Bess Waldo Allison and her daughter
Bess Waldo Allison was a First Class Passenger and the mother of the famous Allison family that couldn't find their baby on Titanic and therefore they didn't make it, although nursemaid Alice Cooper and baby Trevor survived because they escaped in a lifeboat. She was one of only 4 First Class women to not survive the sinking.
Bessie Waldo Daniels was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 14 November 1886. She was the youngest daughter of Arville Daniels and Sarah McCully. She had an older sister, Maybelle, and another half-sister, Myrtle, the daughter of Arville's first marriage to Mary Browden. Bess met Hudson Allison on a train in 1907, and a few months later, they were married in their hometown of Milwaukee.
In 1909, the couple's first daughter, Helen Loraine Allison, was born. In 1911, Hudson Trevor Allison, the couple's second child, was born. Bessie traveled with her two children and her husband to England where the family hired domestic staff for their 2 residences, the Allison Stock Farm and their home in Westmount, Canada: George Swane as Chauffeur, Amelia Mary Brown as Cook, Alice Catherine Cleaver as Trevor's nanny, and Sarah Rebecca Daniels as Bessie's maid.
The Allisons had altered travel plans to sail back with old friends on the Titanic. They boarded the ship in Southampton, England, bound for Montreal, Canada. Bess was 25 years old at the time.
Mr. Hudson Allison and Mrs. Bessie were in suiteroom C-22, Sarah and Helen Loraine in another suiteroom, C-24, and Alice Cooper with Trevor in C-26. The other employees traveled Second Class. On the last night of their lives, Bessie and her husband sat down to dinner with Major Arthur Godfrey Peuchen and Harry Markland Molson. Bessie then briefly took Loraine into the Dining Room so she could see how pretty it was.
Disaster[]
When the Titanic hit the iceberg, Alice Cooper had been in a panic and took the baby, noticing how Hudson and Bess weren't worried at all. At some point, Trevor's mother started missing the baby and went looking for it.
Bess was put on a boat with her daughter Loraine, but she refused to leave the ship without her baby. She dragged her daughter out of the boat and started looking for Trevor. Major Arthur Peuchen had been placed in lifeboat 6 because there were not enough sailors. He recounts that Mrs. Allison was directed to the other side of the ship. She was hustled onto one of the collapsible boats and when he last saw her she was toppling out of the half swamped boat. In the words of Major Peuchen, "...she was told by someone that Mr. Allison was in a boat going down on the opposite side of the deck, and with his little daughter he ran away from the boat. Apparently she made it to the other side to to find that Mr. Allison was not there..." When Major Arthur Peuchen last saw her, "she was falling off the half-sunken ship." Either way, Bessie perished during the night of April 15, 1912, and her body, if it was recovered, has never been identified. Young Trevor was the only member of the family to survive.
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