The boat train carrying second- and third-class passengers left London’s Waterloo station at about 7.30 that morning and arrived at the Ocean Dock a little under 2 hours later. A few minutes later second-class passengers began to board the ship through the entrance at the aft end of C Deck. They were met by their stewards and directed or taken to their respective cabins. Second-class passengers who had been allocated cabins right at the stern of the vessel also boarded through another entrance even further aft on C Deck. However, there was no lift handy by this entrance so passengers had to use the stairway to reach the decks where their cabins were situated. There was a lift at the main entrance for the use of the second-class passengers but many of those using that entrance preferred to walk down the relatively grand red-carpeted light oak staircase. Second-class passengers who made their own way to the ship could also board through the other entrance at the aft end, on the starboard side of E Deck. In any event, as soon as they passed through one of the entrances they were assembled into groups by the waiting stewards, then led to their cabins. From then onwards they were expected to find their own way about the huge vessel with the aid of somewhat inaccurate deck plans provided by the line for each ticket-holder. After all, there was little point in asking stewards or crew members for directions as most of them didn’t know their way about the ship either. In fact, on more than one occasion members of the ship’s crew had to ask the newly boarded passengers for directions as they had not been provided with even rough plans of the ship.
Third-class passengers were boarding at the same time as second class. They came into the ship through their entrance close to the stern on C Deck or via the gangway forward on D Deck. Like second class they were assembled into groups by the waiting stewards, but there were many more passengers per steward in third class than second, so the groups must have been larger and far more impersonal. As mentioned earlier, third class aboard a White Star liner was as good as or better than first class aboard vessels belonging to other less prestigious lines. The third-class areas of the ship must have seemed palatial, with their white-painted panelled walls and linoleum-covered floors. In groups the passengers were led to their cabins or dormitories. Single third-class male passengers were shown to accommodation at the forward end, deep within the ship on E, F and G Decks. Single female third-class passengers were taken aft to cabins on D, E, F and G Decks. There would be little fraternisation between unmarried members of the opposite sexes in third class if the White Star line had anything to do with it.
Married couples and families were spread between fore and aft accommodation, seemingly at random. Despite this attempt at segregation, all the third-class passengers could make use of their own public rooms. There was a smoking room and a large general room for drinking and making merry at the rear end of C Deck and the large dining saloon amidships on F Deck, as well as the promenade on the aft well deck and the large open space on D Deck beneath the forward well deck and crew galley. All in all, third class would be adequately provided for with regard to amusement throughout the first few days of the coming voyage. After that it wouldn’t matter.
While second and third class were boarding, the Trinity House pilot, Captain George Bowyer, also arrived at the ship and made his way to Captain Smith’s cabin. It was Bowyer’s job to command the ship until she was clear of the shoal waters in the exit channels from Southampton. All ships over a certain size were obliged to employ a Trinity House pilot when entering or leaving the Hampshire port to minimise the chances of an accident. It will be recalled that George Bowyer had been with Captain Smith on the bridge of Olympic almost seven months earlier when that vessel had collided with HMS Hawke. Nor was that the only blemish on Captain Bowyer’s accident record. He had been the pilot aboard the American liner St Paul when she had rammed HMS Gladiator of Great Yarmouth 3½ years earlier. A number of Royal Navy personnel had perished in that incident.
Captain E. J. Smith’s accident record was easily as bad as Bowyer’s, perhaps even worse. As well as the Hawke incident he had run the Republic aground off New York in 1889. Three crewmen were killed aboard that vessel shortly after she had been refloated when a boiler flue exploded. Almost two years later Smith ran the Coptic aground off Rio de Janeiro. In 1901 Majestic, while under Smith’s command, caught fire, although the Captain later denied knowing anything about this incident. In 1906, while still in Liverpool, his ship Baltic caught fire. The fire was extinguished with the aid of the port fire-fighting equipment but not before the ship and her cargo had sustained considerable damage. Then, in 1909, he managed to run another White Star liner, Adriatic, aground off New York. These were the men who would take the Titanic out of Southampton, and the accident-prone Captain Smith would take her on her one and only Atlantic voyage.
