Titanic

The Story of the Disaster By Some of Those Who Were There

James W. Bancroft

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526772077
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Experience the Titanic disaster through eyewitness accounts from those who lived it in this unique and gripping history. To have sailed on 'the voyage of the century' aboard White Star Line's RMS Titanic —described at the time as 'a floating palace'—was like being one of the first passengers to fly on Concorde. On 10 April 1912, people from all walks of life began embarking on Titanic, then the largest ship afloat, for what was to be the trip of a lifetime on the ship's maiden voyage across the north Atlantic. Many were looking forward to starting new lives in the United States. However, just before midnight on Sunday, 14 April 1912, Titanic 's crew began to send out distress signals stating, 'We have struck an iceberg'. The liner had been steaming at speed when it collided with an enormous iceberg that stripped off her bilge under the waterline for more than 100 yards, opened up five of the front compartments, and flooded the coal bunker servicing one of the boilers. The damage was fatal, and some three hours after the disaster began to unfold the last visible part of Titanic slipped beneath the waves. There were only sixteen lifeboats and four collapsible dinghies—which was completely insufficient for the number of passengers making the crossing. As a result, more than 1, 500 passengers and crew died: two out of every three people onboard perished. Much has been written about the Titanic disaster, and it has been the subject matter for several films. Author James W. Bancroft is well-known for his depth of research and his attention to detail. In a new style of format, he has selected fifty people involved in the disaster, and by using their specific eyewitness accounts, he has managed to make the confusing situation much clearer, making it possible for the reader to experience the dreadful events as they unfolded. The book also includes biographical tributes to the fifty people, who came from all walks of life and geographical regions, telling who they were, their experiences during the disaster, and what happened to those who were fortunate enough to survive.

PART I

Terror at Seven Bells

Introduction

The RMS Titanic disaster, which occurred on the night of 14/15 April 1912, is one of history’s most catastrophic human tragedies and resulted in a terrible sacrifice of life. The people on board were proud to be part of the ship’s maiden voyage, but what they didn’t know was that it was destined to be its only voyage. It harbours many heartbreaking stories about its ill-fated passengers and crew, whose lives were painfully shattered by what they saw and experienced during that one dreadful incident.

RMS Titanic was a Liverpool-registered ocean liner built for the transatlantic passenger and Royal Mail service between Southampton and New York. She was constructed at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast and was launched on 31 May 1911. Titanic weighed over 46,000 tonnes and was valued at £1.5 million. She included sixteen watertight compartments featuring doors that could be closed automatically from the bridge, sealing off the compartments if necessary; the ship would still stay afloat even if four of the compartments were to flood. This system prompted White Star to describe the vessel as practically unsinkable.

She was the second of her class of luxury liners to be built, her slightly smaller sister ship, RMS Olympic, having sailed on her maiden voyage on 14 June 1911. Titanic was built to accommodate about 3,000 passengers and over 900 crew members, and being a Royal Mail ship, she was carrying about as many sacks of mail as people. Titanic had four funnels, although only three of them released steam from the boilers and one of them served no purpose other than the fact that the designers thought the ship would look more impressive with four funnels other than just three.

The ship was designed to provide the ultimate in luxury travel. There was a swimming pool with an adjacent Turkish bath suite, a state-of-the-art gymnasium, an à la carte restaurant, and the Café Parisien. However, the ship’s main feature was the Grand Staircase. Built from solid English oak, and enhanced with wrought iron, the decorated glass domes above were designed to let in as much natural light as possible. To have sailed on ‘the voyage of the century’ aboard RMS Titanic, the world’s largest and most luxurious vessel afloat at that time, was like being one of the first people to fly on Concorde. It was described at the time as ‘a floating palace’ – a combination of Mayfair and Bel Air on water!

However, for all its opulence, some members of the crew who had sailed on Olympic had expressed foreboding about that ship, and these apprehensive feelings did not fade when they transferred to Titanic. Olympic suffered several mishaps during her first months afloat. The most serious of these was when she collided with the British warship HMS Hawke on 20 September 1911, off the Isle of Wight, and had her hull badly damaged. In two further accidents she struck a sunken wreck and had to have a broken propeller replaced, and she nearly ran aground on one occasion while she was leaving Belfast. To get her back to service quickly after the damage, Harland and Wolff had to pull resources from Titanic, which fatefully delayed her maiden voyage by three weeks, from 20 March to 10 April.

