Last Titanic survivor dies in England 2009

Last Titanic survivor dies in England
AFP - Monday, June 1LONDON (AFP) - - Millvina Dean, the last remaining survivor of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, died in a care home in England, media reports said. She was 97.

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Elizabeth Gladys Dean, known to friends as Millvina, was only nine weeks old when the liner hit an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank killing 1,500 people.

She survived after being bundled up in a sack and carried to safety. Her mother Georgette Eva and brother Bertram also made it, but her father, Bertram Frank, was among those who died.

Dean died in a private nursing home near Ashurst in the southern English county of Hampshire, according to the BBC and Britain's domestic Press Association news agency. Staff there refused to comment late Sunday.

Dean's family had boarded the Titanic at Southampton, heading for a new life in Kansas where her father hoped to open a tobacconist shop.

Born on February 12, 1912, Dean was the youngest passenger on board. At the time, RMS Titanic was the most luxurious, most technically advanced and largest passenger liner in the world.

She was dubbed "unsinkable", but it took just two hours and 40 minutes for her to disappear into the icy waters of the Atlantic after striking an iceberg at 11:40 pm on April 14.

Dean was taken back to Southampton with her family after the disaster and did not find out that she had been on board until she was eight years old and her mother was planning to remarry.

According to enthusiasts' website Encyclopedia Titanica (ET), Dean worked for the government as a cartographer during World War II and then for an engineering company.

She told reporters that it was not until the wreckage of the liner was found in 1985 that she suddenly became a celebrity, taking part in documentaries and giving media interviews.

Dean was invited to complete her family's ill-fated journey to the United States in 1997 aboard the QE2, and accepted, although she turned down an offer to attend the premier of the movie "Titanic" because it would be too upsetting.

She moved into a private nursing home in Hampshire after breaking her hip three years ago, and after struggling to pay the bills was forced to sell off some of her memorabilia.

At auction in October 2008 she raised 31,150 pounds (40,000 euros, 53,900 dollars), selling off rare prints of the liner signed by the artists as well as compensation letters sent to her mother by the Titanic Relief Fund.

Dean was also forced to sell a 100-year-old suitcase filled with clothes donated to her family by the people of New York when they arrived after being rescued.

In the wake of the auction, friends including members of the British Titanic Society and the Belfast Titanic Society -- the liner was built in Belfast in Northern Ireland-- set up a campaign to secure her future.

Among the donors to the Millvina Fund were Hollywood actors Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, who starred in the 1997 "Titanic" film. The pair and the film's director, James Cameron, reportedly donated 30,000 US dollars in total.

The last remaining US survivor, Lillian Asplund, died in her home in May 2006 at the age of 99. She was just five years old when the Titanic went down.

KRouge prison chief asks victims for forgiveness

AFP - Tuesday, March 31

PHNOM PENH (AFP) - - Khmer Rouge prison chief Duch admitted responsibility for his crimes at his UN-backed trial and asked the families of the regime's victims for forgiveness.

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"May I be permitted to apologise to the survivors of the regime and also the loved ones of those who died brutally during the regime. I ask not that you forgive me now, but hope you will later," Duch told the court.

"As a member of the (Khmer Rouge) I recognise responsibilty for what happened at Tuol Sleng," he said, speaking in Khmer language.

Prosecutors Tuesday gave harrowing details of the torture and execution of thousands of Cambodians as they laid their case against the Khmer Rouge regime's prison chief for the first time.

Inmates at the notorious jail run by Duch had their nails pulled out and electrodes attached to their genitals, while some were subjected to live autopsies or had the blood drained from them until they died, prosecutors said.

Only a handful of people are known to have survived Tuol Sleng prison, which is now a genocide museum lined with photographs of some of the more than 15,000 men, women and children who died there in the 1970s.

Prosecutors at Cambodia's long-delayed UN-backed tribunal said Kaing Guek Eav -- a former maths teacher also known as Duch -- played a central role as chief of the security apparatus for the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge regime.

