A Night to Remember

There were the passengers in second class, too, professionals and their wives, and salesmen with samples of wares or order books at the ready, all set to make a deal with the entrepreneurs of the New World. And there was the crew, the boilermen and deckhands, the stewards and stewardesses, and, of course, the officers, who would find themselves at the centre of the drama of the ship’s final hours. And as they headed for destruction, so did the larger world they represented, which would soon hit its own iceberg in the shape of the First World War.

Walter Lord begins his account of the disaster with a curious fact: in 1898 one Morgan Robertson wrote a novel about a fabulous liner, packed with the rich and fashionable folk of the day, which crashed into an iceberg and sank. The book was called Futility and the events predicted in it would become startlingly true. It seems to have been the discovery of this eerie coincidence that inspired Lord to take on the mantle of Chief Chronicler of the Titanic.

He would have many imitators, but what continues to mark his version apart from the rest is its extraordinary economy. He manages to convey both the detail and the sweep, the little sorrows and the all-embracing horror, in prose which is minutely researched but never dense. His style is serious, moving and, above all, readable. In my own investigation into the truth behind the sinking, I never came across another book to rival it.

The Titanic has spawned its own legends, its own heroes and heroines, but, as so often in life, the truth is a little more complicated. Some of these stars, the famously ‘unsinkable’ Molly Brown, for instance, or John Hart the third-class steward, or the stalwart Countess of Rothes, prove satisfactorily authentic when they are researched. Mrs Brown did indeed take the oars and try to get the lifeboats to go back for survivors; John Hart did lead parties up from steerage to the boat deck on his own initiative and he did get them away to safety; Lady Rothes did take over the tiller, and corresponded with the sailor in charge of her boat for the rest of their lives.

But then it was Charles Lightoller, second officer, one of the accepted heroes of the sinking, who decided not to fill the boats to capacity, and to take ‘women and children only’ (rather than the more usual ‘women and children first’), his idea being that the men could swim out to join their womenfolk once the boats were safely launched. This doomed plan seems to have been arrived at because Lightoller was unaware that the boats had been tested full in Belfast, and failed to recognize that, after a short time, the hatches from which the men were to swim would be unreachable or that the water was too cold to survive in for more than a few minutes. As it was, the boats rowed away from the wreck as soon as they touched the surface of the sea to escape the suction which never in fact happened.

So while Lightoller definitely was a very brave man and a real hero, his split-second decision not to take men and not to fill all the boats cost hundreds of lives.

I wonder, too, whether some of the villains have been justly treated. History has not been kind to the Duff Gordons, but the charge against them of paying the sailors to keep away from the drowning was never proved. If they were afraid to return for fear of being swamped, it was no more than the fear felt in almost every boat.

And the Managing Director of the White Star Line, Bruce Ismay, has had a hard press when he did not, as one often reads, get into the ‘first’ lifeboat to leave the ship. In fact, he climbed into the very last boat of any description, one of only two collapsibles to be successfully launched, to get away before the ship went down. Nor is there any solid evidence that he was responsible for the increase in speed, since it was White Star’s clear and stated policy that they sold luxury rather than a record crossing. It is not anyway realistic to exonerate Captain Smith from the decision to go faster, as some have tried to do, when the order could not have been carried out, no matter where it came from, without his approval. During those frightful last two hours, Ismay had in fact spent a good deal of the time helping women and children into the boats before the temptation to survive proved too much for him. I wonder if his subsequent title, The Coward of the Titanic, which cast such a shadow over the remainder of his life, was quite merited.