THEY might well be unfamiliar names nowadays but a pair from Newport will forever be associated with an event that made global headlines in the early 20th century.

Senior of the two was George Frank Bailey, who was born in the town in 1866.

He spent his early years living in Monmouth, before marrying and moving to Hampshire. After serving with the Royal Monmouthshire Militia, he joined the Royal Navy as a stoker (also known as a fireman).

He spent 10 years aboard various cruisers, such as HMS Australia and apart from a little time in detention for misconduct, he seems to have largely behaved himself. Standing 5ft 6in tall, he had a fresh complexion and light brown hair, which would have become caked with grime and coal dust as he attended to the furnaces.

A few days shy of his 46th birthday, he signed up with a new luxury liner at Southampton and became one of 163 stokers at a salary of £6 a month.

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With 159 furnaces in need of replenishment, Bailey would have been assigned to four of these, spending around three minutes shovelling fuel into one open maw before moving on to the next. The temperature of the surroundings could reach almost 50ºC and such was the intense heat that it was not unknown for men to be driven mad. However, given his many years of experience among the so-called Black Feet Brigade, the conditions are unlikely to have posed too much of a problem for him.

Bailey’s story is entwined with that of the second man, William Carney.

He was born in 1881 and first lived in Capel Crescent before moving to various properties dotted around Newport.

By 1911, the fair-haired 30-year-old was employed as a boilermaker’s assistant at the town’s docks.

He relocated to Liverpool thereafter and worked on board a ship called the Majestic, before travelling to Southampton to join the same vessel as George Bailey.

It is not clear if the two would have known each other since Carney became part of the 421 men and women who made up the victualling crew. This comprised stewards and stewardesses, bellboys, kitchen staff, and other service personnel.

At the time, the liner was the largest in the world and housed no fewer than four elevators: three for first class passengers and a fourth for second class, each operated by a lift attendant.

Carney was employed as the oldest of these and might have been expected to earn £3/15s a month. He was responsible for one of the first class elevators located near a grand central staircase, conveying passengers in its gilded interior between A and E Decks.

On April 15 1912, the ship sailed (or rather sank) its way into the history books when it was involved in a collision that sliced open its starboard side in the North Atlantic.

More than 1,500 people perished and many famous names were among the fatalities, including the world’s richest man, John Jacob Astor IV. The statistics are chilling: among the passengers, 84 per cent of the men, 28 per cent of the women, and 50 per cent of the children lost their lives - along with 77 per cent of the crew.

A Cunard vessel called the Carpathia picked up 705 survivors from partly-filled lifeboats but it was a cable repair ship, the Mackay-Bennett, that was handed the unenviable task of claiming the dead from the icy water.

The ship did not arrive at the location until April 20 and during its week-long mission, 306 corpses were recovered. When it finally returned to the Canadian mainland, it carried the remains of 190 people, the rest having been buried at sea.

The sinking touched both the highest echelons and the poorest ranks of society, including the families of George Bailey and William Carney.

Only 215 crew survived and sadly, George Bailey was not among them. The abbreviation P-BNR (Perished, Body Not Recovered or Body Not Identified) is given alongside his name in official records.

All four lift operators also died but unlike his fellow Welshman, Carney’s body was retrieved by the Mackay-Bennett. Still wearing his steward’s jacket and blue trousers, he was found carrying personal effects that comprised nail clippers, keys, a comb, a gold ring, and letters.

His remains were subsequently interred at Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Unmarried, he was survived by his mother and his seven younger siblings, the last of whom died in Newport in 1966.

After more than a century, the world’s appetite for the disaster is undiminished, spawning everything from books to video games.

Most famous of all was an epic movie from 1997, which even featured the full complement of elevator attendants, although none were identified by name.

The film, directed by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, had just one word in its title. A word that means exceptional strength or size but has since become synonymous with culpability and tragedy.

That word is Titanic.