A Night to Remember

Many of the arguments revolved around smoking. In 1912 tobacco was not yet the American cure-all for easing strain and tension, and the women in the boats were shocked. Miss Elizabeth Shutes begged two men sitting near her in No. 3 to stop smoking, but they kept on. To Mrs J. Stuart White it was a matter that still rankled at the investigation. When Senator Smith asked if she wished to mention anything bearing on the crew’s discipline, she exploded, ‘As we cut loose from the ship these stewards took out cigarettes and lighted them. On an occasion like that!’

In the more casual intimacy of boat 1, smoking was no problem. When Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon gave fireman Hendrickson a good cigar, neither of the women in the boat could very well object. Miss Francatelli was employed by Sir Cosmo’s wife, and Lady Duff Gordon was too sick to care. With her head down upon the oars and tackle, she vomited away the night.

But No. 1 had its squabbles too. Sir Cosmo and Mr C. E. Henry Stengel of Newark, New Jersey, didn’t get along very well. This might not have mattered in a crowded boat, but with only twelve people it was rather grating. According to Sir Cosmo, Mr Stengel kept shouting, ‘Boat ahoy!’ He also gave lookout Symons conflicting advice on where to steer. Nobody paid any attention, but he irritated Sir Cosmo so much that he finally asked Mr Stengel to keep quiet. Sir Cosmo was doubly annoyed when Mr Stengel later testified that ‘between Sir Cosmo and myself we decided which way to go’.

Meanwhile fireman Pusey was smouldering over Lady Duff Gordon’s remark to Miss Francatelli on the loss of her nightgown. At the time he told her, ‘Never mind, you have saved your lives; but we have lost our kit.’

Half an hour later, still smouldering, Pusey turned to Sir Cosmo, ‘I suppose you have lost everything?’

‘Of course.’

‘But you can get more?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we have lost our kit, and the company won’t give us any more. And what’s more, our pay stops from tonight.’

Sir Cosmo had had enough: ‘Very well, I will give you a fiver each to start a new kit.’

He did, too, but lived to regret it. The Duff Gordons’ near monopoly of boat 1, its failure to row back, gave the gift the look of a payoff that Sir Cosmo had a hard time living down.

Nor did subsequent events help his case. When Lady Duff Gordon reassembled the men in life jackets for a group picture after the rescue, they looked more and more like the Duff Gordons’ personal crew. Still later, when it came out that lookout Symons, nominally in charge of the boat, spent the day with Sir Cosmo’s lawyer just before he testified at the British inquiry, it looked as though Sir Cosmo even had his personal coxswain.

There’s no evidence that Sir Cosmo was guilty of more than extreme bad taste.

Drinking caused some trouble too. When No. 4 plucked a member of the crew out of the water, he had a bottle of brandy in his pocket. It was then thrown away because, as he explained it a few weeks later to the Press, ‘it was feared that if any hysterical person in the boat touched it, the result might be bad’. Miss Eustis has a somewhat different version: ‘One man was drunk and had a bottle of brandy in his pocket, which the quartermaster promptly threw overboard, and the drunken man was thrown into the bottom of the boat …’

There was a different kind of trouble in boat 6. Friction erupted from the moment Major Peuchen slid down the line to fill out the crew. Peuchen, used to giving orders, couldn’t resist trying to take command. Quartermaster Hitchens had other ideas. As they rowed away from the Titanic, Peuchen was pulling an oar and Hitchens was at the tiller, but within ten minutes Peuchen asked Hitchens to let a lady steer and join him in rowing. The Quartermaster answered that he was in charge and Peuchen’s job was to row and keep quiet.

Painfully the boat struggled away, with just Peuchen and lookout Fleet rowing. Under Mrs Brown’s leadership, most of the women gradually joined in, but Hitchens remained glued to the tiller, shouting at them to row harder or all would be sucked under when the Titanic sank.

Then women began shouting back, and as the boat splashed along in the dark, the night echoed with bitter repartee. Most of the time No. 6 was heading towards the elusive light on the horizon, and when it became clear they could never reach it, Hitchens announced that all was lost; they had neither water nor food nor compass nor charts; they were hundreds of miles from land and didn’t even know which way they were heading.

Major Peuchen had given up by now, but the women tore into him. Mrs Candee grimly showed him the North Star. Mrs Brown told him to shut up and row. Mrs Meyer jeered at his courage.