Just before 11.30am the first-class boat train arrived at the dockside and disgorged its passengers. In groups they wandered up the gangway leading to the first-class entrance on B Deck. They were arriving, so it is said, in sufficient numbers to make it difficult for Purser’s Clerk Ernest King to keep his records in order. King’s records are not the most reliable of documents, which leads one to wonder how he would have managed had there been a full complement of passengers boarding that morning. Once passengers had been identified their stewards conducted them to their respective cabins. This tells us that only passengers who could identify themselves and produce some sort of indication as to what cabins they had booked were taken aboard. Admission was a ticket-only affair. Nevertheless, there appears to have been a number of passengers aboard who were travelling under assumed names or who did not appear on any list at all.
With the Board of Trade inspection completed and all the passengers and crew aboard, Titanic was almost ready to depart. The last visitors were seen off the ship. The necessary tugboats were in attendance. A few minutes before midday the massive three-toned ship’s whistles announced her imminent departure. Three blasts on the whistle is the traditional signal that a vessel is ready to leave port. The Blue Peter was run up the foremast. As a Royal Navy reserve officer, Captain Smith was entitled to fly that flag. The mooring lines were cast off and the tugboats took the strain as Titanic’s massive engines began to turn. At noon on 10 April 1912, what must be the most famous voyage in history began. Within minutes the first serious hazard would be encountered and the ship would have to stop. Things were not going particularly well right from the very beginning.
Chapter 12
Cherbourg and Queenstown
Hardly had Titanic begun to move under her own power than things started to go badly wrong. When a vessel as large as Titanic moves it has to push a lot of water out of the way, and that water has to go somewhere.
As mentioned earlier, Southampton Docks were crowded with ships unable to leave because of coal shortages caused by the miner’s strike. These ships were tied up two and three abreast. Somebody should have realised that the powerful currents created by the huge liner could cause some of these vessels to break free of their moorings. It should have come as no surprise when ship after ship strained at the ropes tying them to other vessels or to the quayside, but it appears that it did take everyone unawares. Nobody was prepared when the American liner New York snapped her moorings with a series of reports like pistol shots and began to swing toward the White Star behemoth. Fortunately nobody was hurt when the heavy mooring ropes parted and sprang back like enormous whips as the strain on them was released. Only the quick thinking of Captain Gale on the harbour tug Vulcan saved the day. Somebody had seen what was happening and shouted to Captain Gale to try and push the American ship back out of the way. Gale however, realised that getting in between the two much larger vessels would amount to suicide; the Vulcan would become the filling in a gigantic steel sandwich. Instead Captain Gale managed to get a line onto the New York and slowed her down slightly before that line parted. Vulcan’s crew tried again and succeeded in getting a wire onto the American ship. This time the line held and New York’s swing was first halted, then sl
owly reversed. There was no way that the little tug, powerful as she was, could manoeuvre the large American vessel back into her old mooring, so Vulcan towed her out of the way.
In the meantime Captains Smith and Bowyer, on the bridge of Titanic, had seen what was going on and had the liner’s engines put full astern for a few moments, bringing Titanic to a standstill. The White Star liner waited for an hour while the New York was moved to another mooring before she slowly began to make her way towards the open sea. The prompt action of Captain Gale and the uncharacteristic efficiency of Captains Smith and Bowyer had averted what could have been a serious accident, but opened the way for an even more dramatic event. Even if a collision between the two liners had been relatively minor there would inevitably have been a considerable amount of damage done, which would at the least have delayed Titanic’s departure, perhaps for a matter of days. Had that occurred, this and countless other books might never have been written. However, a collision was avoided and events would take their course. Titanic had come as close to New York’ as she ever would.
