Marshall Brines Drew

The heart is not judged by how much it loves-

but how much it is loved by others…        Frank Baum

 In the winter of 1982. I heard about a local art teacher who gave lessons in a private  studio in Westerly.   He also just happened to be a Titanic survivor- and I hoped he wouldn’t think I had signed up for lessons just to learn more about the ship!  What would follow would become a precious four-year friendship filled with adventures and travels. “Titanic was something that happened to me by accident- art -well, THAT I did on purpose!” he often remarked.

 Marshall’s first love was photography- sunsets, trees, the nearby dunes of Misquamicut Beach on the Rhode Island shore, flowers and Nature.  He left more than 10,000 slides to the Westerly Camera Club!  After retiring from the New York Pratt Institute, he settled in a tiny cottage in the Dunn’s Corner section of Westerly off the coast road.  An accomplished painter (particularly abstracts)- he often would say with a wry smile, “There’s a BIG difference between looking and seeing.

  A popular photo by Marshall still used on postcards

 The little cottage and studio in Dunns Corner, Westerly

 Marshall had been visiting his grandmother in Cornwall in the winter of 1911-1912 and remembered looking up the great chimney and seeing stars at her home on the rugged Cornish coast. He had departed on Olympic in September of 1911 for the crossing, accompanied by his Aunt Lu and Uncle Jim,  His mother had died when Marshall was only a few weeks old.  Aunt Lu soon filled the maternal gap left by the death of Elizabeth Brines Drew. Marshall’s father was a Greenport , L.I. stonecarver, and had met his wife on a trip to Westerly’s famous blue granite quarries.

 

  Uncle Jim’s stone in Ashaway, RI Marshall’s stone in River Bend

Due to his diminuative size, Marshall was a great favorite with young people.  He had only one daughter Bette, and four grandsons.  Great- Grandson Andrew who lived next door was a constant companion in Marshall’s last years.   Often we would sit in the little cottage, he strumming a ukelele and singing old camp songs or creating fanciful origami animals from colorful bits of paper- thin cigarillo hanging from his lips.  Riding in his little red car was always an adventure as he drove everywhere at breakneck speed- red beret tipped to one side.  The jaunty cap was filled with souvenir pins; sometimes he wore a blue Civil War cap and red suspenders.  Marshall spent  many summers with his Great Uncle Henry Christian, a Civil War vet, who lived in Southold, Long Island.

Over the years Marshall would point with a wry smile at the memorial volumes listing him as lost in the Titanic disaster.  After being hauled up on deck of the Carpathia, Marshall acknowledged the only thing he could think of was getting something to eat- and was having doughnuts and cocoa when the first lists were being compiled of those saved.  When Carpathia reached New York, and a comfortable hotel found for him and Aunt Lu, he sat on the steps pricking out a silhouette of the  Titanic with a common pin on a scrap of paper. Marshall became a master calligrapher and artist, origamist, and photographer.

 sample of his German Fractur

 Convergence of the Twain by Hardy done in calligraphy italics two months before his death in 1986.

 

During his long retirement, Marshall made many friends in the art community.  Friday mornings would find the group at BeeBee’s Dairy or Noah’s in Stonington- most were newspapermen, artists and photographers- and historians. In March of 1986 we went to see Dr. Ballard’s slide presentation at the University of Rhode Island. Marshall was anti-salvage but enjoyed the  undersea photography of the ship.  We made a final trip back home to Greenport in May of 1986, – he would never return .  We parted at the ferry landing, that last morning.  A lunar moth had perched  on a pier piling- we got out our cameras, then said goodbye for the last time.  That was sixteen years ago but he will always be with me-one of those remarkable people who enters one’s life for a brief time, and changes it forever.  I asked him once in jest how he would like to be remembered. His immediate reply was “Teaching is what I’ve been most proud of.” And so when it was time to write an epitaph for the blue Westerly granite stone for River Bend cemetery , the inscription was easy.  I asked him if he minded being remembered for Titanic- and being an historian of the first degree- he said,  “One day, someone walking by this way may be interested to know . . . ”