Tam Dive Toronto Empress of Ireland exhibit

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HIDBOY

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COMING SOON



Coming soon! Tam Dive will be hosting an exhibit of artifacts collected from the Empress of Ireland. The cabinets are being constructed and the upstairs at Tam Dive is being prepared. On May 29, 1914 the Empress of Ireland collied with the Storstad which pierced her hull and 14 minutes later sent the Empress to the bottom of the St. Lawrence River. The Empress of Ireland took all but 465 of the 1477 souls on board with her to the bottom.
 
The ghosts of the Empress of Ireland are stirred
Barring a miracle today, artifacts to go south. On the waters of oblivion. Unless someone comes up with $750,000 pronto, precious haul likely to wind up with Florida collector. Despite its amazing story, vessel has never received its due in public imagination.

MARK ABLEY
Montreal Gazette

Philippe Beaudry, who headed the now-defunct Empress of Ireland Historical Society, is waiting to see if funds can be found in Canada to match an offer he has from the U.S. for his extraordinary collection of artifacts from the wreck.

As angels go, Marion Kelch is a somewhat unlikely one. A retired teacher and amateur playwright living on a ranch near the village of Czar, Alta., she may not be ideally placed to save artifacts gathered from a shipwreck in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and kept in Longueuil.

But Kelch is a determined woman. And this year she has mounted a determined E-mail campaign to persuade the government of Canada that what Philippe Beaudry possesses has national significance.

Her attempt is agonizingly close to paying off. The Canada Museum of Science and Technology, in Ottawa, has agreed to house the artifacts; Heritage Canada has agreed to pay half the price.

What's missing is the other half: a simple matter of $750,000. Without it, Beaudry will be free to seek an export permit to sell his collection to an American buyer - for a much larger profit.

The deadline to produce the cash expires today. The collection is packed and ready to go. Kelch is on tenterhooks.

---

If this story has an uncertain ending, it has many beginnings. You could say it starts with the launching of the Empress of Ireland, a steamship sailing out of Liverpool, in 1906. Over the next few years, it would bring many thousands of settlers to Canada.

Or you could say the story begins with the ship's demise, when it was rammed by a Norwegian collier off Rimouski on a fog-filled night in May, 1914. The Empress sank fast, 265 tons of water a second pouring in through a gaping hole below the waterline. In all, 1,012 passengers and crew would die; 465 would be saved.

Or maybe the story opens when the wreck was located in the tricky waters of the gulf in 1964. Beaudry began to explore it a few years later; he has dived there more than 600 times.

It became his passion. Some divers were keen to exploit the ship - soon after the wreck was found, a 20-ton bronze propeller was dynamited off, hauled to Rimouski and sold to a scrap dealer.

Such behaviour dismayed Beaudry. Not only did he salvage items from the ship, he also spent countless hours and many thousands of dollars buying any and all memorabilia related to it.

The result is, beyond doubt, the finest collection and archive that will ever be created about the Empress of Ireland.

Will ever be created?

Yes, because after a Gaspé company stripped tropical hardwood decking off the ship in the '90s, and announced plans to blast the wreck open (ostensibly to search for nickel ingots), Beaudry succeeded in having Quebec declare the Empress an underwater historic site.

He was supported by the Salvation Army, 148 of whose members were heading to a gathering in England when they died in the disaster. On a small scale, private plundering may continue - but nothing on the scale of a decade ago.

Moreover, says Derek Grout - author of Empress of Ireland: The Story of an Edwardian Liner - "The ship is slowly collapsing in on itself, due to corrosion. It's the most pillaged ship in modern history. But penetration of it is getting harder and harder."

Grout expresses sympathy for Beaudry, "who has invested an inordinate amount of time and money diving on the Empress, and accumulating a very interesting collection of artifacts."

A few highlights are the ship's enormous bell, its major navigation instruments and its brass stairwell fixtures.

Some Empress artifacts are housed in a museum at Rimouski. But the depth and breadth of that collection in no way compare to what Beaudry has gathered.

By the late 1990s, Beaudry's appetite for diving was in decline. He looked for a Canadian buyer - and found nobody. He did, however, receive an offer from a buyer in Florida: Leon Lyons, a businessman who collects knives and diving helmets and has (according to his Web site) "a passion for firearms."

Lyons was willing to hand over $1.5 million U.S. Beaudry is willing to sell the collection for the same amount in Canadian dollars. What he's not prepared to do is hang on to it much longer.

The federal Export Review Board blocked the initial sale. Heritage Canada offered $750,000 in matching funds. But nobody has matched the government's promise.

---

In its short career, the Empress of Ireland carried more than 186,000 passengers. Many of them moved on from Quebec to the Canadian Prairies, whose population was burgeoning.

Researching his recent book, Grout spoke to five elderly people who had sailed to Canada as small children on the Empress. They are among the last survivors. But nobody is sure how many descendants of Empress passengers now live in Canada - one informed guess puts the total at half a million.