"For 30 years, a whole generation of Cambodians have been struggling to get answers about their families' fates," Cambodian co-prosecutor Chea Leang told the court, as Duch jotted notes in the dock.

"Today in this courtroom before the Cambodian people and the world, at long last this process begins and justice will be done."

During a brief recess, Tuol Sleng survivor Bou Meng told reporters video footage shown by prosecutors, which included a corpse chained to a bed, reminded him of how he lost his wife at the prison.

"I cannot forgive Duch because of my wife's life. I want to beat him to death, but I respect the law and now is the time to use it," said Bou Meng, who was spared because his skills as an artist were deemed useful to the regime.

International co-prosecutor Robert Petit said that people detained at Tuol Sleng, also known as S21, had been tortured "under the accused's direct orders and sometimes by his own hand."

"The policy was that no one could leave S21 alive," Petit told the court.

"Victims were beaten with rattan sticks and whips, electrocuted, had toenails and finger nails pulled out, were suffocated with plastic bags forcibly tied over their heads and were stripped naked and had their genitals electrocuted," Petit said.

"The accused has stated that beatings by a stick was used the most because other forms of torture took too much time."

Duch, 66, has denied personally torturing or executing prisoners but has taken responsibility for presiding over the prison in Phnom Penh. He is charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture and premeditated murder.

Duch, who faces life in jail, said he acted under orders from superiors in the Khmer Rouge, which rose to power as a spinoff from the conflict in Vietnam and emptied Cambodia's cities to take society back to a rural "Year Zero."

Up to two million people died during its nearly four years in power.

But Chea Leang contended that Duch himself played a central role, running the central prison and a nationwide network of 195 security centres, which systematically starved, tortured and executed hundreds of thousands of people.

"S21 formed an integral and indeed vital role in a widespread attack on the population of Cambodia. The accused's crimes were part of this attack," she added.

"Prisoners would be tortured until they confessed to being enemies, implicating their friends, colleagues, and neighbours, creating a new list of traitors to be arrested, tortured and smashed," she said.

Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died under house arrest in 1998, and many in Cambodia believe the UN-sponsored tribunal is the last chance to bring those regime figures still alive to justice.

Duch himself is expected to address the court about his role and publicly ask forgiveness from Cambodians. He became a born-again Christian during the 1990s and was arrested in 1999 after years in hiding.

The tribunal was formed in 2006 after nearly a decade of wrangling between the United Nations and Cambodian government, and has faced controversy over allegations of corruption and political interference.

The government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge fighter, has been accused of trying to protect the regime's former figures from facing justice.

Female vampire

ROME – An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws — evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be a vampire. The unusual burial is thought to be the result of an ancient vampire-slaying ritual. It suggests the legend of the mythical bloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance of how diseases spread and what happens to bodies after death, experts said.

The well-preserved skeleton was found in 2006 on the Lazzaretto Nuovo island, north of the lagoon city, amid other corpses buried in a mass grave during an epidemic of plague that hit Venice in 1576.

"Vampires don't exist, but studies show people at the time believed they did," said Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist at Florence University who studied the case over the last two years. "For the first time we have found evidence of an exorcism against a vampire."

Medieval texts show the belief in vampires was fueled by the disturbing appearance of decomposing bodies, Borrini told The Associated Press by telephone.

During epidemics, mass graves were often reopened to bury fresh corpses and diggers would chance upon older bodies that were bloated, with blood seeping out of their mouth and with an inexplicable hole in the shroud used to cover their face.

"These characteristics are all tied to the decomposition of bodies," Borrini said. "But they saw a fat, dead person, full of blood and with a hole in the shroud, so they would say: 'This guy is alive, he's drinking blood and eating his shroud.'"

Modern forensic science shows the bloating is caused by a buildup of gases, while fluid seeping from the mouth is pushed up by decomposing organs, Borrini said. The shroud would have been consumed by bacteria found in the mouth area, he said.

