Granddaughter of Titanic survivor shares her story

Maud Sincock wasn’t supposed to be aboard the Titanic but, 113 years ago, she boarded the “lovely ship,” as she described it and became part of history.

As the anniversary of the sinking of the luxury ocean liner nears, Gail Garcia — Peralta resident and the granddaughter of Maud Sincock-Roberts — prepares for a presentation about her grandmother’s story of survival this weekend at the Los Lunas Museum of Heritage and Arts.

When Maud left Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, to join her father in the United States, she and her traveling companions were redirected to the Titanic due to a coal strike that forced other ships to transfer their coal and passengers.

“She was 20 and she spent her 21st birthday on the Carpathia,” Garcia said.

After an uneventful week on the ship, everything changed when Titanic struck an iceberg and the unthinkable happened. Initially told to put on their life jackets and heading to the deck was just a precaution, in written accounts and interviews Maud recalled putting on a raincoat over her nightgown and taking several flights of stairs to the upper decks.

Garcia has recorded interviews her grandmother did about the ship sinking, as well as numerous newspaper accounts, but says Maud didn’t really talk to her about the experience.

“I wasn’t old enough for her to even really talk to me about it. I was 4 or 5,” Garcia said. “When I was with her, it was all Grandma cookies and hugs and kisses.”

In the interviews with and articles about Maud, she talked about sitting in the bow of the tiny lifeboat, her legs tucked under her in an attempt to stay warm as she and other passengers watched the Titanic sink into the North Atlantic Ocean.

“When it comes to the people in the water, all she would say was you could hear the screams and the moans, but that was it,” Garcia said.

When they were rescued by the Carpathia, that ship already had a full load of passengers, so the Titanic passengers slept on deck and in the dining room.

“She said the people on the Carpathia did everything they could to take care of them,” Garcia said. “When they got to New York, they had to wait. People put them up in their houses.”

White Star Line, the British shipping company that owned the Titanic, paid to get its passengers on to their final destination, she said, but nothing more.

Maud settled in Michigan, where her father and other relatives lived, and eventually met and married Arling Roberts.

“She ended up in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan and she pretty much never left there, other than when she was doing interviews,” her granddaughter said.

When a movie or book would come out, recounting the tragedy of the Titanic, Maud and other survivors were contacted and asked to share their stories. She even ended up making an appearance on Johnny Carson’s “I’ve Got a Secret.”

“They couldn’t guess her secret, that she was a Titanic survivor,” Garcia said. “She stumped them.”

Garcia described her grandmother as “a very down-to-earth person. She was once asked if she would like to forget (surviving the sinking of the Titanic.) She said she couldn’t. Everyone is just so fascinated by it.

She said, ‘I can’t forget about it because people don’t let you forget about it.’ But I think it was also rather therapeutic for her.”