The rising clamor attracted the attention of Minnie Coutts. A young mother traveling in Third Class with her two small boys, eleven-year-old William and eight-year-old Leslie, to join her husband in New York, she had felt only the slightest tremor when the Titanic hit the iceberg and paid little attention to it. It was not until the mass exodus of steerage passengers from up forward began passing her cabin that she took notice and became somewhat alarmed. Careful not to disturb her sons, who were fast asleep, she stepped out into the corridor and stopped a passing steward, inquiring about the cause of the commotion and was told that the ship was in no danger. Nearly an hour would pass before another steward finally came along with the order for everyone to put on their lifebelts.
At this Mrs. Coutts found herself in an awkward strait: there were only two lifebelts in her cabin, and she couldn’t find a third, since all of the other Third Class passengers seemed to be looking for lifebelts as well. She began frantically asking every person who passed by if they knew of any extra lifebelts, but no one did. One crewman frankly informed her that there were no extra lifebelts available anywhere. In the hope that something would turn up, she quickly dressed her sons, strapping a lifebelt onto each of them, then stepped back out in the corridor and ran into the same crewman who had just moments before told her there were no more lifebelts. Desperately she explained her predicament and this time the man calmly replied, “Follow me.”
He led the three of them forward through a maze of passageways, through First Class and into the crews’ quarters. There, he took his own lifebelt, fastened it around her and said quietly, “There, now, if the ship goes down, you’ll remember me.” Minnie asked if the situation was really that dangerous and the crewman replied that it was. He then gave her directions to the boat deck and left.
Minnie and her boys set out for the upper decks, only to find their way blocked by a locked door. She was just beginning to feel the first tinges of panic when another crewman appeared and quickly led them to the Boat Deck. It wasn’t until she and her boys were safely in Boat 9 that Minnie realized that she had never learned the name of the crewman who had given up his lifebelt. She never saw him again. 16
At half past midnight the word came down to Third Class to send the women and children up to the Boat Deck. Steward Hart, who had realized early on that the Third Class passengers had almost no chance of negotiating the passageways and corridors that were usually inaccessible to steerage if left to themselves, began to organize his charges into little groups. Around 12:50 he set off for the Boat Deck, leading a score of women, some with children in tow. Other stewards continued to organize and reassure the rest of the Third Class passengers. It wasn’t an easy trip: the design of the ship, because of those outdated American immigration laws that required Third Class physically separated from the other classes of passengers, allowed no direct route from the Third Class berthing areas to the Boat Deck, and access to what routes there were was very limited. That was why Hart had to lead his group up the stairs to the Third Class Lounge on C Deck, across the after well deck, past the Second Class Library, into First Class, along a stretch of corridor that led past the surgeon’s office and the private dining saloon for the First Class’ servants, and finally out to the Grand Staircase, which carried them up to the Boat Deck.
Once on deck Hart led his charges to Boat 8, where as quickly as he got them in, several jumped right back out and ran inside where it was warm. Exasperated, Hart gave up after a few minutes and began the long trip back to Third Class.
It was well after 1:00 A.M. when he got back to E Deck and prepared to set out with his second group. This time many of the married women refused to go without their husbands, while several of the men, some rather forcefully, demanded to go along. But Hart had his orders—women and children only—and after firmly reinforcing the order, he set off, reaching the Boat Deck around 1:15. This time he led his group to Boat 15, but was stopped by First Officer Murdoch when he started back down for steerage again. Overriding Hart’s protests, Murdoch ordered him to go with Boat 15 when it was ready to be lowered. 17
Hart’s efforts underscored the fact that, despite later accusations to the contrary, there really was no deliberate policy of discrimination against Third Class. What there was, and what may have been all the more insidious by being purely unintentional, was that simply no policy or procedure for looking after the Third Class passengers existed. Instead, they were left to shift for themselves, not because they were being purposely ignored, but rather because they had simply been overlooked.
Future generations would have a hard time understanding how this could be, preferring instead to attribute it to the innate snobbery of the Edwardian society, but the truth was far less malign and much more tragic. Somewhere in the chain of command communications had broken down, and as had happened so many times before on this night, when Captain Smith had given no specific instructions, Chief Officer Wilde seemed incapable of initiating any actions himself. The other officers were already thoroughly occupied and had little time to spare for wondering about what or who the captain and the chief officer may have overlooked. That discrimination was never intended by the White Star Line lay in the fact that none of the women and children from steerage who reached the Boat Deck were prevented from getting into the lifeboats. The problem was that so few made it there.
Nevertheless, a lot of them tried. Singly and in small groups, some steerage passengers began to make their way to the upper deck. A few of the barriers that closed off Third Class from the rest of the ship were down, and some of the steerage passengers began to work their way into the ship, unsure of where they were going, but certain that if they kept climbing, eventually they would reach the Boat Deck.
