The film Titanic has renewed interest in the tragedy in Ireland, where the ship was built and where most of the steerage passengers who died came from. Alice, Agnes and Bernard McCoy from Aughnacliffe in Co Longford were on board. They had dressed and gone on deck when it struck the iceberg and they saw a lifeboat half filled by crew members being lowered into the sea.
An officer with a revolver ordered the crewmen out of the lifeboat and said he would shoot them if they didn't obey.
He told the youngsters from Longford there was no danger and to go back below - even though they saw water entering the steerage quarters.
The officer eventually loaded the women into the lifeboat - but Bernard was ordered to stay on deck and he watched his sisters leave.
Half an hour later they saw him struggling in the water and one of them made a grab for him. A sailor told her if she tried to take him in he would throw her out.
Young McCoy made a second attempt to get on board but was beaten away by oars. On his third attempt the two sisters pulled him in and they all survived.
Another survivor, Thomas McCormack from Longford town, was beaten by lifeboat crews when he tried to get aboard two of the lifeboats. However, two sisters, Mary and Kate Murphy, dragged him into a lifeboat despite the crew's objections.
These reports were carried in the Longford Leader of April 27th, 1912, which are reproduced in A Century of Longford Life, just published by the Leader to celebrate its centenary.
A Leader report in August 1912 came in the form of a clarification. Miss Maggie J. Murphy of New York, but late of Fostra, Aughnacliffe, Co Longford, had survived the sinking.
She asked the paper to correct a statement made in the "yellow" press in New York, to the effect that on her ill-fated voyage she was eloping with John Kiernan, one of two brothers drowned in the disaster.
Said the Leader: "As a modest respectable Irish girl, Miss Murphy rightly complains of the cruelty and injustice both to her and the poor young fellow who drowned, of this typical American invention.
"We have much pleasure in giving her flat contradiction and assuring her that the people at home did not, and do not, believe any such Yankee yarn."
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