Enter Marion Kelch, who once wrote a play about the ship. This is not the first time she has taken on the task of saving a chunk of history: in the 1970s, she led a campaign to save and restore St. Norbert's Church near the town of Provost, Alta. It was the first historic site named by the province.

"If it did happen that those artifacts went south, there would be outrage here like you would not believe," Kelch said.

Brave words. But saving Beaudry's collection has proved a harder fight than preserving a rural church.

Months ago, when Kelch began to wage the campaign, she should - as she now realizes - have formed a non-profit organization with tax-deductible status. With a registered tax number, Kelch might well have been able to attract donations, not only from individuals but also from wealthy foundations.

At least one foundation has expressed informal interest in helping Kelch - but for legal reasons feels it would be dubious in this case to help out the Science and Technology Museum, another non-profit institution.

That museum would gladly accept the artifacts if they were donated. Yet it's not prepared to pay any of its own funds.

"We have a very small acquisitions budget," Leeanne Akehurst, director of communications, said this week. "As a matter of course, we don't set up one-off fundraising ventures. And we're not in a position to take on a campaign; it would require increased staff."

As for Philippe Beaudry, he says, "I'm fed up. I've been through so much bureaucracy. And it's no fun."

A minute later his bitterness is even stronger: "It's a very sad story. I've been working 32 years for the protection of this wreck, and nobody cares."

It seems a very Canadian stalemate.

A Canadian historic site; hundreds of Canadian dead; a Canadian collector ready to sell within the country; a Canadian museum ready to house the collection; an arm of the Canadian government ready to pay half the cost - all this for naught.

Because after today, unless Kelch or someone else can break the stalemate, Empress of Ireland artifacts will join a bunch of hats and knives in Florida.

It was May 1914 when the Empress of Ireland disappeared below the frigid waves of the Gulf of St. Lawrence - the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history. But the outbreak of World War I soon removed it from public awareness.

When the ship was rediscovered in 1964, it seemed ready to take its place in the Canadian imagination. Dead liners have a certain mystique. And, after all, more passengers had died aboard the Empress than on the Titanic.

What's remarkable, though, is how the recent efforts to bring the vessel back into our consciousness have sunk as surely as the liner itself. It's tempting, though doubtless over-the-top, to speak about a "curse of the Empress."

There is, first and foremost, the inability of Philippe Beaudry to find a Canadian buyer for his extraordinary collection of artifacts.

Beaudry used to run the Empress of Ireland Historical Society - but that society is now defunct.

In 1998 David Zeni, a retired U.S. naval officer, published Forgotten Empress, a detailed look at the ship's sinking.

It came out with the little-known British firm of Halsgrove. In theory, the book is available from its Canadian distributor, Goose Lane Editions; in practice, it's very hard to find in any Canadian store. On-line orders can take a month or longer.

Last year, Pointe Claire's Derek Grout published Empress of Ireland: The Story of an Edwardian Liner. Rather than repeat the tale of the sinking, Grout explored the life of the ship over the previous decade. His work was short-listed for the McAuslan First Book Award, given by the Quebec Writers Federation last month.

According to the jury's citation, "This prodigiously researched book creates a social portrait of an important era in Canadian history. The book is clearly a labour of love."

Yet Empress of Ireland is virtually unobtainable in Montreal - or anywhere else in Canada. (Perhaps the only store to stock the book regularly has been The Double Hook on Greene Ave.)

It was published in Britain by Tempus Ltd. The Canadian distributor, an obscure firm called Vanwell in St. Catharines, Ont., explains that paperback books that cost more than $40 don't interest the chainstores.

Grout wrote the book after losing his job as a middle manager with Teleglobe. A diver and history buff with a flair for writing, he took on the story of the liner to keep himself busy.

Somewhat to his own surprise, "it turned into a full-time job. I would wake up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat and think, 'What have I agreed to?' "

Grout once intended to dive the wreck. In retrospect, he's glad the attempt was called off:

"I tried to create an impression of a ship that was full of laughter, of happiness, of music. I don't want to think of it as a giant steel tomb on the bottom of the ocean."

To resurrect the Empress in the public mind, what's needed, perhaps, is a Hollywood studio, a Canadian-born director, a pair of gorgeous young stars, a tune sung by Céline Dion -

Oh. That's been done already?
mabley@thegazette.southam.ca
© Copyright 2002 Montreal Gazette
 
A simple link from the montreal gazette would of been fine. Leon Lyons a good friend of mine from St Augistine Florida may buy the artifacts if the price is right for his vintage diving museum down south.

HIDBoy
 
It seems that money has been gathered by an Alberta consortium today. There is a museum at Pointe-au-Père just east of Rimouski, Qc where many artifacts are shown. Great place and complete collection but they offered only $350 000 in partnership with Heritage Canada.

The funniest thing is that Heritage Canada appraised his collection to $1.5 millions but they are willing to give him only less than a fourth !
 

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