Titanic lives exhumed from dusty archives

LET’S talk a little cycling and football. But first some family history.

William O’Doherty tied on his apron as normal one morning in Cork city and walked to work behind the bar of the well-known Woodford Bourne public house on St Patrick’s Street. The year was 1912.

He was in his early 20s and, it seems, liked a game of cards after his shift pouring pints. One night he and a colleague were dealt a fateful hand. The pot? A ticket each for the Titanic’s maiden voyage.

You can, I’m sure, guess the rest; both young men were lost in the cold water on that night to remember, April 15.

It sounds like a Hollywood yarn — and indeed it is, thanks to James Cameron — but O’Doherty was my grandfather’s uncle. And, sadly we thought, he earned even less than those Irish who were resigned to the footnotes in that chapter of history. O’Doherty and his workmate were forgotten completely — the names of the two lads who actually lost the game of cards, and had earlier booked the tickets, are instead on records, plaques and in books.

They may well have cursed their luck at the full table in that dark corner of the bar (which is still open), then risen and walked out into rich, full and long lives. Their descendents may be reading this now. But their names are inked in history’s ledger as the two young men who froze in the Atlantic.

So, prompted by an uncle who compiled our family tree through hours of research and conversation, I stayed back late one night after work in the Irish Examiner offices and sneezed my way through the dusty archives. A colleague in the library allowed me to literally reel in the years on the microfilm print machine. I poured a coffee and slotted the spool marked ‘Cork Examiner, 1912’ into the mechanism.

Eventually I found the front page I was looking for. Peering back at me through layers of time and several generations was the stoic image of a posing William ‘Achilles’ O’Doherty. With a middle name like that, he was always doomed, it seemed to me.

The journalist Senan Maloney dedicated a section of his book The Irish Aboard the Titanic, to the pair’s story, having one day rapped on my grandmother’s front door, I believe.

Armed with these pieces of evidence, we next contacted the heritage centre in Cobh, to politely pull at their sleeve and explain that their list of lost souls on the wall was missing a couple of chancers. They promised a year ago to commemorate him by producing a piece of the wall of his own.

Tomorrow, meanwhile, the Tour de France gets underway and its stages will, I hope, be once again bookended by the voice of Eurosport’s Gary Imlach. The wry, intelligent presenter has been doing the presenting job for years, prodding studio guests like Stephen Roche for nuggets of information those of us outside the peloton never knew.

He wintered this year under the lights of Channel 4’s graveyard NFL coverage, in which his understated demeanour seemed at odds with the chuckling persona of his American in-studio pundit.

But far from saddles and shoulder pads, it’s from another sporting tradition that Imlach’s family is rooted. When his father died in 2001, the Englishman realised he knew relatively little about him. He wrote a wonderful book, My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes, as a sort of testimonial.

Stewart Imlach, Gary’s father, was a left-winger from Lossiemouth in Scotland. A nippy winger, he weaved his way through 14 seasons of professional football, over 400 games, including playing in the 1959 FA Cup final for Nottingham Forest against Luton Town and the 1958 World Cup for Scotland. He rarely spoke of his past and Gary didn’t delve into his father’s career until he was forced to rely on secondary sources — like newspaper microfilm — for sources.

“The list of his clubs had always had a natural rise and fall to it,” he wrote. “Bury, Derby, Nottingham Forest — pause for a beat — Luton, Coventry, Crystal Palace. Nine syllables up, nine down.”

And the sad end to a proud career becomes more personal as he learns more. “I knew the sequence of steps to and from the high-altitude plateau in the middle of his career, but I didn’t know the tempo. Discovering the abruptness of his decline was like coming across an old spool of cine film in the attic that showed him falling silently and inexplicably downstairs.”

Finding a match programme for the 59 Wembley showpiece, Imlach reads with a little sadness: “Bob McKinlay, centre-half: training to be a motor mechanic ... Stewart Imlach, outside-left: a return to the joinery business.”

His father did quickly fade into the shadows again and put away his medals and caps. But his son’s memorial is a wonderful piece of writing and a better testimonial to his dad.

On Sunday, rather than sit in and watch the second stage of Le Tour with Imlach, after an email from Cobh this week, we hope to travel to the town for the day to view William O’Doherty’s new testimonial for the first time.