Robert Bateman
Baptist Minister, Age 52
~ Perished ~
Robert James Bateman was born in Bristol, England, but his home was Jacksonville, Florida, where he lived with his wife and seven children. He became a Baptist minister at age twenty-one and went on to be the literal and spiritual founder of the Central City Mission, where his reputation grew as a champion of the poor and disadvantaged. (Both the 1900 and 1910 US Censuses list Bateman as a minister, with the understanding that he simultaneously worked as a stonemason.)
On 10 April 1912, after a trip to England to seek funds for a home for wayward women in his adopted city, and to visit relatives in his native Bristol, Robert Batemen boarded the Titanic and escorted his wife’s widowed sister Ada Balls—also a person of great faith—on her visit to America. The two boarded the ship at Southampton as second class passengers.
On the night of the disaster, Robert—alongside his sister-in-law Ada—had organized a prayer meeting near the second class dining room. A small group of no more than half a dozen people sang hymns and joined in prayer, concluding around 10:30 PM. Ada then retired to bed and slept through the ship’s impact with the iceberg. Her cabin companion Mrs. Jerwan woke her when she burst into their room exclaiming “We had an accident!” Too tired to take notice, Ada nonchalantly went back to sleep; it was only when her brother-in-law arrived at her cabin and sternly instructed her to get up and get dressed, that she was compelled to do so. Robert then escorted his sister-in-law to Deck A, helped her into one of the aft port lifeboats and gave her his coat. As the lifeboat was lowering, he reportedly threw his neck tie to her and shouted, “If I don’t meet you again in this world, I will in the next.”
Robert Bateman’s body was later recovered by the Cable Ship Mackay-Bennett and was forwarded to his family in Florida. He was buried in Jacksonville’s Evergreen Cemetery on 12 May 1912.
A year later, Jacksonville remembered its fallen hero in the place he most loved, the Central City Mission. Men, women and children from many of the city's churches came to the mission on 15 April 1913, to remember Robert Bateman, the mission founder. A local newspaper from that time described the event—in part—as follows: “Haunting and incongruous, the strains of Nearer My God to Thee rang through the Central City Mission, as they had through the lonely reaches of the North Atlantic a year before when the ill-fated RMS Titanic slipped beneath the waves with 1,500 souls.” Coincidentally, if not ironically, Robert Bateman had led those in attendance at the prayer meeting that tragic night to remember in the selfsame hymn.
Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!
E'en though it be a cross that raiseth me,
Still all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to thee;
Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!
— Ron Metheny
Bible Verse: “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” — 2 Corinthians 5:1 ESV
Quotable Quote: “Through his rough exterior I saw there was reality within. [Robert Bateman] was a converted alcoholic, on fire with God’s love and I said to myself, I want what he has! . . . I accepted him for what he was—a devoted, diamond-in-the-rough winner of souls.” — E. Stanley Jones (1884–1973) in his work, “Songs of Ascents”
Comments