Fr. Browne’s Titanic

Religious obedience, Fr Frank Browne SJ was fond of noting, can save your life. He would know, having been ordered off the Titanic by his Provincial. His collection of photographs of the great liner, discovered by Fr Eddie O'Donnell among a collection of more than 40,000 negatives, are an extraordinary record, consulted even by James Cameron for the making of the Titanic movie. To mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, the 79 photo's he took on board now feature in a newly published edition of Fr Brown’s Titanic Album.

The book has a foreward by Dr Robert Ballard who located the sunken ship in 1985 and was launched in the Cobh heritage centre on Wed 23 Nov, 2011, by Ms Una O’Neill, Chair of the Belfast Titanic Society. Relatives of passengers on the ill-fated night, along with representatives from Harland and Wolff shipyard, attended.

The volume features a newly discovered article by Fr Browne, written for the now obsolete Cork Constitution newspaper, the only thing written by him about the ship before the sinking. And using the photos and memorabilia of Fr Browne’s personal Titanic album, it tells the full story of the great ship’s voyage from Southampton to Cherbourg to Cobh (Queenstown), her final port of call before disaster struck.

Fr. Eddie O’Donnell S.J , who found the photographs of Fr Frank Browne SJ and is now the curator of the collection, speaks to Pat Coyle about the set of photographs which Fr Browne took of the Titanic on the first leg of its maiden -- and only -- voyage, from Southampton to Cobh, Cork, in 1912, sharing some of the stories of the ship that still fascinates people one hundred years on. Listen: