How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  There was a transparent, seemingly deliberate, feebleness to Lightoller’s defences of his employer. As a patriot he was damned if he was going to stand by and watch an Englishman savaged in this kangaroo court, but Lightoller’s mockery of Smith served also to undermine Ismay. Lightoller’s biographer, Patrick Stenson, claims that he ‘simply felt sorry’ for the boss, that he was ‘one of those curious creatures’ who went to the ‘aid of the underdog, and certainly there was no dog more under just then than the chairman of the White Star Line’.14 But Senator Smith did not see it like this. Baffled by the dynamic between the two men, he returned to the question, which Lightoller felt had been exhausted in his last interrogation, of when he had last seen Ismay.

  ‘As I now recollect your testimony — and I have it here — you said you were not acquainted with Mr Ismay.’

  ‘I have known Mr Ismay for fourteen years.’

  ‘You did not speak to him that night?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You told me you looked at one another and said nothing.’

  ‘I might have spoken and I might have said “Good evening”.’

  ‘I mean after the collision.’

  ‘After the collision, no.’

  ‘One moment,’ Smith paused. ‘After the collision you saw Mr Ismay standing on the deck?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Looking out at sea?’

  ‘I don’t know what he was looking at.’

  ‘You were standing out at deck about twenty feet from him?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You say now that you did not say that?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Would that not be true?’

  ‘I do not think so. I was walking along that side of the deck.’

  ‘How far past Mr Ismay?’

  ‘I walked past him within a couple of feet of him.’

  ‘And he said nothing to you and you said nothing to him?’

  ‘I might have said “Good evening”. Beyond that I said nothing. I had work on; something else to do.’

  ‘Did he say anything else to you?’

  ‘Not that I know of. He may have said “Good evening”. Perhaps I said that, perhaps I did not. I do not remember.’

  ‘In a great peril like that, passing the managing director of the company that owned the ship, you passed him on the ship and you said “Good evening”?’

  ‘I would, as I would to any passenger I knew.’

  ‘And he passed you and said “Good evening”?’

  ‘I could not say. I say I may have said “Good evening” and may not, and he may have said it and he may not.’

  ‘I only want to know as well as you can recollect.’

  ‘I cannot say for certain.’

  ‘My recollection is that you said you did not speak to him.’

  ‘I am not certain. If I did speak, it was purely to say “Good evening” and nothing more and nothing less.’

  ‘How long was that after the collision?’

  ‘I think,’ said Lightoller, ‘you will find that in the testimony.’

  ‘I know I will find it there,’ said Smith, ‘but I want it again. Your recollection is just a little better today than it was the other day, and I would like to test it out a little.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Lightoller. ‘My mind was fresher on it then, perhaps, than it is now.’

  According to Lightoller’s granddaughter, Louise Patten, the officer confided to his wife a very different version of events. What he told her was kept a ‘family secret’ for nearly a century. Following the collision, when he had gone to the bridge to ask if the blow was serious, Ismay had told the Captain to continue moving ‘Slow Ahead’.[4] The ship, which had stopped following the collision, now started up again and continued at a speed of around 5 or 6 knots until 12.15 a.m., when the Captain sent down the order to once more stop the engines. In pushing her forward, Lightoller believed, Captain Smith had allowed water to pour through the damaged hull at hundreds of tons a minute and to burst through six watertight compartments, one after another. Had the Titanic stood still, ‘the whole ship would have assumed a fairly acute and mighty uncomfortable angle, yet, even so, she would, in all probability have floated — at least for some considerable time, perhaps all day. Certainly sufficient time for everyone to be rescued.’15

  We cannot know whether or not Ismay gave the Captain this order, but had he done so it would not have been an unreasonable suggestion, and nor would it have been out of character. He was confident that the Titanic was unsinkable and he wanted to avoid the adverse publicity of a damaged liner being needlessly towed to port. In his testimony, Lightoller described Ismay as silent and motionless on the Titanic and as incapable of action on the Carpathia. Ismay, too, presented himself as a man who said nothing, saw nothing and did nothing. But the reason for Ismay’s conflicts with his father, Wilton Oldham believed, was that Bruce was ‘quick thinking’, that he acted independently and made decisions without due consideration. In a crisis, when given a choice between action and inaction, Ismay was the sort of man who would always opt for action, but on a sinking ship standing still is a mark of heroism. As Kipling put it: ‘But to stand an’ be still to the Birken’ead drill is a damn tough bullet to chew… So they stood an’ was still to the Birken’ead drill, soldier an’ sailor too.’

