A Night to Remember

Mr and Mrs Lucien Smith and Mr and Mrs Sleeper Harper sat quietly chatting in the gym just off the boat deck. The mechanical horses were riderless now – the Astors had moved off somewhere else. And for once there was no one on the stationary bicycles, which the passengers liked to ride, pedalling red and blue arrows round a big white clock. But the room with its bright, blocked linoleum floor and the comfortable wicker chairs was far more pleasant than the boat deck. Certainly it was warmer, and there seemed no hurry.

In the nearly empty smoking-room on A deck, four men sat calmly around a table – Archie Butt, Clarence Moore, Frank Millet, and Arthur Ryerson seemed deliberately trying to avoid the noisy confusion of the boat deck.

Far below, greaser Thomas Ranger began turning off some forty-five electric fans used in the engine room, and he thought about the ones he had to repair tomorrow. Electrician Alfred White, working on the dynamos, brewed some coffee at his post.

At the very stern of the Titanic, Quartermaster George Thomas Rowe still paced his lonely watch. He had seen no one, heard nothing since the iceberg glided by nearly an hour ago. Suddenly he was amazed to see a lifeboat floating near the starboard side. He phoned the bridge – did they know there was a boat afloat? An incredulous voice asked who he was. Rowe explained, and the bridge then realized he had been overlooked. They told him to come to the bridge right away and bring some rockets with him. Rowe dropped down to a locker one deck below, picked up a tin box with twelve rockets inside, and clambered forward – the last man to learn what was going on.

Others knew all too well by now. Old Dr O’Loughlin whispered to stewardess Mary Sloan, ‘Child, things are very bad.’ Stewardess Annie Robinson stood near the mail room, watching the water rise on F deck. As she puzzled over a man’s Gladstone bag lying abandoned in the corridor, carpenter Hutchinson arrived with a lead line in his hand – he looked bewildered, distracted, wildly upset. A little later Miss Robinson bumped into Thomas Andrews on A deck. Andrews greeted her like a cross parent:

‘I thought I told you to put your lifebelt on!’

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but I thought it mean to wear it.’

‘Never mind that. Put it on; walk about; let the passengers see you.’

‘It looks rather mean.’

‘No, put it on … Well, if you value your life, put it on.’

Andrews understood people very well. A charming, dynamic man, he was everywhere, helping everyone. And people looked to him. He handled them differently, depending on what he thought of them. He told garrulous steward Johnson that everything would be all right. He told Mr and Mrs Albert Dick, his casual dinner companions, ‘She is torn to bits below, but she will not sink if her after bulkheads hold.’ He told competent stewardess Mary Sloan, ‘It is very serious, but keep the bad news quiet, for fear of panic.’ He told John B. Thayer, whom he trusted implicitly, that he didn’t give the ship ‘much over an hour to live’.

Some of the crew didn’t need to be told. About 12.45, able seaman John Poingdestre left the boat deck to get his rubber boots. He found them in the forecastle on E deck forward, and was just starting up again when the wooden wall between his quarters and some third-class space to starboard suddenly gave way. The sea surged in, and he fought his way out through water up to his waist.

Further aft, dining-saloon steward Ray went to his quarters on E deck to get a warmer overcoat. Coming back up, he went forward on ‘Scotland Road’ towards the main staircase. The jostling firemen and third-class passengers were gone now. All was quiet along the broad working alleyway, except for water sloshing along the corridor from somewhere forward.

Still further aft, assistant second steward Joseph Thomas Wheat dropped down to pick up some valuables from his room on F deck, port side. It was right next to the Turkish bath, a gloriously garish set of rooms that formed a sort of bridge between the Victorian and Rudolph Valentino eras of interior decoration. The mosaic floor, the blue-green tiled walls, the gilded beams in the dull red ceiling, the stanchions encased in carved teak – all were still perfectly dry.

But when Wheat walked a few yards down the corridor and started back up the stairs, he saw a strange sight: a thin stream of water was flowing down the stairs from E deck above. It was only a quarter-inch deep – just about covered the heel of his shoe – as he splashed up the steps. When he reached E deck, he saw it was coming from the starboard side forward.

He guessed what had happened: water forward on F deck, blocked by the watertight compartment door, had risen to E deck, where there was no door, and now was slopping over into the next compartment aft.