In fact, fifty-three sailors were under arrest in Southampton because they had refused to sail to New York on Olympic unless that ship was fitted with wooden lifeboats instead of collapsible dinghies. They were found guilty of having refused duty. However, after what happened during Titanic disaster the magistrate decided that it was inexpedient to punish them.

In addition to these problems, there was serious industrial unrest at the time, and because of a coal strike some ships were unable to sail, so many of their passengers were transferred to Titanic.

Some strange bad omens came in the form of the written word long before Titanic was even thought of. On 22 March 1886, the well-known newspaper editor William Thomas Stead, a keen believer in spiritualism, who was fated to go down with Titanic, had published an article entitled: ‘How the Mail Steamer went down in mid-Atlantic’, by a Survivor, in which he wrote about a steamer that collides with another ship, and because of the shortage of lifeboats there is a large loss of life. He wrote ‘This is exactly what might take place and will take place if liners are sent to sea short of boats – Ed’.

The White Star Line constructed a ship named Majestic and it was launched in 1889, and three years later an edition of W.T. Stead’s magazine Review of Reviews carried a story entitled From the Old World to the New. Although the story was fictional, it was about a ship named Majestic of the White Star Line that has set sail with a clairvoyant on board who senses a disaster to another ship that has collided with an iceberg. The survivors are rescued and the Majestic manages to avoid the ice.

In 1898 an American novelist named Morgan Andrew Robertson published a book entitled Futility or The Wreck of the Titan, about a fictional ocean liner that sank after hitting an iceberg and does not carry enough lifeboats for everyone on board. Both boats were roughly the same size, and they both sank 400 nautical miles from Newfoundland on an April evening. Although the fact and fictional similarities are uncanny, Robertson later stated that he did not have any psychic abilities, as his novel was based on his knowledge of shipbuilding and understanding of the dangers of modern shipping. He died less than three years after Titanic sank.

The fateful true-life omens continued to make things look bad. A fire broke out in the coal bunkers before Titanic had even left Belfast, which the trimmers and stokers below were desperately trying to get under control, and she almost collided with another large vessel as she was leaving the harbour at Southampton.

The delays and problems caused everything to be rushed, and to make up some of the lost time Titanic was steaming at a speed that the crews of other ships would have envied at the time. It was stated later that up to the moment the vessel struck the iceberg she had a speed of 22 knots an hour. Just before midnight on Sunday, 14 April 1912, the RMS Titanic began to send out signals of distress stating ‘We have struck an iceberg’. It had collided with an enormous body of ice that stripped off her bilge under the waterline for more than a hundred yards, opened up five of the front compartments and flooded the coal bunker servicing one of the boilers. The ship that took three years to build took less than three hours to sink.

There were sixteen lifeboats and four collapsible dinghies, which were insufficient, as a consequence of which two out of every three people on board perished. It was one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in modern history.

The CS Carpathia was on its way from New York to Gibraltar and fortunately the ship was in the region, and on receiving a distress signal from Titanic it immediately set a course towards the disaster area. After working through dangerous ice fields it arrived at the scene at four o’clock in the morning of 15 April. Some people, mostly women and children, had escaped from the ship in lifeboats and Carpathia saved over seven hundred of them.

Investigations into the tragedy took place soon after, with the US Senate beginning their inquiries less than a week after the tragedy, followed by the British Board of Trade inquiry later in the year. The overall findings stated a combination of failures that had led to the sinking. These included inadequate lifeboat facilities and regulations, and the fact that they were not filled to capacity when the ship was being abandoned; failure by the captain to take ice warnings seriously; and that the ship was travelling too fast in a minefield of dangerous waters.

Some people also suggested there were flaws in its design and construction. It is suspected that many of the bolts that held the vessel together were weak, and the bottom of the boat was not designed to withstand the weight of a major flooding. One passenger actually stated that the designer admitted the ship was not ready to sail when it did.

Consequently, the International Ice Patrol was set up and stricter regulations were introduced through the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, both of which are still in place today. Maritime safety regulations were updated, including new lifeboat requirements, the introduction of lifeboat drills and the Radio Act of 1912, which insisted on twenty-four-hour communication access on passenger liners, and that communications concerning the safety of the ship took priority over passengers’ personal messages. Of course, all these new regulations came too late for the poor unsuspecting passengers and crew who lost their lives.

