Temple Tuesday: The Titanic Connection

On July 12, 1938, Shirley Temple and family departed for Bermuda:

With three bodyguards and two toy dolls, Shirley Temple yesterday sailed for Bermuda. The child star’s departure was kept secret to permit her to escape hordes of admirers. Shirley and her mother, Mrs. George F. Temple, arrived only five minutes before the Queen of Bermuda sailed. Adopting her usual simplicity with the press, Shirley told reporters: “I want to ride a bicycle and those little carts they have in Bermuda. I want to go swimming and I expect to have an awfully good time.” Completely unnoticed by the sailing crowd of 300 at the pier was another of the ship’s passengers, Vincent Astor.

Shirley stayed at the Castle Harbour Hotel and visited various local attractions, including the Bermuda Aquarium which had been founded in 1926. Vincent Astor and Aquarium curator Louis Mowbray would often take a motor yacht down to South America and bring animals back to Bermuda, like Crooked Nose, the Galapagos tortoise. American millionaire and philanthropist Vincent Astor accompanied Shirley to the Aquarium:

Shirley Shoots Fish

Bermuda—Inside of Bermuda’s Government Aquarium at the Flatts Village, Bermuda, Vincent Astor is shown with Mr. Louis Mowbray, curator of the Aquarium and one of the world’s foremost Icthyologists, and Shirley Temple, child movie star, on holiday in Bermuda. A little boy gazes in awe at Shirley, and not at the queer fish in the tanks.

Astor also invited Shirley to ride on his private railway which ran through his 22-acre estate. Vincent was very fond of trains, and built a narrow gauge track consisting of about 1400' of track. The train had two passenger cars (each sat four) and two luggage cars. The train was used to take his guests around the large estate and over the hill to his private station where he connected his tracks to those of Bermuda’s Main Railway. The junction point was known as Astor’s Siding. The railway no longer exists, apart from trails and remnants.

Vincent’s parents were wealthy American business tycoon John Jacob Astor IV and Philadelphia heiress Ava Lowle Willing. They divorced in November 1909. As if that wasn’t scandalous enough, in 1911 John Jacob remarried (at the age of 47) 18-year-old socialite Madeleine Talmage Force. Vincent did not care for his stepmother, yet still served as best man at his father's wedding. The couple took an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt to avoid all of the gossip back home, but still managed to make headlines since their honyemoon vessel was the ill-fated Titanic. John Jacob Astor put his five months pregnant wife Madeleine on one of the ship's lifeboats. She was rescued eight hours after her husband went down with the ship.

When Astor helped his wife onto the lifeboat, he was wearing his dinner suit, complete with his favorite 14 karat gold Waltham pocket watch, which was intact and in his coat pocket when his body was discovered nearly 13 days later. John Jacob Astor’s body and his belongings were shipped to Nova Scotia, where Vincent arrived a few weeks later to collect them. Vincent wore the watch for years and showed it to Shirley when they were aboard the Queen Bermuda. Eventually, he gave the watch to his godson, William A. Dobbyn V.

John Miottel (shown above with the watch), who collects luxury ocean-liner memorabilia, said in a phone interview that he bought the Astor watch “in 1997 in a small auction house in Asheville, North Carolina, around the 85th anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking.…The ironic thing is that almost nobody, including the Astor Foundation, knew about this watch at the time. There would have been a lot more bidders if they had.” Mr. Miottel said that he bought the watch after Mr. Dobbyn’s widow died and her heirs put it up for auction. “Mrs. Dobbyn had a young cousin in Asheville in the auction business, so instead of going to Sotheby’s or Christie’s she took it to him,” he said.

And that is Shirley’s Titanic connection!

See more Shirley Temple photos at my main website.