South Australia-trained rower and nurse Evelyn Marsden becomes a lifeboat rescue hero in 'Titanic' disaster in 1912
Trained at the Adelaide Hospital, Evelyn Marsden, serving as a stewardess and nurse for first class passengers on the Titanic in 1912, drew on rowing skills learned while staying as a young woman at a Murray Bridge farm in South Australia to guide a lifeboat with 40 passengers after the ship sunk.
South Australia nurse Evelyn Marsden became a hero of the 1912 Titanic disaster when she draw on skills learned on the Murray River to help row Lifeboat No. 16 with 40 people until they were rescued the next morning.
Evelyn Marsden was born in 1883 to South Australian Railways worker Walter Marsden (later stationmaster at Hoyleton) and Annie Bradshaw at Stockyard Creek about 80 kilometres north of Adelaide. Growing up in rural Hoyleton, Marsden became an accomplished horsewoman and spent holidays on a Murray Bridge farm where she was taught to row against the tides and currents on the Murray River.
Marsden trained as a probationer nurse at the Adelaide Hospital between January and November 1907 before joining the White Star shipping line as a nurse/stewardess. She was serving on the passenger ship Olympic when it collided with HMS Hawke on September 20, 1911. While the Olympic was being repaired, Marsden, at 28 and living in Southampton, England, signed on to the maiden voyage of RMS Titanic as a stewardess and nurses for first class passengers.
During the Titanic disaster on April 27, 1912, Marsden escaped by being lowered in Boat 16 at 1.35 a.m. from the port side of the ship. Marsen was able to use for rowing skills to help guide the lifeboat with its 40 people until it was picked up a 7 a.m. by RMS Carpathia.
Marsden later married Dr William Abel James, who also worked for the White Star Line. She returned to South Australia, anchoring at Adelaide’s Semaphore, in November 1912 aboard the White Star line, the Irishman, that had her husband as ship’s doctor. Marden was greeted as a hero in South Australia and she went back to the Murray Bridge farm to thank her friends for teaching her how to row.
Her husband served as a doctor in South Australia and they moved into a new apartment in Ruthven Mansions on Pulteney Street, Adelaide city. Later they lived and worked at Wallaroo on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula for 15 months, before finally settling at Bondi, Sydney, where her husband continued work as a doctor.
The couple died, within a week of each other, in their fifties in 1938. A headstone was only placed Evelyn’s grave at Waverley cemetery in 2000, after an article was published about her in a women’s magazine.