Titanic to Thames

A ghost story about queer people the people history forgot to write down.

On Hallowe'en night, at a rowing club on the Thames at Mortlake, Finn meets a stranger in coal-black working clothes who pays for his whisky with gold sovereigns from 1912. The stranger is Hugh, a softly spoken Irish bargeman who insists he sailed on the Titanic, and who has kept a lonely watch over the river for more than a century. Somewhere between the stokeholds of the great liner and the riverbanks of west London lies the story of a love Hugh was never allowed to name.

In the spring of 1912, Hugh and his dearest friend Finnigan, a riveter from the Belfast shipyard where the Titanic was built, planned a new life together in America. When every official door closed to him, Hugh made a desperate pact with God and found his own way aboard. His name appears on no passenger list, no crew agreement and no memorial. More than a hundred years later, Finn and his partner Aly set out to prove he ever existed, following a trail through emigrant records, shipping archives and a single Irish word passed down through four generations of Finn's own family.

Titanic to Thames turns its back on the grand staircase and the famous names of the First Class saloon. Its heroes are firemen and trimmers, a widow from County Mayo travelling Third Class, a Welsh stoker, a shipyard riveter and the unticketed souls who boarded in hope of a better life. Through a queer lens, it asks what becomes of love that was lived in silence, in rented rooms and behind drawn curtains, when the official record leaves no trace of it. The answer is moving, often very funny, and quietly defiant: Hugh's own glossary of the modern world, from contactless cards to the rainbow flag, is one of the most tender things in the book.

Rich in historical detail, from the launch at Queen's Island to the freezing hours in a collapsible lifeboat and the arrival of the Carpathia at Pier 54, the novella moves between Edwardian Belfast, Southampton and the North Atlantic and present-day London. It is a story about remembrance, inheritance and the dignity of lives that history overlooked.

For readers of E.M. Forster's Maurice, Sarah Waters's historical ghost stories, John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies and Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn, and for anyone who loves a story told by the fire on a cold October night.

Human written with hand-drawn illustrations throughout. A Silverbourne Hallowe'en novella, with a Historical Note, bibliography and glossary.