Titanic’s journey from Southampton to her first port of call at Cherbourg was relatively uneventful except that the ship’s lookouts, stationed in the crow’s-nest, began to grumble about the fact that they had no binoculars. Captain Smith made no attempt to make up the hour lost in the New York incident. Although a deep-water port, Cherbourg harbour was simply not big enough to take a vessel of Titanic’s dimensions, so the liner dropped anchor outside at about 6.30 that evening, just as it was growing dark. Passengers and mail were loaded and unloaded by two small tenders specially built for the job by Harland & Wolff. Class segregation was treated as a matter of course in those far-off days, just as it is now. First- and second-class passengers were brought out to the liner aboard the tender Nomadic, while third-class were carried by the slightly smaller Traffic. According to the White Star Line’s records, 142 first, 30 second and 102 third-class passengers joined the ship at Cherbourg, while 13 first and seven second-class passengers left. Just over 90 minutes later, with her business at the French port concluded, Titanic weighed anchor and got under way towards her next port of call, Queenstown (now Cobh) in County Cork, southern Ireland.
Passengers of all classes were beginning to settle in and take stock of their surroundings. This would be their first night aboard the liner and for those in third class it must have been an eye-opener. Most of them had never previously seen anything as grand as this ship and had certainly never before been waited on by servants, and were thus a little overawed. The more jaded passengers in first class had seen it all before and not only accepted excellent service but expected it. However, for most in second class, while the experience was perhaps new, it wasn’t in the least frightening, merely interesting. It was passengers in second class who noticed that the ship was listing to port. From the centre of their dining saloon on D Deck, when they looked out of the portholes on the right-hand side they could see the sky, but through those on the left side of the ship they could only see the sea. This clearly caused some interest as it was commented upon by those passengers who had noticed it. Lawrence Beesley, a school teacher who was travelling in second class, also noticed that the ship’s engines were vibrating quite badly, so much so that the mattress on his bed was shaking about. If those second-class passengers had known more about the ship they might well have been a lot more concerned about the list and vibration. As it was they merely talked among themselves.
Deep within the bowels of the liner the engineers were running the engines at high speed and the stokers were pushed to feed enough coal into the boiler furnaces to keep pace. At breakfast time on 11 April second-class passengers noticed that the ship’s list was still there although they still attached little importance to the observation. Had they been able to see the ship from outside, and if they had watched closely as she left Southampton, they might well have been a little more impressed, or even a little fearful. Photographs of the ship as she was leaving Southampton show her riding with two rudder pintles (hinges) exposed above water and a third almost completely exposed. A photograph taken at Queenstown shows the previously almost completely exposed pintle to be now more than half submerged. As these pintles are about 3 feet in height the rear end of the ship must have settled by somewhere between 1 and 2 feet in the time between her leaving Southampton and arriving at Queenstown. During that short voyage a considerable amount of coal must have been consumed by the ever-hungry furnaces, so the ship should have been riding slightly higher out of the water. Instead she appears to have been slowly sinking by the stern.
The port of Queenstown, like Cherbourg, was too small to take a vessel as large as the ‘Olympics’, so Titanic dropped anchor about 2 miles offshore. Then the liner waited for about half an hour as the two tenders, Ireland and America, brought 1,385 bags of mail, 113 third and seven second-class passengers out to her. Once the passengers heading for the New World were safely aboard, it was time for those travelling only as far as Queenstown to disembark. In all, 13 first-, 7 second- and possibly 2 third-class passengers left the ship at the Irish port. They were joined by a stoker, John Coffy, who, according to the official record, was deserting the ship. It is possible that Coffy, who worked deep within the bowels of the liner, had realised that she was not a brand new vessel at all. He might even have known that the ship was taking in water, in which case his eagerness to leave her would be entirely understandable. It has been said that Coffy might have only taken the position as a stoker in order to obtain free passage from Southampton to his home in Sherbourne Terrace, Queenstown. This seems a little unlikely as he actually lived at 12 Sherbourne Terrace, Southampton.
