by Senan Molony
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© Senan Molony, 2012
ISBN: 978 1 85635 883 5
Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 054 0
Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 055 7
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For Brigid & Philippa
Acknowledgements
I must pay tribute to my eyes and ears on the American side, Phillip Gowan of Myrtle Beach, North Carolina, to whom I am immensely indebted. I am also obliged to Bob Bracken of Midland Park, New Jersey.
The following have also generously provided information and assistance: Maureen Heslin Anderson, John Arkins, Fay Blettner, Róisín Brady, Sheila Brogan, Nora Buckley, Anne Burrows, Sue Babcock Byrd, Mary Noon Capuano, Helen Cassells, Chapin Memorial Library, Willie Charters, Ed Coghlan, Pat Colbert, Maura Conlon, Tony Cox, Ita Cusack, Julia Lynch Danning, Bernard Delaney, Con Dennehy, Chris Dohany, David Donohoe, Tony Donohoe, Moira Dooley, Frank and Essie Dwan, Mary Edward, Denzie and Johnny Egan, Con English, Al Ermer, Bernard Evers, Charlie Evers, Paddy and May Flanagan, Billy Flynn, Mary Flynn, Cathleen Foerster, Barbara Foland, Jerry Foley, Liz and Cathy Foyle, Paddy Gallagher, Erin Garry, Dr Denis Griffiths, Molly Harten, Margaret and Donal Hickey, Mary LaSha Higgins, Philip Hind, Michael Hopkins, Nancy Hopkins, Alan Hustak, Charles Jones, Edna Draper Jones, Karen Kamuda, Nellie Keane, William and Patsy Keane, Michael Kilgannon, Bob Knuckle, Jacqueline Komay, Beatrice Lacon, Mimi Lai, Helen Landsberg, Jack and Margaret Leniston, Jimmy Lennon, Don Lynch, Maureen Lynch, John and Margaret Lynn, Diana Ylstra Maher, Anthony and Clare Mangan, Anne Manning, Johnny Mannion, Susan Markowitz, John Martin, Ruth Jermyn McElhenny, Brian Meister, Arthur Merchant, Mick Molloy, Patrick and Nora Mullane, Tom and Kathleen Mullen, Tom Mullins, National Archives staff, National Library staff, Regina Nau, Esther Naughton, Derek Newcomb, Henry Noon, Margaret and Joseph Nuesse, Gearóid O’Brien, Mona O’Brien, Lorcan O’Connor, Mary Alice O’Connor, Kitty O’Donovan, Nellie O’Heney, Derry O’Riordan, Sister Angela Perry, Robert Prior, Noel Ray, Benny and Teresa Reilly, Mary Reilly, Sheila and Joe Riordan, Mary Rogers, Audrey R. Sampson, Patrick Shaughnessy, Tom Shiel, Daniel Sinnott, Mona Sinnott, Dympna Slater, Tommy Smith, Dick Stokes, Mary Foley Taylor, Johnny Thompson, Diana Thorpe, Brian Ticehurst, Jack Toohey, Rita Guilfoyle Townsend, Dermot Walsh, Mike Walter, Kathy Weir.
Introduction
The tumult began when the waters closed over the Titanic, and it has hardly ceased since. The awfulness of the cries of the dying faded within an hour and the sea was stilled, save for sobbing and the gentle slopping of oars. But the news soon reached New York and new cries were going up.
Newspapers led and fed the cacophony. A single ship, lost at sea like thousands since time immemorial, became a fever that touched every door. It was the only topic of conversation for weeks afterwards. It affected home and hearth, industry, empire, everything. Once so sure of itself, western society was forced to question and think anew.
In the decades since, the topic has remained submerged yet embedded in the public consciousness. Titanic is the Rolls Royce of shipwrecks. She glittered with the finery and wealth of millionaires and was the zenith of industrial accomplishment at the time, ushering in a host of refinements. And when all mankind’s efforts in creating her were set at nought, she launched a thousand sermons on our follies and our foibles.