At the time however, what passed for scientific texts taught that "shroud-eaters" were vampires who fed on the cloth and cast a spell that would spread the plague in order to increase their ranks.

To kill the undead creatures, the stake-in-the-heart method popularized by later literature was not enough: A stone or brick had to be forced into the vampire's mouth so that it would starve to death, Borrini said.

That's what is believed to have happened to the woman found on the Lazzaretto island, which was used as a quarantine zone by Venice. Aged around 60, she died of the plague during the epidemic that also claimed the life of the painter Titian.

Much later, someone jammed the brick into her mouth when the grave was reopened. Borrini said that marks and breaks left by blunt instruments on several among more than 100 skeletons found by the archaeologists show that the grave was reused in a later epidemic.

Such a reconstruction of events is plausible, as is the link to the superstitions about "shroud-eaters," said Piero Mannucci, the vice president of the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology.

"Maybe a priest or a gravedigger put the brick in her mouth, which is what was normally done in such cases," Mannucci said.

The anthropologist, who did not take part in Borrini's research, said that at a time when bacteria were unknown, such superstitions were a way for the terrified population to explain the waves of plague epidemics that killed millions during the Middle Ages. Jews were also often accused of spreading the disease.

Borrini said the discovery shows that vampires in popular culture were originally quite different from the elegant, aristocratic blood-drinker depicted in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula" and in countless Hollywood revisitations.

"The real vampire of tradition was different," he said. "It was just a decomposing body."

Da Vinci decoded

Da Vinci decoded - 2 March 2009

A drawing obscured by handwriting for five centuries in one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks may be a youthful self-portrait of the genius, according to Italian experts who 'aged' the sketch to compare it with confirmed later self-portraits.
A detail of the page of da Vinci's Codex Of The Flight Of Birds and a sketch made by Italian state TV channel RAI's graphic department are seen in this picture released on Saturday. Hidden under layers of thick writing, the sketch was spotted by Italian scientific journalist Piero Angela.

PHOTO: REUTERS, RAITRE

COLLECTION OF CULTURAL RELICS

Building plan of City Hall

Ensconced within the National Archives, this blueprint was the work of municipal architect F.D. Meadows. Then known as the Municipal Building, City Hall was constructed from 1926 to 1929 and housed departments in charge of services such as water, electricity, gas, roads and street lighting.

The Singapore stone

A fragment of a large boulder about 3m high and 3m wide that originally stood at the entrance of the Singapore River, near present-day Fullerton Hotel.

Believed to date as far back as the 10th century, it bore an inscription which remains undeciphered to this day.

East Javanese-style gold ornaments

Housed in the National Museum, these precious artefacts, including an armlet and rings set with diamonds, were found at Fort Canning Hill in 1928 by labourers working on a reservoir.

The relics are proof that the island was under the political and cultural ambit of the East Java-based 14th-century kingdom of Majapahit.

Glass plate negatives by Percy Reginald Hill

A notable donation last year to the National Library from the family of the late Percy Reginald Hill, who worked as a chartered accountant in Singapore and Malaya during the early 20th century.

From photographs by Mr Hill, the 60 glass plate negatives show scenes of daily life in early Singapore and Malaya.

Portrait of Sir Frank Athelstane Swettenham

Done by renowned artist John Singer Sargent in 1904, the portrait (left) of the first Resident General of the Federated Malay States adorns the National Museum and is a legacy from the Raffles Museum, its predecessor.

Singapore's national treasures - March 1 2009

Raffles' letters, books and paintings among heritage items
By Tan Dawn Wei

Among what could be deemed artefacts from once-sleepy olde Singapore would be the letters penned by Sir Stamford Raffles.

Imagine if these had been looted, auctioned to foreign buyers, and lost to the country forever.

Indeed, recent anger in China centred on the sale of two imperial Chinese cultural relics looted during the second Opium War in 1860. Last Wednesday, despite China's protests, the bronze rat and rabbit sculptures were sold by auction house Christie's for 28 million euros (S$55 million) to unidentified bidders at a Paris auction.

