A piece of Titanic history uncovered

Samuel Dugan, who owns Bookease second hand bookstore in High Street Mall, came across the piece of history when going through a box of old magazines.

What’s thought to be an original copy of a poem, written about one of the engineers who perished on the ship, was inside a limited edition magazine about the Titanic printed right here in Lurgan.

Samuel said: “I’ve been watching a lot of Titanic documentaries these last few days and the name that keeps coming up is Frost.

“He was an engineer of the Titanic. They were the real heroes of the Titanic. When the ship hits the iceberg, they dropped everything and all rushed down below. Every one of them died trying to save the ship.”

Samuel explained how he came to be in possession of a unique piece of Titanic memorabilia - an original typed poem about Anthony Frost.

He said: “There’s a guy I know brings in things to the shop. He had a box of old ‘Listener’ magazines from the BBC that he was going to dump. I said I’d take them. I don’t like to throw anything like that out without taking a good look to see if there’s anything of value in them.

“About two magazines from the bottom I found this booklet about the Titanic.”

The glossy magazine was printed in 1985 at Morton Newspapers’ old HQ in Windsor Avenue.

‘The Deathless Story of The Titanic’ was a reprint of an account of the sinking of the Titanic written in 1912 by Phillip Gibbs, a novelist of the time. The original document was pieced together a short time after the events of April 12, 1912 and as such is subject to historical inaccuracies, but is nonetheless a great first person account capturing the mood of the time.

Of even more interest to Samuel was a document found inside the magazine.

“Inside the magazine was an original copy of a poem written by a person called Mick Nolan about Anthony Frost. There’s some writing at the bottom of the page. A man called Billy, I think Robson may be his surname, was in possession of the poem and the magazine at some point.

“He was given it by Mr Frost’s sister and he mentions that Mr Frost’s son worked in Harland and Wolf until he died.”

He added: “This is far more important than the magazine and most of the other mass-produced Titanic memorabilia. I’m taking it to the Ulster Museum to try and get it dated and see if they’d be interested in putting it on display. It’s amazing that it was destined for the bin and now it could end up in a museum.”