All this is true, but there is also something else, something differently spiritual. Why do we hanker after the lost ship? What is it about that ‘tide in the affairs of men’ in far-off 1912 that exercises such an unfathomable pull on imaginations still? Certainly, she stands as an object of desire, an emblem of opportunities forgone, and a glimpse of how the other half lived – with the added, secret comfort that rich and poor went down alike.
But we have heard too much about the rich. We are surfeited on Grand Staircases, on the ridiculous roe of sturgeon, on starched collars and feather boas. If we look closely at the Titanic, we can also see ourselves, not in how we enviously hope to be, but in how we are. Everyone can project themselves into the desperate dilemma of that night and how they might have acted, while perhaps forgetting that the vessel already carried a representative sample of us through all classes, creeds, ages and races. The Titanic certainly fulfils a need for those who yearn for the ways of yore. And, in actuality, she provides a detailed picture of the way things were. The way things were for officers, crew, society, Finns, Syrians, Americans, Irish …
Two of the oft-repeated catch cries of that night to remember are ‘Women and children first!’ and ‘Be British!’, the latter phrase attributed to Captain E. J. Smith in his efforts to stiffen the resolve of the crew close to the end. Hackneyed as they are, they offer a superficial impression of the values that informed the conventions of the Edwardian age. Men were expected to be gallant, to behave like gentlemen, to elevate the weak at the expense of the strong. In large part on that night of 14–15 April 1912, they lived up to the image they had created for themselves. It was part of belonging to the ‘civilised’ world, part of being British in the larger sense, even if one was Argentinian, German, Swiss or any one of the other nationalities in First Class. The underlying assumption was that civilisation set certain races apart. In the aftermath of the tragedy, commentators seized upon the fact of monied men standing back from the boats as triumphant proof of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon mindset. If such complacency had helped to bring about the disaster, many continued to find it a refuge thereafter.
It is, after all, a stupid thing to crash full tilt into an iceberg. But the undoubted heroism shown by many that night was puffed up into mythic proportions. One paean of praise for the lost proudly trumpeted that the Englishman had shown the world how to die. Articles on both sides of the Atlantic pointed out with some distaste that the Chinese custom was not to prioritise the women and children, but to save the men. Men first, then the women, then children. Men work and produce, they can find new wives. If the women survive too, so much the better. The children can be replaced.
So much for the Chinese. Their near neighbours in Japan could also be disparaged. The Titanic’s Fifth Officer, Harold Lowe, led lifeboat No. 14 back to the scene of the wreck a while after the hopeless cries had ended. His boat passed by a floating door to which a ‘small Japanese’ had lashed himself with a rope. Charlotte Collyer, a Second-Class passenger, wrote in a magazine in May 1912 that the officer had hesitated about trying to save him. ‘What’s the use?’ said Mr Lowe. ‘He’s dead likely, and if he isn’t, there’s others better worth saving than a Jap!’
Lowe actually moved his lifeboat on, but then changed his mind and went back. The Japanese man was hauled aboard, and one of the women rubbed his chest while others chafed his hands and feet. He opened his eyes, and in five minutes had recovered his strength. He next took over at the oar from an exhausted crewman, prompting Lowe to remark: ‘By Jove! I’m ashamed of what I said about the little blighter. I’d save the likes o’ him six times over if I got the chance.’
But the reality was that the ‘likes of him’ did not make it into the lifeboats. The strong, who supposedly elevated the weak, som
ehow saw to it that the strong remained strong and the weak, weak – at least in racial and economic terms, if not quite so obviously in relation to women and children, although here too a steerage child was in a far weaker position than First-Class offspring. A woman in Third Class had just a 50–50 chance of being saved, while just one in eight of the Second-Class women were lost, and as few as three in a hundred of those at the top of the social tree. So the famous cry might as well have been ‘First-Class women and First-Class children first!’
We shall look again at what it meant to be among the lower orders, like the Irish and other emigrants who were lower physically on the vessel’s decks and much further away from the boat deck and the means of salvation. But let us also re-examine the attitudes exhibited to those not fortunate enough to be British, or at least conform to the Anglo-Saxon stereotype.
Alongside Officer Lowe in lifeboat No. 14 was steward Fred Crowe, who testified to the American inquiry that at the time of its launching ‘there were various men passengers, probably Italians or some foreign nationality other than English or American, who attempted to rush the boats’. It would be difficult to think of a more neat summation of a generalised and unshakeable conviction in the order of things, and of peoples.