While Singapore is a young nation, what few artefacts it has are precious still.

Some of the Raffles Letters might have been looted if not for quick-witted action by its keepers. When Japanese soldiers occupied Singapore during World War II, private homes, businesses and public institutions were looted.

But keepers at the then-Raffles Library and Museum hid historical valuables. Sir Stamford's letters, for instance, were hidden in the museum's rafters.

Still, not much is known about what other cultural relics are still here - or out there.

'It could take years to compile a list,' said Dr Kevin Tan, president of the Singapore Heritage Society.

The National Heritage Board (NHB), which runs Singapore's main museums and is responsible for collecting, preserving and displaying the country's heritage assets, said it does not have ready information about Singapore's cultural relics in foreign hands.

But many heritage items important to Singapore are safely here, thanks to successful acquisitions.

A sizeable and rare collection of Raffles' letters, books and artefacts came back to Singapore after it was put up for sale by London-based rare books dealer Maggs Bros on behalf of an anonymous seller.

Prominent businessman Tang Wee Kit of the CK Tang family snapped up this precious collection in two separate sales in London in 2004 and 2005, forking out £560,000.

In 1995, Mr Goh Geok Khim, founder of stockbroking giant, GK Goh Securities, bought a collection of 477 paintings accumulated by William Farquhar, Singapore's first Resident.

He donated the collection, worth $3 million then and purchased through Sotheby's, to the then-Singapore History Museum.

The National Library Board (NLB) has also bought four letters, signed by Raffles, from the open market for an undisclosed sum.

Neither NHB nor NLB would divulge their acquisition budgets. But it has been reported that the total acquisition budget for all the museums was $3million in 2007.

According to NHB's annual report, its acquisitions from government and non-government grants amounted to $5.6 million in the last financial year while donations were valued at $2.3 million. It now has more than 100,000 artefacts, either bought, donated or on loan.

The library has a rare materials collection with more than 6,000 items, mostly 19th- and early 20th-century publications issued by Singapore's earliest printing presses.

'We do our due diligence, when acquiring important items, by checking to ensure that they are not stolen, for example, on Interpol's stolen art register, and also declaring our interest to acquire, to the heritage authorities in the country of origin,' said Dr Kenson Kwok, director of the Asian Civilisations Museum.

dawntan@sph.com.sg

Footprints that are 1.5 million years old

WASHINGTON: - Footprints uncovered in Kenya show that as early as 1.5 million years ago, an ancestral species - almost certainly Homo erectus - had already evolved the feet and walking gait of modern humans.

An international team of scientists, in a report published yesterday in the American journal Science, said that the well-defined prints in an eroding bluff east of Lake Turkana 'provided the oldest evidence of an essentially modern humanlike foot anatomy'.

The experts said the find also added to evidence that painted a picture of Homo erectus as the prehumans who took long evolutionary strides - figuratively and, now it seems, also literally.

Where the individuals who made the tracks were going, or why, is beyond knowing by the cleverest scientists.

The variability of the separation between some steps, researchers said, suggests that they were picking their way over an uneven surface, muddy enough to leave a mark - an unintended message from an extinct species for the contemplation of its descendants.

NEW YORK TIMES

Teochew graveyard's buried treasures - 23 Feb 2009

THE last Teochew cemetery here is yielding up a treasure trove of secrets as its graves are being exhumed.

As the land on which the 150-year-old Kwong Hou Sua Teochew Cemetery sits is being prepared for redevelopment, researchers from here and abroad have descended on it to attempt a reconstruction of the lives of the early Teochews here


Among the artefacts unearthed and documented, with the permission of the families of the deceased, are jade bangles of the Qing Dynasty era, stacks of paper money and remnants of courtly robes that once draped the corpses.

Also found are jade beads with insignias seen on hats like those worn by Qing Dynasty officials.

Dr Hui Yew-Foong of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies explained that many of the Chinese elite here brought their official titles from the Qing government of the day and used these titles on their tombstones. So tombstones bearing such inscriptions were likely to have artefacts buried in the grave.