  ‘An Ismay’, as journalists had noted of the family tendency, ‘never goes back’. For Bruce Ismay, keeping going was better than standing still;[5] advancing straight at the iceberg was better than trying to swerve around it; jumping into a lifeboat was better than remaining on the ship; pushing the wrong way on an oar was better than not rowing; returning to England was better than waiting around in New York; looking forward at the horizon was better than looking back at the sinking ship. Ismay, who never again rode a horse and rarely wore an overcoat after his father’s humiliations, can always be found shutting the cupboard door which contains the sea before continuing down the corridor. Jack Thayer described him in the doctor’s cabin on the Carpathia as ‘looking ahead with his fixed stare’, and when he was deciding whether or not to become president of the IMM, Ismay had told Sanderson: ‘I intend going slow, and giving the matter the most earnest and careful consideration.’ Was Ismay’s flaw that he acted too quickly, or too slowly?

  It is easy to hear him give the order to Captain Smith to go ‘Slow Ahead’. Ismay’s refusal to believe that either the Olympic or the Titanic could sink as a result of a collision is apparent in a letter he sent on 7 March to the head of the Hamburg-America Packet Company. ‘The fact there is no graving dock in America which would accommodate the Olympic and the Titanic has given me much food for thought as to what would happen in the event of one of these vessels meeting with a serious accident in American waters.’16 It is also easy to hear the Captain — who lost control of the situation almost immediately — agreeing that to continue slowly was the right thing to do. ‘I cannot imagine’, Captain Smith had said of the Titanic, ‘any condition that would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.’ Why panic the passengers, most of whom were asleep, by stopping the ship? Because she had been running under a full head of steam, all eight exhausts would, Lightoller later said, start ‘kicking up a row that would have dwarfed the row of a thousand railway engines thundering through a culvert’.17 A few months earlier, had the Olympic not stayed afloat when he rammed her into the HMS Hawke? And here was the Titanic, also built like a battleship, but a thousand tons heavier.

  Later, according to Lightoller’s granddaughter, ‘while they were still on the Carpathia, the chairman of the White Star Line had shown my grandfather where his duty lay. Due to certain exceptions in White Star Line’s limited liability insurance policy, Bruce Ismay had told him, if the company were found to be negligent it would be bankrupted and every job would be lost. Rightly or wrongly, my grandfather decided that it was his first duty to protect his employer and his fellow employees, and in his autobiography he made it cl
ear that this was exactly what he had done.’18

  But if Lightoller was keeping a secret it was because he needed also to protect himself. He had been at sea for twenty-five years; he was now thirty-eight — only three years younger than Captain Rostron — with a young family to feed and he wanted his own command. How would Lightoller, who was in bed at the time, have known that the Captain was going ‘Slow Ahead’ under Ismay’s orders? Perhaps Officer Boxhall had told him, in which case Ismay would have had to coerce Boxhall as well, but there is no suggestion that Ismay and Boxhall had any private contact whatever. And how possible is it that Ismay, dosed as he was with opiates and unable to think of anything beyond the need to delay the Cedric and replace his shoes, would have set in motion a full-scale operation of silencing the ship’s crew? The Titanic would have sunk in a matter of hours whether or not the Captain had gone Slow Ahead; it was wishful thinking on Lightoller’s part that had she stopped completely the ship might have remained afloat long enough for her passengers to be rescued.

  But still, the suggestion remains. As Lawrence Beesley put it in an article for the New York Times on 29 April, in which he considered the evidence for and against Ismay’s control over the speed of the ship, ‘I admit the possibility, and there it must be left.’

  Lightoller was followed to the stand by Quartermaster Robert Hichens, who had been at the wheel when the collision took place. Senator Smith knew that the White Star Line wanted Hichens out of the country; he had been one of the five subpoenaed men to be brought back from the Lapland in a US Navy pilot boat. Ismay and Lightoller listened closely as Hichens gave his evidence. He had gone to the wheel at 10 p.m. At 11.40 three gongs sounded from the lookout, followed by a telephone call ‘iceberg right ahead’. Murdoch rushed to the bridge and gave the order ‘hard-a-starboard’. Five minutes later the Captain entered the wheelhouse and saw, from the commutator on the front of the compass, that the ship had already listed five degrees. Why, asked Senator Smith, did you ‘put the ship to starboard, which I believe you said you did, just before the collision with the iceberg?’

  ‘I do not quite understand you, sir,’ replied Hichens.

  ‘You said that when you were first apprised of the iceberg, you did what?’

  ‘Put the helm to starboard, sir. That is the order I received from the Sixth Officer.’

  ‘What was the effect of that?’

  ‘The ship minding the helm as I put her to starboard.’

  ‘But suppose you had gone bows-on against that object?’ asked Smith, who now knew where the bow was.

  ‘I don’t know nothing about that. I am in the wheelhouse and, of course, I couldn’t see nothing.’

  ‘You could not see where you were going?’

  ‘No, sir; I might as well be packed in ice.’ The spectators absorbed the image and Hichens continued. ‘The only thing I could see was my compass.’

  ‘The officer gave you the necessary order?’

  ‘Gave me the order, “Hard-a-starboard”.’

  ‘Hard-a-starboard?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You carried it out immediately?’

  ‘Yes, sir; immediately, with the Sixth Officer behind my back, with the junior officer behind my back, to see whether I carried it out — one of the junior officers.’ Neither officer had survived.

  Whether they were referring to the iceberg or to the passengers, the witnesses at the inquiry often described seeing nothing. The problem with witnesses, Senator Smith realised, was that they had been there. Their presence makes them unreliable. In an essay about the bombing of Dresden in On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald wrote: ‘The death by fire within a few hours of an entire city, with all its buildings and trees, its inhabitants, its domestic pets, its fixtures and fittings of every kind, must inevitably have led to overload, to paralysis of the capacity to think and feel in those who succeeded in escaping. The accounts of individual eye witnesses, therefore, are of only qualified value.’

  Quartermaster Hichens was released. He had not, Lightoller also confided to his wife, told the truth. But nor had Lightoller, who, according to his granddaughter, concealed from the inquiry that when he went to Murdoch’s room to collect a firearm he was told that Hichens, ordered by Murdoch to steer ‘hard-a-starboard’, meaning that he should turn to port, had turned the wrong way. If Hichens had indeed done this, it was an understandable error; in 1912 sailing ships and steamships operated two different steering communication systems, rudder orders for steamships and tiller orders for sailing ships, which meant the opposite of one another. Sailors who started their careers on ships which were steered by tillers connected directly to the rudder had to get used to ships now steered by wheels, and the confusion was the cause of many collisions. The Titanic operated tiller orders on the North Atlantic and Hichens, who had not sailed the North Atlantic before, followed rudder orders. In his panic, he did the reverse of what he should have done. The truth, Ismay apparently told Lightoller, would be the end of the White Star Line and all those who knew about it were told to say nothing. The fact that Hichens never mentioned his error throws some doubt on the story. But Ismay was clearly anxious, for reasons of insurance and reputation, that the collision be seen as an Act of God rather than human error. Lightoller saw that Hichens was put into Lifeboat 6, along with Frederick Fleet, the lookout, and Major Peuchen. The shaken quartermaster accepted the offer of some whisky and steered the tiller with his back to the sinking ship. Hichens was the only man, apart from Ismay, not to look when the Titanic went down.

