"Jump, Sim, jump!" and Webb did jump, survived, and became a primary source for information about the famous wreck. KFC founder Colonel Sanders worked as a railroad stoker when he was 16 or 17. A 14-year-old Martin Luther King Sr. worked as a fireman on the Atlanta railroad. Depictions in popular culture and art Art Torsten Billman, a Swedish graphic artist, drawer, and mural painter - himself coal trimmer and stoker on various merchant ships from 1926 to 1932 - has portrayed the hard work in coal bunkers and stokeholes. Events Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson acted as stoker on the steam locomotive No. 60163 Tornado while performing a Race to the North against Richard Hammond and James May. It was an homage to the historical Race to the North, a rivalry between British steam engines, trains and men of different companies between London and Edinburgh. Film The lead character Bill Roberts (George Bancroft) in Josef von Sternberg's motion picture The Docks of New York (1928) is a stoker. The lead character in Aleksei Balabanov's 2010 film The Stoker, Ivan Matveyevich Skryabin, is a stoker. Literature The first chapter of Franz Kafka's novel Amerika (published posthumously in 1927) is entitled "The Stoker". Mat Burke, a principal role in Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie (1921) is a ship's stoker. Yank, the protagonist of Eugene O'Neill's play The Hairy Ape (1922), is a stoker on a ship. Music "Stoker Dreams" and "Stoker Love" are songs by the Russian indie group Chimera. The RMS Mauretania (1906) is remembered in a song, "The fireman's lament" or "Firing the Mauretania", collected by Redd Sullivan. The song starts "In 19 hundred and 24, I ... got a job on the Mauretania"; but then goes on to say "shovelling coal from morn till night" (not possible in 1924 as she was oil-fired by then). The number of "fires" is said to be 64. Hughie Jones also recorded the song but the last verse of Hughie's version calls upon "all you trimmers" whereas Redd Sullivan's version calls upon "stokers". Notes References Further reading Dissertation. Railway occupations Steam locomotives