“Any more ladies on deck?”

Marion Wright tried to ease her way through the crowd, to see who was talking. She still hadn’t grasped what was happening.

Not long before, a “terrific jar” made the 26-year-old Englishwoman sit up in her second-class berth. Absolute silence followed the brief shaking -- the ship’s engines had been cut. Unnerved, she dressed and made her way to the B Deck.

It was Sunday, just before midnight, on April 14, 1912.

The coat Wright wore that night is now back at the Cottage Grove Museum after two years on loan. It’s part of a new permanent exhibit, “From Yeovil, England, to Cottage Grove, Oregon: She Survived the Titanic.”

Up on the Titanic’s deck that night, Wright hugged herself and watched her fellow passengers milling about. Finally, a young doctor named Alfred Pain found her. They had mutual friends in England, and so he’d promised to look after her during the trip across the Atlantic.

“I have been trying to find you for some time,” he told her.

He tried to guide Wright to the nearby lifeboats, but it was almost impossible to move through the throng. “I think we had better go around to the other side,” he said. “There aren’t so many people there.”

By this time, the 11-story-high, 46,000-ton Titanic clearly was in deep trouble. Having hit a massive iceberg, the ship had begun to tilt. As Wright and Pain made their way around to the other side of the deck, a distant voice cut through: “Any more ladies, this way!”

“You had better run,” Dr. Pain told her. Wright pulled up her skirt and ran. She would never see her friend and protector again.

Marion Wright Woolcott and her husband Arthur Woolcott. (Courtesy of the Cottage Grove Museum)

“He gave up his own life,” she told a reporter years later.

Pain was one of hundreds of men who stood at the Titanic’s railings as the lifeboats descended into the water.

“Many of the men aboard kissed their wives and then stepped back and waited quietly for the end,” Wright said. “The ship’s band continued to play until the ship sank. I remember hearing the beautiful piece ‘Autumn’ as I left the Titanic.”

Not all the men on board lived up to chivalric expectations. Some wanted to live, cultural norms be damned.

“I remember it was only about half full,” Wright said of the lifeboat she had stepped into. “Two young men climbed in, but crew members forced them out. One sneaked back in and hid as the boat was lowered into the water.”

The lifeboat had one crewman assigned to it, and he rowed as hard as he could for fear the boat would be pulled under by the suction from the sinking mega-ship. Wright recalled watching deck lights disappear into the void “one row at a time.”

She left behind more than 1,500 passengers and crew who would perish when the celebrated “floating hotel” went down. She was one of about 700 survivors.

Wright had grown up in the English town of Yeovil, the daughter of a widowed farmer. She’d fallen in love with Arthur Woolcott chiefly through long letters sent across the Atlantic. Woolcott, a fellow Yeovillian, had immigrated to America and bought an 80-acre fruit farm near Cottage Grove in the remote state of Oregon.

Wright had been enjoying her trip on the Titanic, looking forward to meeting her betrothed in New York. On the morning of April 14, she strolled the deck with a friend, taking in the “warm and sunny” weather -- until a portent arrived.

“Suddenly the air turned cold,” she told the Eugene Register-Guard years after the disaster, the subject of numerous books and movies over the years. “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky but it became so chilly we had to go inside. We didn’t realize then that the sudden temperature drop was due to the approach of field ice, then still many miles away.”

A scene from the 1997 movie "Titanic." (Paramount Pictures/20th Century Fox, Merie W. Wallace)AP

That night, she found herself in the pitch-black with a small group of other passengers, the ocean tossing their lifeboat around. The steamship RMS Carpathia, having braved the ice fields after receiving a distress call from the Titanic, picked up Wright and many other survivors.

Five days after her rescue, news of Wright’s ordeal appeared in The Oregonian. “Lost Sweetheart Found,” the headline declared.

The article explained how, with conflicting information reaching New York as the Carpathia docked, it took Wright and her fiancé a while to find one another. Woolcott spent a day going from hospital to hospital in the city before, frustrated and scared, he headed to a family friend’s home to try to figure out his next move.

“He was greeted at the door by his sweetheart of school days in England, whom he had not seen for many years,” wrote The Oregonian.

The couple, newly married, showed up in Cottage Grove two weeks later. All of Marion Wright Woolcott’s new neighbors wanted to know about her ordeal, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She claimed she’d lost her voice. Eventually, Wright Woolcott spoke about the disaster before the town’s Woman’s Club.

Marion Wright Woolcott would live the rest of her life in Cottage Grove, working on the farm and raising a family. She died at age 80 in 1965, four years after her husband’s passing.

Over the years, reporters regularly showed up at the Woolcott farm to ask her to recall that terrible night in the Atlantic. Every now and again she would agree to an interview. Fifty years after the Titanic’s sinking, she said: “The events are so etched in my mind that it seems like it happened yesterday.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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