  Lightoller had initially been appointed First Officer on the Titanic, but found himself demoted when ‘the ruling lights of the White Star Line’ decided at the last minute to draft in Chief Officer Wilde, who had useful experience of the Olympic. ‘This doubtful policy threw Murdoch and me out of our stride; and apart from the disappointment of having to step back in our rank, caused quite a little confusion.’19 Everyone changed places: Murdoch, who had been Chief Officer, was now First Officer, Lightoller was now Second Officer, and the original Second Officer was sent home. As a Christian Scientist, Lightoller believed that death was an illusion, man was indestructible, and the power of prayer would help overcome suffering and distress. In an article for the Christian Science Journal he described his ‘miraculous’ survival and his understanding that knowledge of the ‘Truth’ had saved him. But as the ‘solitary survivor of over fifty officers and engineers’, he was now isolated; his dead friends and fellows had at least ‘escaped the never-to-be-forgotten ordeal carried out in Washington’.20

  Lightoller was caught between bedding down in a cheap hotel with an unpaid crew and conspiring with the officials of the White Star Line. First Captain Smith and now Ismay had fallen to pieces, leaving the most senior surviving officer to do his duty for the company. ‘A washing of dirty linen would help no one,’ Lightoller said of his performance at the inquiries.21 He was loyal to the White Star Line but he was also a wild card, and Lightoller obeyed a higher law than the US Senate Subcommittee. He took risks, he told lies, and he changed his story when it suited him. He knew how to make words work; some of Lightoller’s phrases, such as the remark that he did not leave the ship, the ship left him, would become famous (Ernest Jones reminded Freud of Lightoller’s expression when he was trying to persuade the psychoanalyst to leave Vienna in 1938). An exchange with Senator Bourne about the absence of searchlights on the Titanic shows Lightoller — whose very name is Dickensian — to be a master of language: ‘A searchlight’, he explained, ‘is a peculiar thing, and so is an iceberg. An iceberg reflects the light that is thrown on it, and if you throw the light on an iceberg it turns it to white, and if you throw it on the sea it turns it to white.’ Lightoller could conjure up images, hold an audience in his hand. Only in Titanic and Other Ships, published two years before Ismay died, did Lightoller tell the full-blooded sea yarn he denied the crowd in America. No longer the silent movie he described at the inquiry, Lightoller now turns up the sound and
lets us hear the night. It was impossible, he reveals, to give orders to the crew and the passengers because of ‘the appalling din’, the ‘infernal roar’, of the steam being released when the engines stopped. Lightoller had to cup his hands to the Captain’s ear and shout to ask him if the boats should be put out. After half an hour, when the ship is still and the noise has ceased, ‘there was a death-like silence a thousand times more exaggerated’.22

  On 25 April, Ismay replied, in pencil, to a letter he had received from the brother of the artist, Francis Millet, who had gone down with the ship. ‘I regret extremely’, he said, that ‘I had not the pleasure of meeting your brother and am therefore unable to give you any information in regard to him.’ Ismay expressed his condolences, adding that ‘I would also like to say that I am not in any way responsible for the truly dreadful disaster which God knows, if it had been possible, I would have done anything in the world to avert. We had the finest ship in the world, and appointed as her commander a man in whom we had absolute confidence. Why people try to make me responsible for the horrible disaster I cannot imagine. The last week has been a horrible nightmare to me, and I cannot yet realise the Titanic has gone. I can only hope God will give me strength to see the matter out to the end. I am having a truly awful time.’23

  Later that day Ismay wrote to Senator Smith reminding him that ‘though under severe mental and physical strain’ he had ‘welcomed this inquiry’ and placed himself at the disposal of the committee. ‘Though not in the best of condition to give evidence’, he had ‘testified at length’ the previous Friday. Since then he had attended every hearing and held himself in readiness to answer all the committee’s needs, ‘though personally I do not see that I can be of any further assistance’. Might it be possible, he implored, ‘if the committee wishes to examine me further’, for it to do so ‘promptly in order that I may go home to my family’, especially now that the British government had begun its own inquiries ‘which urgently require my personal attention in England’?