But most of the barriers were still up, confining Third Class to the forward and after well decks, where there were no boats. At this point, two components of the geography of the ship defeated the efforts of many of the Third Class passengers to reach the Boat Deck. The first was in the design of the Titanic: there were only a handful of exits from the Third Class areas that gave access to the upper decks—seven to be exact; all of them, be they doors, gates, or hatchways, by law were required to be kept locked. The second was the interior layout of the ship: the complex route that Steward Hart followed when leading his group of women passengers up to the boats was actually the most direct route to the Boat Deck, but for the Third Class passengers, it was a venture into terra incognita, abounding with dead ends and circuitous passages.
A sense of the growing danger they were in communicated itself to some of the steerage passengers and they started finding ways up to the Boat Deck. Soon a thin but steady stream of Third Class passengers could be seen crawling up onto a cargo crane in the after well deck, inching across the boom to a railing on B Deck, then clambering over the railing and on up to the Boat Deck.
Some of them got lost and wandered into the Second Class promenade on B Deck, which turned out to be an apparent dead end. The only way out was an emergency ladder, meant for the crew’s use only, that passed very near the First Class à la carte restaurant. The restaurant, which was still brightly lit, could be seen through the French doors, with table after table already set with gleaming china, sparkling crystal, and freshly polished silver in preparation for the morning’s breakfast. Anna Sjoblom, one of those who got lost, would always remember how the sight had taken her breath away—she had never seen anything like it growing up in Finland.
Two decks below them, another group of young women from steerage found their way barred by a locked gate, this one guarded by a seaman. The three young colleens—Kate Murphy, Kate Mullins, and Kathy Gilnagh—frantically pleaded with the man, who refused to allow them to pass through (regulations were regulations, after all). Suddenly a big, tough-looking Irishman from the girls’ home county, Jim Farrell, the piper, came up the corridor: He took one look at the girls, at the gate, and at the seaman, then bellowed “Good God, man! Open the gate and let the girls through!” Thorou
ghly intimidated, the sailor meekly complied, then ran off.
A larger group was clamoring at another guarded gate barring the way to the upper decks, this one down on E Deck by the Second Class staircase. As Daniel Buckley approached the barrier, the man ahead of him was roughly shoved back by the seaman standing before the gate. Howling in fury the man charged forward again. The seaman promptly ducked through the gate, locked it behind him, and fled. The passenger broke the lock, then took off in pursuit of the offending seaman, shouting that he would chuck the sailor into the sea if he caught him. Buckley and dozens of others rushed through the open gate and hurried up the stairs.
Yet they were only a handful—there were still hundreds of steerage passengers walking about aimlessly in the after well deck or at the foot of the staircase on E Deck. Also left behind on E Deck were most of the Second and Third Class kitchen staff, along with chefs and waiters from the à la carte restaurant. The majority of them were French and Italian, and, owing to a longstanding British animosity toward France and Italy, were objects of suspicion in 1912. No one knows who, if anyone, actually gave the order, or why it was given, but about an hour after the collision they were shepherded into their quarters by members of the deck crew, locked in, and promptly forgotten.
Many of those steerage passengers left behind returned to their cabins; others turned to prayer: around 1:30 Gus Cohen passed through the Third Class Dining Saloon and saw a large number of them gathered there, many with rosaries in their hands, “huddled together, weeping, jumping up and down as they cried to their ‘Madonna’ to save them.” August Wennerstrom, also a Third Class passenger, later observed bitterly:Hundreds were in a circle with a preacher in the middle, praying, crying, asking God and Mary to help them. They lay there, still crying, till the water was over their heads. They just prayed and yelled, never lifting a hand to help themselves. They had lost their own willpower and expected God to do all their work for them. 18
Clearly not all of the barriers for Third Class were of the physical kind. It is a difficult concept to grasp from the late-twentieth-century perspective of an egalitarian, socially mobile society, but it was an undeniable reality that in the first decade of this century feudal society was far from dead. The rigid class structure that had shaped, driven, and defined Europe for more than a thousand years still exerted an overwhelming influence on the lives of almost everyone born into it, dictating every aspect of life: an individual’s vocabulary, diet, education, clothing, housing, profession, even choice of friends were to greater or lesser degrees prescribed or proscribed by their position in society.
And nowhere was that rigidity more prevalent than in the working class. Sons and daughters followed the life paths of their fathers and mothers, each generation putting its successor on the treadmill. Centuries of being the source of an endless supply of labor led to an ingrained mindset among the majority of working men and women whereby they expected to be told where to go, what to do, and when to do it—initiative was never expected of them. Leaving behind the strictures of their working-class origins was equally unthinkable: though Great Britain’s recently formed Labour party had as its proclaimed goal the amelioration of the worst physical conditions of the workingman’s lot, it was not yet ready to articulate the idea of creating a society that would overcome all the poor conditions of the workingman’s life.
