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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© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is the news service for Hoofcare and Lameness Publishing. Please, no re-use of text or images on other sites or social media without permission--please link instead. (Just ask if you need help to do that.) The Hoof Blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a headlines-link email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). Use the little envelope symbol below to email this article to others. The "translator" tool in the right sidebar will convert this article (roughly) to the language of your choice. To share this article on Facebook and other social media, click on the small symbols below the labels. Be sure to "like" the Hoofcare and Lameness Facebook page and click on "get notifications" under the page's "like" button to keep up with the hoof news on Facebook. Questions or problems with the Hoof Blog? Click here to send an email hoofblog@gmail.com. 

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Google Ocean and the Animated MRI of a Horse's Foot

by Fran Jurga | 4 August 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

This blog post is comprised of three "aha!" moments.

It began back in February when I was intrigued by the launch of Google Oceans, an enhancement of Google Earth that allows us to look at the ocean floor, go inside the hull of a sunken ship, or explore the base of an iceberg in Antarctica. I imagine one day soon that the lobstermen around here won't have to go out and check their traps anymore; they will simply get on Google Ocean, type in the GPS coordinates of each trap, and see what they've caught. Then they would have to haul only those traps.

The image (above) that Google Ocean served up to promote its new program made me think of the horse's hoof, of course. The hoof has a lot in common with an iceberg. Everything is going on where we can't see it. Things are larger than they appear on the surface. And there's more to it than meets the eye. And as the history of the Titanic will tell you, a problem with an iceberg can ruin your day, or even end it. The same goes for a hoof.

Fast forward a couple of months and I'm lying inside an MRI unit in Massachusetts General Hospital. I'm determined to understand and appreciate this uncomfortable and deafening experience and use whatever I can get out of it to enhance my comprehension of magnetic imaging of the horse's foot.

Except no one on the staff wants to talk to me and the noise is too loud for conversation anyway.
I appreciate MRI images of the horse's foot because it is a new way to see inside the foot but I'm never sure what I'm looking at because I am trying to keep in mind that that is just a slice, unlike a radiograph. The MRI is like a strip of film negatives of a sequence of images in an old-fashioned filmstrip (albeit in 3D). When the radiologist looks at the MRI, he or she views the series mounted together on a sheet, not a single isolated image. Together, they make up the whole, but the isolated view reveals the injury.

MRI should be a collective noun, not a singular. That's what I brought out of that clanging tube that day at the hospital.

Fast forward again. Now it's the end of July and I'm in Columbus, Ohio, sitting in the back row at the AAEP's Focus on the Foot summer meeting. I'm really enjoying the speakers, taking notes like mad, and regretting missing the first day.

A change in the schedule brings North Carolina State University's Dr Rich Redding to the stage; he had been the victim of media glitches the day before, so his lecture was rescheduled. What a bonus for me! His lecture offers a hybrid approach to examining the foot and selecting the imaging modality for an injury diagnosis. All his images of the foot are lovely and explained very clearly but it all comes together for me when he compares four cases of foot injuries--puncture wound, two collateral ligament strains, and navicular zone pain by showing their MRIs.

The first thing that caught my attention was the should-be standard technique of showing a dissected foot cut at a specific point, and positioning an MRI "slice" at the same point next to it. That helped visualize the level in the foot where the injury was, and all the structures seen in the MRI, since the navicular bone can be viewed on so many different slices through the coffin joint.

Then, instead of showing an isolated MRI slice that showed the lesion site, he animated the slices into a fly-through of the entire MRI series.

Dr. Redding writes: "This was a horse that had a puncture to the navicular bone that damaged the Deep Digital Flexor (DDF) Tendon with a flap of tendinous tissue on the dorsal tendon proximal to the navicular bone. There is hemosiderin in the digital cushion where the nail penetrated the frog into the DDF and navicular bone." (Rough translation: the nail was in the back part of the foot so it grazed the upper surface of the navicular bone, which is at the level of the short pastern bone in the coffin joint. Watch the video and when the black square of P2 appears, you will see the injured area very briefly.)

It was Google Ocean all over again. You're beneath the surface, flying through; stop where you like and have a look around.

When they decide to do Google Hoof, I'm ready. Or maybe we're already doing it.

Thanks to Dr. Redding for the loan of this animation.


© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.