Farmer's son had Titanic role (From Swindon Advertiser)

Farmer's son had Titanic role

4:32pm Friday 3rd June 2011 in Looking Back

On May 31, 1911 the Titanic slipped into the water at the Harland and Wolff Queen’s shipyard in Belfast for the final fittings. It would be another 11 months before she made her fateful maiden voyage. But what has this to do with a farmer’s son from landlocked Wiltshire?

Frederick Ernest Rebbeck, born in Badbury, Chiseldon, in 1877, was one of more than 3,000 men who worked on the ship. Frederick would go on to rise through the ranks of the firm and eventually become a managing director and chairman of Harland and Wolff.

He was the only child of Albert Ernest Rebbeck and his wife Janetta Morgan Smythe. Albert’s branch of the family descended from William and Sarah Rebbeck at Lockridge, Overton.

In the 1870s Albert moved to the Swindon area, farming at Badbury, Chiseldon, while his brother William became Lord Bolingbroke’s tenant at Eastleaze Farm, Lydiard Tregoze, in the 1880s. With Albert’s untimely death in 1878 Janetta took a post as governess at a school in Wantage where her three-year-old son became a pupil. Little else is known of Frederick’s early life.

He completed his engineering apprenticeship with a Midlands firm before moving to the Scottish shipyards and then further afield to Belfast. Details of his career path are sketchy, involving periods working with British Westinghouse, in Manchester, and Victor Coates, in Belfast, before returning to Harland and Wolff.

Just four years after rejoining the company he was made a managing director and eventually chairman, a position he held from 1930 until his retirement in 1962. Frederick was knighted in 1941. Following his death in 1964 The Times published a lengthy obituary describing Sir Frederick as having much in common with the Ulster people including the capacity for hard, sustained work, complete honesty in his dealings and being outspoken.

For so long any mention of the Titanic was avoided within the Belfast ship building fraternity, the loss and the shame was too great. But now it is permissible to celebrate the achievements of those early 20th century engineers and at 12.13 on May 31, 2011 Belfast marked the moment ship number 401 made its first journey.

A hundred years ago 150,000 people had lined the Victoria Channel to watch the original event, among them Chiseldon-born Frederick Rebbeck, himself standing on the brink of an auspicious career.

FAMILY PERISHED AS SHIP WENT DOWN

THE body of an unidentified baby boy found floating in the sea six days after the luxury liner sank became a symbol of the children lost aboard the Titanic. He was buried in Fairview Cemetery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the inscription on his gravestone read: “Erected to the memory of an unknown child whose remains were recovered after the disaster of the Titanic.” But 95 years later advances in DNA testing made it possible to identify the child as Sidney Goodwin.

He was the youngest son of Frederick Joseph Goodwin and his wife Augusta. Frederick, an electrical engineer, was taking his young family to join his brother Thomas in Niagara where a power station was due to be built by the falls. The bodies of Frederick, his wife and their five older children were never discovered. Although originally from London, at the time of the 1911 census the family were living at Watsons Court, Melksham. In 2002 initial investigations incorrectly identified the lost baby as Eino Panula. However, with the assistance of a maternal relation of the Goodwin family living in the US it was possible to eventually confirm that the child was 19-month-old Sidney Leslie Goodwin, who was born in Melksham in 1910.