedo boat based in Gibraltar.

After the war, he returned to White Star and eventually became a chief officer before retiring in 1940. Following his death in 1967 at the age of 83, his ashes were scattered at his request at the position he had calculated as Titanic’s final resting place.

In 2006 a plaque commemorating his life was placed on his former home in Westbourne Avenue.

Angus Young

Poet and second-hand obsessive Dean Wilson scours Hull’s bargain palaces to report on the best.

One of the larger but lesser-known libraries in the city is visited by former Saturday girl Amy Thompson.

Embroider Miranda Van Rossum tells us all about her remarkable project to turn the city into an artwork.

A whole history of Hull literally buried is now being revealed and, as our sepultural excavation correspondent Angus Young reports, it sounds fascinating.

It’s an oasis of green next to Hull’s busiest road. At the moment there is currently no public access to Trinity Burial Ground thanks to the ongoing construction work on Castle Street. But people will once again be able to visit when the £200m highways upgrade is finally completed next year. One of the reasons the wider scheme has taken so long was the need to excavate part of the site to eventually make way for a new slip road.

Originally used by the parish church of Holy Trinity (Hull Minster), the burial ground was used between 1783 and 1861 after space immediately next to the church in the Old Town became limited. A team of 90 archaeologists sensitively excavated nearly 10,000 bodies which were subsequently re-buried within the grounds. Their work uncovered a cross-section of Hull’s population at the time and represented the largest ever scientific excavation of a post-medieval burial ground in Northern England.

As well as the bodies, personal items and coffins, they also discovered the footprints of various buildings including an 18th century prison, a 19th century timber yard and, most intriguing of all, a previously unrecorded limestone building which is thought to have been part of the 12th and 13th century settlement of Wyke.

Examination of the human remains has helped build up a detailed picture of the health of Hull’s population at the time through evidence of injuries and disease. The investigations were carried out under a special licence issued by the Diocese of York to main contractors Balfour Beatty who, in turn, hired Oxford Archaeology to carry out the excavation.

With the human remains reburied and work on the main A63 project now in its final stages, attention is turning back to the burial ground. A Balfour Beatty spokesperson said: “The Trinity Burial Ground redevelopment is going well. We have retained over 70 per cent of the area and are now working to complete the carefully-restored brick walls, with new landscaping, planting and pathways alongside returning a number of the original headstones which will be displayed to the public. The final layout and landscaping for the area will provide a welcoming  public space for the local community. The burial ground will be open to the public on completion of the scheme in 2026.”

As archaeologists continue desktop work to catalogue all their work, some of their finds at the site are currently on public display at Hull Minster and in the church’s Trinity Room cafe during normal opening hours.

Angus Young

Playwright Maureen Lennon takes us back a couple of thousand years for a night on the tiles.

We caught up with children’s author Catherine Jacob at a recent Mini-Malarkey and it turns out she’s a fan of old-school stories.

Our wartime reminiscences correspondent Angus Young has been listening to the fascinating memories of a Hessle Roader.

Kathleen Hartley was born In February 1941 when the intensity of German bombing raids on Hull was starting to increase. In the same month 20 people were killed in the city during attacks by the Luftwaffe. Kathleen’s mother Evelyn gave birth to her at the family home in Great Thornton Street. She joined three older sisters and a brother. A younger sister would be born in tragic circumstances two years later.

Kathleen explained: “Before the war my Dad worked on the trawlers. When the war started he became part of the Merchant Navy and in 1943 he was killed when a torpedo sank his ship.” Gilbert Edwards was just 42 when he lost his life. He had been a bosun on the Ellerman Wilson Line steamship Runo when a U-boat attacked a small convoy of ships 60 miles off the coast of Libya.

Back in Hull, it was decided to send a heavily-pregnant Evelyn to Gainsborough in Lincolnshire to give birth. Although she has no memory of it, Kathleen was about to be evacuated. “Two of my sisters and my brother were sent to live in Scarborough. They had a terrible time because the family they were with weren’t very nice. They ended up sleeping in a cellar. My other sister went to Huddersfield and I was sent to Malton. I was just a baby really so I can’t really remember it. I’ve always wondered who looked after me but I never got to know.”

After the war, the family were reunited back in Hull. “Our old house had suffered bomb damage so we couldn’t go back there, I think all the windows had been blown out. Instead, we moved into a house in Cambridge Street – six of us and Mum. That’s where I grew up. The house had two bedrooms, an attic, a front room and a scullery/kitchen. That was it. There was no hot water and we had an outside toilet and a tin bath. We all got washed in it once a week on a Saturday.”

To support her young family, Evelyn worked in a nearby soft drinks factory. She also washed trawlermens’ kits when they were back onshore for two shillings a bag and sold some of her own home baking to make ends meet. “We were definitely poor but we didn’t feel like that. Mum was a great cook and I don’t ever remember being hungry.”

Even so, she says the family were grateful for the support of the close-knit fishing community they were part of. “Mum and Dad were both from Hessle Road. Everyone seemed to know each other back then and I remember we got regular deliveries of free fish which I think came from the Fishermen’s Mission. We ate a lot of fish and drank cups of water. All of the furniture was given. One armchair had no back in it.”

Her childhood playground was the bombed ruins of St. Luke’s Church at the top of the street. “All the kids used to play there. We used to play ‘houses’, pretending it was really a big house. There was never any trouble. We would play out until the man came along to turn the gas lights on, that was the signal for us to go home.”

With their mother constantly busy, Kathleen and her sisters would also help out at home. “Every Saturday we would clean the house from top to bottom when she was at work. There were no vacuum cleaners back then, it was all done by hand with brushes. We didn’t complain because we all knew it was our job to do it. We just got on with it and made sure we did the best we could. We also cleaned the front step. Everyone did in those days, there was a real pride in keeping the front of your house clean and tidy.”

One day a parcel arrived at the house. Inside were a number of dresses. They were from America, donated as part of an extended wartime charity aid programme. “They were the most beautiful things I had ever seen,” recalls Kathleen, who thinks she was five or six-year-old at the time. Mum was so proud of how we looked in them that she insisted on getting a photograph taken of us wearing them.”

Kathleen left school at 15 and started her first job at Reckitts factory on the company’s famous blue laundry soap production line. “I hated it. I was stood eight hours a day breathing in blue and the foreman was horrible but I stuck it out for three years because it was money. I would give every pay packet I got straight to my mother. Then I got a job as a waitress at the Gainsborough restaurant in the city centre and I loved it. I was in my element because I’ve always been quite a social person and just love being around people.”

Now 84, Kathleen still works as a volunteer at the Hull Women’s Aid charity shop in Chanterlands Avenue. “It’s a very different world now. We had very little when we were young but, in a way, I think we learned to appreciate what we did have a lot more than perhaps younger people do these days.”

Angus Young

With two J.R.R. Tolkien statues being unveiled in the East Riding next month, we dispatched Hull Tour Guide Paul ‘Sméagol’ Schofield to reveal the author’s links with our city.