Wherever there was chaos or panic on the Titanic that night, the transcript points to ‘Italians’, ‘foreigners’ and ‘Mediterranean-looking’ men at the heart of it all. The Italians in particular were singled out for negative references. Despite the reality that there were very few Italians aboard the Titanic (far more serving as waiters in Signor Luigi Gatti’s concession restaurant than were booked aboard as passengers), that nationality came in for unwarranted criticism, so much so that the Italian ambassador protested during the hearings of the US inquiry and Fifth Officer Lowe was obliged to apologise. Lowe later met the ambassador and a certified declaration was read into the record of the inquiry:
I, Harold Godfrey Lowe … stated that I fired shots to prevent Italian immigrants from jumping into my lifeboat. I do hereby cancel the word ‘Italian’ and substitute the words ‘immigrants belonging to Latin races’ … I did not intend to cast any reflection on the Italian nation … I feel honoured to give out the present statement.
This rather odd affair points to something else that may be salient: the thinness of different skins in 1912. Clearly national pride was a matter of such supreme importance that the Royal Ambassador of Rome should feel it necessary to stand over Welshman Lowe as he composed his breast-beating public statement. No doubt Lowe himself was ‘honoured’ in return, while the parcel of blame was summarily passed on to other Latins.
Why should the Italians be the focus of barely disguised scorn from many crewmembers? The answer must lie in conditioning. The previous October a British newspaper had described Italy as a ‘pirate and brigand’ nation, arising from Italian interference in Libya. King Victor Emmanuel had joined the scramble for Africa. In February 1912, the Italians, announcing themselves as a military power, bombed Beirut, opening an ambitious war against the Ottoman Empire. Britain, which had clothed much of the world in imperial pink, did not take kindly to such upstart behaviour, particularly since she controlled Egypt, Libya’s eastern neighbour, and had designs on Palestine.
Put simply, Britain and Italy, like all other European powers, were heading inexorably for war. In this context, vaunted and sensitive feelings of national self-worth meant that even appalling disasters became fodder for the mythmakers. The worse they were, the greater that necessity. Britain had placed Lord Gordon of Khartoum on a pedestal because he was killed on the steps of his headquarters in the Sudan in 1885. Sieges of British forces at Mafeking and Ladysmith, once relieved, had been celebrated as great victories. Isandhlwana in 1879 saw hundreds of redcoats wiped out, and the last order given to ‘fix bayonets and die like British soldiers do’. The same day saw the illustrious stand at Rorke’s Drift when eighty-five South Wales Borderers won seventeen medals in an afternoon, eight of them Victoria Crosses. In 1852, some 200 British troops aboard the sinking Birkenhead, off Cape Town, had maintained perfect discipline when drawn up in companies on deck to drown as the vessel settled in shark-infested waters many miles from shore. Being British meant stiff upper lips and going down with the ship, literally and metaphorically.
The Titanic joined the ranks of legend and became even greater than all of them. Who today remembers the Birkenhead? Yet it is astonishing to note that Captain Edward Smith of the Titanic had been asked in a social setting with Harland & Wolff directors before the ship had even left Belfast whether courage and fearlessness in the face of death existed among seamen as of old. He replied that if any disaster like that of the Birkenhead should occur, they would go down as those men had done.
Indeed they did – at least by the time the mythmakers were finished. Waltz music drifted across the deck and ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ was played. The notion that a band member might have had tears streaming down his cheeks was judiciously omitted from the official version, while unsavoury happenings – once dragged into the light of the US inquiry – were ascribed to ‘Italians’, who in turn officially supervised the onward denigration of other peoples.
In this vainglorious context, the militarists were not alone in striving to avoid disgrace. Industrial might and popular pride was bound up in all of it, so that even such questionable achievements as being first to the South Pole or winning the blue ribbon for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic – the ribbon itself being an appropriately fabled, not actual laurel – were prizes sought after among the competing powers.