While Dr Hui has been documenting the gravestones' inscriptions, Dr Gan Su-Lin and a Republic Polytechnic (RP) team have been trying to piece together a social history of the Teochews here.

Among those buried in this cemetery are Singapore's first ambassador to Thailand Tan Siak Kew and a prominent rice merchant in the early 1900s, Mr Chen He Qu, who was the grandfather of famed Singapore-born artist Chen Ke Zhan, 50.
Mr Chen He Qu is of particular interest to another researcher on the site, Professor Choi Chi Cheung from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Prof Choi, whose interests are in business history and popular religion, has been tracing the Chen family's regional business network for nearly 20 years.

The graves have also drawn the Genealogical Society of Utah, which is working with Dr Hui to document the family histories of overseas Chinese going back more than a century.

They are looking to publish the collected data to add to knowledge on the genealogy of overseas Chinese.

The cemetery, sited along Woodlands Road, is being exhumed in two phases: The first phase last year cleared more than 1,900 graves to make way for the new Downtown Line MRT depot; the ongoing second phase will clear another 1,020 burial plots spread over a 70,000-sq m hilly area.

Burials in this second area, considered 'prime estate' because of the positive fengshui of the hill, began in 1929 and continued till the late 1970s.

Ms Diana Soh, who is on the RP team, said: 'The higher on the hill the grave was, the greater the wealth and status of the deceased.'

She noted that the graves on the upper parts of the hill were spaced farther apart and were bigger, often with space for the family clan, while the plots lower down sat 'cheek by jowl'.

When the Singapore Land Authority completes Phase 2 of the exhumation by June, all unclaimed remains will be put into storage for three years by the National Environment Agency, after which they will be scattered at sea.

About 55 per cent of the graves have been claimed by the descendants of the deceased, of which 47 per cent have opted for public exhumation, which begins today. In a public exhumation, the Government removes and cremates the remains and then lodges the ashes in a columbarium. The family is kept informed.

The families of Mr Tan Siak Kew and Mr Chen He Qu are among the 8 per cent who have opted for private exhumations. They do so to keep the grave away from the public eye and also to find out what their ancestors had buried with them. Private exhumations also enable the family to relocate the remains in accordance with the best fengshui timing.

For the researchers, the work is arduous, and progress, piecemeal. Their first stop is with the descendants of the deceased. But the fact that it was customary for Chinese gentlemen to use different names through their lives or one name in life and another at death complicates matters.

For example, Dr Gan found that Mr Chen is listed as Chen He Qu on his tombstone, but when he was alive, he called himself Chen You Tang (or Tan Yew Tng in the Teochew dialect) in correspondence. For business dealings, he was Chen Ken Gou or Tan Kheng Khor, which had been variously spelled as Tan Kheng Keoh, Tan Keng Kok, Tan Keng Khor, Tan Kheng Khoh, and Tan Khing Koh.

That this was a member of the Teochew elite is not in doubt: His grave sits on a high point on the hill, which is supposed to augur good luck for his descendants, said Dr Hui. The grave has a half-moon shaped pond in front of it and a mound to represent a hill at its rear, in accordance with good fengshui.

Before the flats of Woodlands housing estate rose, the grave would have had a clear view of the Johor Strait. This was, after all, the final resting place of a man who had a prominent regional import-export business in rice that survived for more than 150 years.

Hong Kong-based Danny Chin, who heads the Asia office of the Genealogical Society of Utah, said the aim is to document all the inscriptions in the cemetery's tombstones in digital photographs to form a source for future researchers.

He is getting help from more than 100 volunteers from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints here for the task.

vijayan@sph.com.sg

Keepers of the graves and tradition
By Carolyn Quek

MADAM K. E. Chong, 59, squats in front of a grey tombstone, scrubbing at the smudged paint of its Chinese inscription.
A middle-aged couple wait beside her, hoping she will be able to give them the name of the village in Shantou, China, where the man's grandfather was born.

