Fate caught up with Elizabeth Hocking as she stepped off a curb in Akron. Exactly two years after surviving the sinking of the Titanic, she met her destiny.
A streetcar conductor flagged down two pedestrians at about 6 p.m. after seeing a woman sprawled on East Market Street in front of Akron City Hospital. The men were surgeons, Dr. Charles E. Norris and Dr. Charles W. Millikin, who carried the woman into the hospital.
“When discovered, the woman was lying on what is known as the ‘devil strip,’ the space between the car tracks,” the Akron Evening Times reported April 15, 1914. “The only wound on her body was a deep cut on the back of the head. She was unconscious and never regained sufficiently to talk before the end came early this morning.”
Police initially thought she was a mugging victim. Officers identified her after finding a water bill in her pocket.
Eliza Hocking, 54, a widow who lived at 195 Gale St. on West Hill, was the matriarch of an English family who had sought a better life in the United States. They packed up their belongings in Penzance, Cornwall, and booked second-class passage in Southampton aboard the Titanic on April 10, 1912.
Dreams of new lives
Joining Hocking on the liner’s maiden voyage were daughter Nellie Hocking, 21, son George Hocking, 22, daughter Emily Richards, 24, and grandsons William Richards, 3, and George Richards, 10 months. Waiting for them in Ohio were Emily’s husband, Sibley Richards, and Eliza’s son Sidney Hocking, brothers-in-law who had moved to Ohio a year earlier, found work in rubber companies and raised enough money to bring their families here.
George Hocking had lived in Akron, too, working at Diamond Rubber Co. in 1911 before catching typhoid fever in the fall and returning to Cornwall to recuperate.
The Hocking and Richards families were dreaming of new lives in Akron when the Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40 p.m. April 14, 1912.
“I had put the children in bed and had gone to bed myself,” Emily Richards later recalled. “We had been making good time all day, the ship was rushing through the sea at a tremendous rate and the air on deck was cold and crisp. I didn’t hear the collision for I was asleep. But my mother came and shook me.”
“ ‘There is surely danger,’ she said to me. ‘Something has gone wrong.’ ”
A slight bump
Asleep in another cabin, Nellie Hocking felt a bump as the ship struck the iceberg.
“I jumped out of bed and asked the steward what was wrong,” she recalled. “He said ‘Oh, nothing much, child, go back to bed.’
“I was going back, but noticed several persons coming up the passageway with life belts on. So I dressed completely, and by that time the steward told me to go up on deck. My brother George was one of the first to help fill the lifeboats. He told me to get in and I didn’t want to but he insisted.”
Initially, Nellie thought “it seemed fun” to get into the boat and be lowered to the water. She expected to return to the Titanic to tell her mother about the experience.
Meanwhile, her mother, sister and nephews were ascending into chaos. They were ushered through a dining room to a ladder that led to the upper deck and whisked through portholes into a lifeboat that had a foot of icy water in the bottom.
“Once the boat had started away, some of the women stood up and the seamen, with their hands full with the oars, simply put their feet on them and forced them back into the sitting position,” Emily said.
The lights go out
Watching in the dark, Nellie said some women in her lifeboat were worried about their husbands. That’s when she realized her brother was in danger.
“When we saw a row of lights go out on the Titanic, we were frightened; when we saw another row go out, we wanted to row back and get those we had left,” Nellie recalled. “Then came a crash and the whole ship broke in half, all the lights went out, the broken parts went down and we heard the screams of those left behind. Oh, I want to forget those screams.”
The Titanic sank at 2:20 a.m., claiming more than 1,500 lives. With bodies floating all around, sailors in Eliza and Emily’s lifeboat plucked seven men out of the icy water. Overcome with hypothermia, they babbled incoherently and tried to overturn the boat. Two died soon after.
On Nellie’s lifeboat, everyone was “screaming, crying, sick, frozen and wet” until the rescue ship Carpathia reached them before dawn. Aboard the Carpathia, distraught families learned who was saved and who was lost.
George Hocking was among the missing.
In Akron, Sydney Hocking didn’t know his family was on the Titanic until he read it in a newspaper. The clan was supposed to cross a week later aboard the Oceanic.
“If Brother is lost, I know it will kill Mother,” he told the Akron Press. “Just when I was looking forward to a happy reunion, this horrible thing had to happen.”
He hurried to New York, where the Carpathia landed April 18 with more than 700 Titanic survivors. The Hocking and Richards families had a bittersweet reunion before continuing on to Ohio.
Eliza Hocking told reporters that she didn’t want to talk about “this terrible wreck,” but with tears in her eyes, she mourned for her son George.
“My boy came home from Akron last December with typhoid fever and I nursed him back to strength,” she recalled. “He did look so well, too, when we left Penzance. I only came over here for his sake; he was such a wee laddie — only 22 years old — to be left without a mother in a strange land.
“I never want to go back to England. I couldn’t forget him there, where he lived all his life and where his friends would drop in any time. Here in this new country, which I don’t associate with him at all, it will be easier. But, oh, if I could only have kissed the laddie goodbye. Not a word to the grave did he take with him from his mother.
“I was so sure we would see each other again. Dear, dear, what happy times we planned last Sunday on the Titanic, when we should all be together today in Akron.”
It was Eliza Hocking’s final public statement on the Titanic’s sinking. Over the next two years, she quietly blended into Akron with her children and grandchildren.
Unsolved ending
On April 14, 1914, she took a streetcar to visit her daughter Emily Richards at 225 Arch St. She may have been preoccupied with thoughts of the Titanic anniversary when she mistakenly exited at Franklin Street, one block away from Arch, and apparently walked around the back of the streetcar to cross East Market.
Not long afterward, she was found lying in the street. She almost looked like she was asleep. The only injury was a half-dollar-sized hole in the back of her scalp.
Police wondered if a robber had mugged her. Later, they theorized that an automobile hit her and drove off. The case never was solved.
The brown-haired, gray-eyed grandmother was 54 years old when she drifted away at 6 a.m. April 15 — two years to the date that she lost her son on the Titanic. She was buried in Akron’s Glendale Cemetery.
Elizabeth Hocking crossed the Atlantic, but she wasn’t able to cross a street.
Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.