The story of Titanic disaster is a record of many stories, and to study the lives of the people who were involved in the tragedy is like taking a step back in time; a paradigm of the Edwardian era. The remains of the wreck of RMS Titanic may lie on the bottom of a deep ocean, but its stories and legends will continue to surface forever, and people all over the world will continue to be interested in them.

I have tried to present the narrative in a way that allows the reader to make their own opinion about the main aspects of the disaster, and take the reader through the terrifying events as they unfolded, through the eyes of a selection of people who experienced them and left descriptions of what they saw and suffered; with biographical tributes giving information on the type of people they were and what happened in later life for those who survived.

*Where a name is accompanied by an asterisk a biographical tribute appears in Part II.

1. ‘Health and Safety?’

White Star Line had become involved in a competition with their rivals, the Cunard Line, over the immensely lucrative Atlantic passenger trade. It was a fight in which size and luxury really mattered. White Star’s president, J Bruce Ismay, intended to get ahead so he came up with plans to build three new ships that would be better than Cunard’s – and they would be called Olympic, Titanic and Britannic.

The Blue Riband was an unofficial accolade given to passenger liners in regular service that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the fastest speed, usually from Queenstown in Southern Ireland to Sandy Nook in New Jersey. It was recognised for the fastest speed westbound and also for the eastbound journey. Since the turn of the century it had been held by German double-screw steamers. However, the Cunard Line took over the record in both directions after the launch of their large liners Lusitania on 7 June 1906, and Mauretania on 20 September 1906.

Lusitania took the westbound record during its trip of 6 to 10 October 1907, when it reached a speed of 23.99 knots (44.43 km/h). The ship increased the record three times, reaching a speed of 25.65 knots (47.50 km/h) on its trip of 8 to 12 August 1909. Mauretania gained the record during its trip of 26 to 30 September 1909, when it reached a speed of 26.06 knots (48.26 km/h). That record would stand for twenty years.

Lusitania took the eastbound record with a speed of 23.61 knots (43.73 km/h) during its trip on 19 to 24 October 1907. This was fractionally beaten by Mauretania on its 30 November to 5 December 1907 trip, when it reached a speed of 23.69 knots (43.87 km/h). However, the ship increased the record six times, reaching a speed of 25.88 knots (47.93 km/h) during its trip of 16 to 21 June 1909. This record stood until Mauretania itself beat it fifteen years later.

White Star had last held the westbound record with Teutonic in 1891, and it had not held the eastbound record since the old Britannic as far back as 1876.

When information concerning Ismay’s plans became public, and the news that the new ships would be built at Harland and Wolff in Belfast, the local press lauded ‘There is great satisfaction in Belfast of the prospect of assured work for a considerable period being given by the building of two mammoth White Star liners. It is estimated that at least £2,000,000 will be spent in wages in Belfast. Twelve thousand men are employed in Messrs Harland and Wolff’s shipyards, the wages bill reaching £18,000 a week.’

Olympic was ordered in 1907 to be built at yard number SS400. Several men working on the construction of Olympic had lost their lives, including Robert Murphy junior, whose father was to meet his death while involved in the building of the other great ship. The first two men to suffer accidental death in the construction of Titanic at Queen’s Island were young teenagers, and strangely each known man who met his death during construction was older than the one who had been killed before him.

On 20 April 1910, a fifteen-year-old named Samuel Joseph Scott said goodbye to his family, left their lodgings at 70 Templemore Street in the Ballymacarret district of east Belfast and joined the other workers as they made their way down to ‘The Yard’. He was a catch boy working on the ship then known simply as SS401. His job was to climb a high ladder to a platform where white hot rivets were thrown up to him and he had to catch them with a pair of tongues. He would then hold them in a hole ready for one of the five-man team of riveters to drive them home with a heavy hammer.

That afternoon he was busy at his work when perhaps he had to stretch out a bit too far to catch a rivet and he somehow lost his footing and fell helplessly for 23ft onto the hard surface of the ship’s hull, where he lay bleeding from a serious head trauma. The cause of death was given as ‘shock, following a fracture to the skull’. Sam was buried in an unmarked grave at Belfast City Cemetery on the Falls Road, and eight other men lost their lives during the construction of SS401, which would later be named RMS Titanic.

Just over two months later, on 23 June 1910, another teenage rivet catcher suffered the same fate. John Kelly was aged 19 and lived in Convention Street. He too died from shock after he fell from a grea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PART I Terror at Seven Bells
• PART II Biographical tributes to most of the victims who appear in the main text
• Appendix
• Bibliography and Research References
• Plate section