This is not to say that the working class viewed itself as oppressed, ready to spring to the barricades in defiance of the patriciate. The working men and women of the early twentieth century—the steel and textile mill workers, chimney sweeps, tanners, coachmen, dustmen, butlers, and maids—were no more ready to rebel than the serfs from whom they had descended. They were good at what they did and proud of it. A contemporary American, Richard Harding Davis, wrote in Our English Cousins:In America we hate uniforms because they have been twisted into meaning badges of servitude; our housemaids will not wear caps, nor will our coachmen shave their mustaches. This tends to make every class of citizen more or less alike. But in London you can always tell a‘bus driver from the driver of a four-wheeler, whether he is on his box or not. The Englishman recognizes that if he is in a certain social grade he is likely to remain there, and so, instead of trying to dress like someone else who is in a class to which he will never reach, he “makes up” for the part in life he is meant to play, and the ’bus driver buys a high white hat, and the barmaid is content to wear a turned-down collar and turned-back cuffs, and a private coachman would as soon think of wearing a false nose as wearing a mustache. He accepts his position and is proud of it, and, the butcher’s boy sits up in his cart just as smartly, and squares his elbows and straightens his legs and balances his whip with just as much pride, as any driver of a mail-cart in the Park.19
Third Class then may have been descriptive of these people’s level of accommodation on a transatlantic liner, but not of the way they viewed themselves. There was nothing fatalistic or resigned in their willful acceptance of their station and of the consequences of that acceptance: they were behaving according to beliefs and values handed down to them by their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents. And if, as far as August Wennerstrom was concerned, they showed little or no inclination to take matters into their own hands, it was because they believed until it was too late that the people in charge, the officers and crew, knew what they were doing. When that belief finally proved false, there would no time for anything but prayer.
In the engine and boiler rooms everyone was too busy to think of prayer, let alone getting away to the boats—there was too much work to do. Chief Engineer Bell was determined to keep the power going for as long as possible—the lights would stay lit, the pumps keep going, the wireless would still work. To make things easier for the engineers to move about he had opened the watertight doors aft of Boiler Room 4. When the water reached that far, he reasoned, it would be easy enough to close them again.
Bell must have been proud of his men; they worked so hard: Trimmer Thomas Dillon dragging long sections of pipe forward to Boiler Room 4 to get more suction from the pumps there; Greaser Ranger shutting down forty-five ventilation fans, which required him to scramble among hot, exposed moving machinery; Greaser Fred Scott freeing a trapped shipmate from one of the propeller shaft tunnels, caught there when the watertight doors had closed.
The stokers and trimmers in Boiler Room 4 worked frantically to draw the fires in the five huge double-ended boilers. Back and forth they dragged their rakes and slicer bars as they pulled the burning coals from the fireboxes. Soon the embers were falling, hissing, into ankle deep water as the sea began to seep through the floor plates, but the men toiled on: there would be no explosions when the cold sea water reached the boilers. The rising water was past Trimmer George Cavell’s knees when he decided he’d had enough and headed for one of the escape ladders. But halfway up, a nagging feeling that he was leaving everybody else behind caused him to stop and go back down. But by then Chief Engineer Bell was satisfied that the fires were sufficiently drawn, and had ordered Boiler Room 4 evacuated, so when Cavell returned, he found it empty. Satisfied that he hadn’t run out on his mates, Cavell headed for the upper decks. 20
Lightoller loaded Steward Hart’s first group into Boat 8 as quickly as he could, then looked around for other women. Mrs. Stuart White noticed Captain Smith ordering a pair of stewards into the boat to act as oarsmen, and Dr. Alice Leader would later recall that they didn’t seem to know their places in the boat. Just before Lightoller was to give the order to lower away, Mr. and Mrs. Straus walked by, and Mrs. Straus stopped and began to climb into the boat. At the last second she changed her mind, turning to her husband saying, “We have been living together for many years; where you go, I go.” Colonel Gracie and Hugh Woolner overheard her, and tried to get her to change her mind, but she was adamant. Finally Woolner turned to Mr. Straus and said, “I’m sure no one would object to an old gentleman like yourself getting in.”
“I will not go before the
other men,” Straus replied firmly, and for husband and wife the issue was settled. Mrs. Straus turned to her maid and helped the young woman into Boat 8, giving the girl her fur coat, saying, “Here, take this. I won’t be needing it.” The old couple stepped away from the boat and settled into a pair of nearby deck chairs to await the end together. Feeling vaguely embarrassed at having overheard all this, Lightoller gave the order to lower away at 1:10, then started aft.21
Just as Boat 8 had slipped its falls and was pulling away, Chief Officer Wilde tapped Lightoller on the shoulder and asked, “Where are the firearms?” Somewhat taken aback, Lightoller said, “Come with me.” Wilde followed as Lightoller led him to the arms locker, where Captain Smith and First Officer Murdoch were already waiting. Opening the locker, Lightoller passed out a half-dozen revolvers and some ammunition to Wilde, who then distributed them to the other officers. Just as Lightoller was about to return to the boats, Wilde shoved one of the revolvers and a half-dozen shells into Lightoller’s hands with the remark, “Here, you might need this.” The second officer nodded a bemused acknowledgement and hurried back out to the Boat Deck.22
Captain Smith returned to the bridge where Fourth Officer Boxhall and Quartermaster Rowe were firing off the rockets. When Captain Smith handed Boxhall a revolver, the young officer looked at his captain in frank disbelief—he still hadn’t accepted the fact that the Titanic was sinking. “Captain, is it really serious?” he asked.
Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic Page 17