The couple also want to replicate the inscription at the place where their ancestor's remains will rest after his grave is exhumed.

Madam Chong comes through and gives them the information they need. She has helped many families in this way since the start of the exhumation of Kwong Hou Sua Teochew Cemetery.

'If you give me a name, I will know which grave you are looking for,' said the cemetery caretaker, who has been at this job since she was nine.

She is among the fewer than 10 caretakers who have tended to the 3,000 graves there. Some of them hold a second job, but all return during the Qing Ming Festival to help families paying their respects to their ancestors - such as by repainting tombstone inscriptions, cutting the grass or even helping the families to locate the graves.

For these caretakers, tending to the cemetery is more than just a job - it is about upholding a family tradition. Madam Chong, for instance, is a third-generation caretaker in her family.

Fellow caretaker Ng Choon Hai, 72, has been at the job for almost 60 years. His father did the same job, as did his brother, and now, his nephew.

Like most cemetary caretakers, his and Madam Chong's families lived on the site. They are called to duty even in the dead of night, which is when private exhumations take place.

They do not mind the hours, nor are they spooked. As Madam Chong said: 'What's there to be afraid of? I used to live next to these graves. The people buried here are like family to me.'

Mr Ng said the families used to pay him $3 to $4 to tend to the graves, 'very big money then'. Now the going rate is $30 to $40, but fewer families visit the graves now, so he moonlights as a taxi driver.

Madam Chong said she would rather tend to the graves than do her other job of selling handbags in air-conditioned department stores. She said of her outdoor 'office', laughing: 'I feel carefree here, there's no one to mind me. You know, I can be very unrefined. But I have to talk softly when I sell bags. I can't be myself.'

With the cemetery making room for development, her life-long job will soon be no more. She said: 'When this place is gone, I'll miss it.'

Besides the caretakers, officials from the Singapore Land Authority have also been on hand to ensure the exhumation goes smoothly for the families.

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Three of the prominent names buried in the cemetery

Tan Siak Kew

TAN Siak Kew was born in 1903 in Guangdong province, China, and came to Singapore at the age of seven with his father and elder brother.

He later formed his own firm to trade in tropical produce and went on to become the chairman of the Sze Hai Tong Bank, or Four Seas Communication Bank, in 1962.

He was also a pioneer property developer whose projects included Sennett Estate near MacPherson Road.

He was a bilingual community leader, active in the Ngee Ann Kongsi, a Teochew charitable trust group, said historian Melanie Chew.

He contributed to various charitable causes and was also active in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.

A staunch supporter of education, he became one of the founders of Nanyang University and was its chairman in the 1960s.

He became Singapore's first ambassador to Thailand in 1966 and died in 1977.



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Lee Wee Nam

He was an eminent community leader and entrepreneur born in Guangdong province in China, in 1881.

He lost his mother at a young age and was raised by his father, a coffin-maker.

At 16, he came to Singapore. As he had little formal education, he worked as an apprentice in a firm for $2 a month.

He later became the chairman and managing director of the Sze Hai Tong Banking and Insurance Company, or the Four Seas Communication Bank, which is now part of OCBC Bank.

He also co-founded Singapore's first Chinese girls' school, the Ngee Ann Girls' School, in 1940.

He died in 1964, aged 83.

Wee Nam Road in the Newton area is named after him.

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Seah Eu Chin

SEAH Eu Chin, born in 1805, came to Singapore from Swatow in 1823. He was a merchant who traded in pepper and gambier - a common ingredient used by Asians in chewing betel nut - and was an early member of the Singapore Chamber of Commerce. He was also one of the first Chinese to become a naturalised British subject. He was a clerk on trading vessels before becoming a commission agent supplying junks plying between Singapore and Sumatra.

Believed to be a pioneer in gambier plantations, he bought land in River Valley Road, Bukit Timah and Thomson Road, and his empire stretched to Sembawang and Mandai.

He died in 1883. His body has already been exhumed.