The South Pole actually gave Britain its first ice disaster of 1912, but this too was reinvented as a benchmark of nobility through the medium of courage and heroism. Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott had launched separate bids for the pole in October 1911, with the Norwegian winning the race on 14 December, but only managing to relay news of the victory in March 1912. He saw no sign of Scott, who had reached the pole in January, being crushed by the sight of the Norwegian flag. Ill-provisioned, Scott and his team turned back but were ambushed by bad weather. Trapped with little food, Captain Lawrence Oates sacrificed himself for the sake of his comrades, walking from shelter into a blizzard with the words: ‘I am just going outside, I may be some time.’ His conduct did not save the others, who all died, but his supreme act had been noted in Scott’s later recovered diary of their last hours.
Such was the calibre of some men in 1912, which in part seemed to stem from old aristocratic principles such as noblesse oblige, that status conferred obligations. But a rich vein of shimmering, if catastrophic, failure – upon which the Titanic would place the tin hat, at least until the tin-hat days of Dunkirk – only serves to mask some deeper truths. It can certainly be argued that Britain and America’s outlook imposed no obligations on persons of other nationalities to live up to standards of behaviour inculcated over decades, if not centuries, of conquest, civilisation and self-congratulation. Why should Third-Class passengers patiently ‘wait their turn’ in steerage? Who made the rules?
It will be seen in the accounts contained in this book that Third-Class passengers were undoubtedly discriminated against in leaving the Titanic. But if there was prejudice, it was institutionalised by reason of the class system. All subconsciously seemed to accept that a person who paid thousands for a First-Class ticket had a greater right to a place in a lifeboat than one who had paid less than £8 for their passage.
Daniel Buckley, a young man from Ballydesmond, County Cork – which in 1912 was known by the rather absurd yet telling name of Kingwilliamstown – certainly did not question the way things were. He told the US inquiry into the disaster that a sailor had hurried to lock an unlocked gate as he and fellow steerage passengers rushed up a staircase. Breathtakingly, Buckley, when asked by Chairman Senator William Alden Smith whether the steerage had any opportunity at all of getting out, responded: ‘I think they had as much chance as the First- and Second-Class passengers.’ Before the enormity of such
a statement could sink in, Smith asked whether such equal chances had come about after the locked gate had been smashed in. Again Buckley’s reply is instructive: ‘Yes, because they were all mixed. All the steerage passengers went up on the First-Class deck at this time, when the gate was broken. They all got up there. They could not keep them down.’
Another steerage passenger, Olaus Abelseth, also displayed blithe acceptance of a hierarchy of human life. He spoke of steerage being allowed onto the forward well deck, where further advance was prevented to higher decks where the lifeboats were. But he also told his audience of incredulous senators that steerage passengers still had plenty of opportunity to get up. It turned out he was talking about the danger-fraught route of climbing up the deck cranes and inching along their freezing metal arms to jump over railings and onto the forbidden territory of B deck.
Equally, it was unquestioningly assumed that the lifeboats were for passengers, and that the crew had no entitlement to them other than to serve as basic lifeboat crews. Indeed, there was resentment of sailors saved in some lifeboats, particularly among First-Class ladies who had left husbands behind. Somehow the crew were not playing the game by swimming to lifeboats or shinning down ropes. This distaste manifested itself in criticism of crewmembers for smoking, alleged but unlikely drunkenness, coarse talk and incompetence.
If some members of the crew looked after themselves and their own in a few instances, few today would blame them. They did it when they could and when officer backs were turned. One account in this book mentions the strange expression on stewards’ faces as passengers were helped into boats, an intimation of sickly envy knowing what was in store for they themselves, but still following orders.
At officer level there was no question of taking a place in the boats. Devotion to duty was paramount, and with it the maintenance of discipline – so much so that officers were prepared to fire their guns. Meanwhile senior surgeon William O’Loughlin swung his lifebelt in his hand and joked to colleagues that he wouldn’t be needing it – even as the foaming water roared up the wall of the forward well deck mere yards away. Second Officer Charles Lightoller, a survivor, who had straddled some lifeboats the better to help load them, bristled when later asked how he had left the ship. He replied to the effect: ‘I didn’t leave the ship. The ship left me.’
