We have been trying to find out more about the people on board Titanic, I want to know more about them than just their name. So in my search I have found out about Robert Williams Daniel. He is often only remembered as an American Titanic survivor, but he was much more than that. He was a person and when we look more closely into his life, we can see a man that was privileged but also influenced by pressure, war, loss, and perhaps even by memories that he could never truly escaped.
Robert Williams Daniel was born on the 11th of September 1884 in Richmond, Virginia and came from a prominent Virginian family with both political and legal roots. He was well educated and attended local schools before he graduated from the University of Virginia in 1903. He began building a career in business, first working with the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad, before moving into insurance, and then into banking. He was clearly an ambitious man and very capable, and was used to moving in wealthy and influential circles. By 1911 he was living in Philadelphia and was working as a banker, with business interests that required him to travel to Europe.
In April 1912, whilst her returning home from London, Daniel boarded the RMS Titanic as a first-class passenger. He was only twenty-seven years old and was used to travelling in comfort, he even brought his prized French bulldog, Gamin de Pycombe. He would have probably seen the crossing as just more than another routine journey. But that was not to be, tragically Titanic hit an iceberg.
Daniel survived the sinking, although the exact details of how he escaped remain unclear. That uncertainty shows just how chaotic that night really was. Whether he reached a boat or was pulled from the water later, he survived one of the most traumatic disasters of the time. His dog though was tragically lost.
While aboard the rescue ship Carpathia, he met another survivor, Eloise Hughes Smith. She had sadly lost her husband in the disaster. They married in 1914, probably drawn together by an experience that only very few others could understand.
During the First Word War, Daniel served in the United States Army from 1917 to 1919 and reached the rank of Major.
After the war, Daniel returned to banking becoming a senior bank executive. Sadly his marriage to Eloise ended in divorce in 1923. He married Margery Durant later that same year, and they had a daughter, but that marriage also ended. In 1929 he married Charlotte Bemiss Christian, they had a son together. He owned Brandon, a historic Virginia estate and restored it and farmed there, and became known as a gentleman farmer.
The economic shocks of the Great Depression changed his path once again. He retired from finance and turned more fully toward public life in Virginia. In 1935 he was elected to the Virginia Senate, and served as a Conservative Democrat, remaining in office until he died.
Some accounts suggest he battled alcoholism, maybe caused by the emotional aftermath of the Titanic, and the stigma that was attached to being one of the men who survived. He died in Richmond on the 20th of December 1940 from cirrhosis of the liver, aged just fifty-six. For a man who had survived one of history’s most famous maritime disasters and had also lived through the First World War, it is sad that greatest battles of his life may have been one that no one could see.
I think Robert Williams Daniel’s story reminds us that survival is not always the end of the struggle. Do you think men like Daniel, who outwardly rebuilt their lives after great tragedy, were ever really able to leave those events behind?
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