It seems much more likely that the stoker was leaving the ship quite legitimately and with Captain Smith’s knowledge. It is inconceivable that he could have hidden himself away aboard a vessel as small as a tender, or that he managed to mingle unnoticed with the passengers, Customs officials, reporters and so on who were also leaving the liner at the time. Coffy had something of a record for leaving ships aboard which he was employed without completing the voyages he had supposedly signed on for, yet his papers showed no record of this tendency towards desertion. Nor was this the last time he apparently deserted. During the Great War he served as a rating in the Royal Navy. Desertion from the Army or Navy during wartime was a serious offence that would normally be punished by a term of imprisonment or even a death sentence. Peculiarly, Coffy was awarded a war medal, although this was taken away from him in 1922. Shortly after deserting Titanic he was taken on as a stoker aboard the pride of the Cunard fleet, Mauretania. A seaman’s papers, upon completing a period of service aboard any ship, were endorsed by the Captain or Chief Officer to show whether or not he had performed satisfactorily. Obviously a deserter’s papers would not show any such endorsement, merely that he had been signed on. Without his previous Captain’s confirmation that a seaman knew his job he was virtually unemployable. He would certainly not be taken on as a skilled or semi-skilled sailor. Why then would the captain of the Mauretania allow a man with Coffy’s lack of credentials to join his crew? The short answer is that he would not.
There is a possible explanation for John Coffy’s departure from Titanic and the various other vessels he served aboard that would not involve his papers being incomplete or his needing to forge a Captain’s signature. If he worked directly for the Liverpool Shipowner’s Association, and therefore directly for the shipping lines themselves, to keep an eye on and report on any dissent among the various crews he served with, his papers would be in order. In that case his departure from the liner at Queenstown was probably prearranged. As we know, there was a lot of industrial unrest and even sabotage at the time, and Coffy could have been just one of many employed to infiltrate trade unions and the like.
Among the letters taken ashore from the liner during her stopover at Queenstown was one from her Chief Officer, Henry Tingle Wilde. The letter was to his sister and in it he wrote that he ‘still’ did not like this
ship. According to the record Mr Wilde never saw or set foot on Titanic until the morning of 10 April, the day she sailed. How then could he have still disliked a vessel he had had nothing to do with until then? Mr Wilde had, however, served aboard Olympic before as Chief Officer, and it stands to reason that it was this ship he was referring to. If that was the case, Wilde must have known that the Titanic he was aboard was in fact really Olympic.
At about 1.30pm Titanic weighed anchor and got under way for New York. There was no particular hurry as she was not expected to arrive until after daylight on Wednesday 17 April, when the reception was arranged and the press would be ready. However, stokers later complained that the ship had been run at very high speed right from the very start of the voyage and that they had struggled to keep up with the demand for coal from the furnaces. This complaint by those in a position to know exactly how hard the boilers had been worked at first seems to make no sense. During her first day at sea, from 1.30pm on the Thursday when she departed Queenstown until noon on the Friday, the ship covered 386 miles. That is an average speed of just over 17 knots, which was nothing like her established top speed of 23.5 knots. Were the firemen grumbling for the sake of it or was there some hitherto unexplained reason why the ship needed so much steam to cruise so sedately. Could the water that had entered the after part of the ship be slowing her down, or might it be that the starboard engine was not producing anything like the amount of power it should have done for the amount of steam it was consuming? Vibration is wasted power and it takes a lot of power to continuously vibrate about 60,000-odd tons of steel ship, and we already know that the ship was vibrating badly. Evidently the firemen persevered because between noon on the Thursday until the same time on Saturday the vessel covered 519 miles, an average speed of about 21.5 knots.
The Great Titanic Conspiracy Page 14
