Titanic Disaster: The farrier who went down with the world's greatest ship

It was a big newsday when the world learned that the Titanic, a ship hailed as "unsinkable", had indeed sunk in the North Atlantic, after hitting an iceberg on April 16, 1912.

Every year in April, we hear once again about the sinking, as the world pauses in honor of the terrible tragedy: the "unsinkable" British cruise ship hit an iceberg. Since it was woefully unprepared for the possibility of sinking, 1500 lives were lost.

At least one farrier went down with that very big ship.

George Henry Green was a 40-year-old farrier who had been shoeing in the town of Dorking in Surrey, England. He was emigrating to South Dakota, in hopes of making a new life in a gold mining town, and was a third-class passenger on the Titanic.

Not long before the ship hit the iceberg, he had sent a post card home, saying that he was enjoying "lovely sailing".

Farrier George Green, from

encyclopedia-titanica.org

As a third-class passenger, George may well have been locked below deck when the ship's crew followed orders that would seal the lower-paying passengers' fate. You hear so much about the Strausses and the Astors and other first-class passengers yet we don't know much about those poor people belowdecks who met one of the worst fates imaginable.

They didn't have a chance of escape and possibly never even knew what hit the ship or what was going on above them.

Out of 599 third-class passengers, only 172 survived. And George wasn't among them.

Here's another horseshoeing-related trivia fact about the Titanic; The first lifeboat to be lowered was manned by Titanic crew member James Robert McGough, the son of an Irish horseshoer who had emigrated to Philadelphia.

And did you know that it took 20 draft horses to pull one of Titanic's 15-ton anchors through Belfast to the shipyard on a wagon?

George Green's body was never recovered from the icy North Atlantic but his name appears on the grave of his sister in Fawley Churchyard, Buckinghamshire, England. Thanks to Roger Marks for finding the grave, taking this photo and giving permission to share it on The Hoof Blog: (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by R~P~M

Were there horses aboard the Titanic? That's still a mystery. Some sources say there were polo ponies aboard, and there's an unverified story about a German racehorse who had a private paddock on C deck.

Other people to think about include Charles Robert Bainbrigge, a 23-year-old horse trainer from the island of Guernsey in the English Channel. Charles was traveling to Savage's International Stock Farm in Minnesota for work and to be near his sister who had already moved to Minnesota. The farm was known as the "Taj Mahal of horse farms" and was home to one of the most famous pacers of all time, Dan Patch.

Two passengers listed their professionals as horse grooms.

Sometimes tragedies just sound like a lot of numbers, but there are real people in those numbers. People like you and me.

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