A Night to Remember

It was dry in the other boiler rooms further aft, but the scene was pretty much the same – men picking themselves up, calling back and forth, asking what had happened. It was hard to figure out. Until now the Titanic had been a picnic. Being a new ship on her maiden voyage, everything was clean. She was, as fireman George Kemish still recalls, ‘a good job … not what we were accustomed to in old ships, slogging our guts out and nearly roasted by the heat’.

All the firemen had to do was keep the furnaces full. No need to work the fires with slice bars, pricker bars and rakes. So on this Sunday night the men were taking it easy – sitting around on buckets and the trimmers’ iron wheelbarrows, gossiping, waiting for the twelve-to-four watch to come on.

Then came that thud … the grinding, tearing sound … the telegraphs ringing wildly … the watertight doors crashing down. Most of the men couldn’t imagine what it was – the story spread that the Titanic had gone aground just off the Banks of Newfoundland. Many of them still thought so, even after a trimmer came running down from above shouting, ‘Blimey! We’ve struck an iceberg!’

About ten miles away Third Officer Charles Victor Groves stood on the bridge of the Leyland liner Californian, bound from London to Boston. A plodding 6,000-tonner, she had room for forty-seven passengers, but none were being carried just now. On this Sunday night she had been stopped since 10.30 p.m., completely blocked by drifting ice.

At about 11.10 Groves noticed the lights of another ship, racing up from the east on the starboard side. As the newcomer rapidly overhauled the motionless Californian, a blaze of deck lights showed she was a large passenger liner. Around 11.30 he knocked on the Venetian door of the chart room and told Captain Stanley Lord about it. Lord suggested contacting the new arrival by Morse lamp, and Groves prepared to do this.

Then, at about 11.40, he saw the big ship suddenly stop and put out most of her lights. This didn’t surprise Groves very much. He had spent some time in the Far East trade, where they usually put deck lights out at midnight to encourage the passengers to turn in. It never occurred to him that perhaps the lights were still on … that they only seemed to go out because she was no longer broadside but had veered sharply to port.

2. ‘There’s Talk of an Iceberg, Ma’am’

Almost as if nothing had happened, lookout Fleet resumed his watch, Mrs Astor lay back in her bed, and Lieutenant Steffanson returned to his hot lemonade.

At the request of several passengers second-class smoking-room steward James Witter went off to investigate the jar. But two tables of card players hardly looked up. Normally the White Star Line allowed no card playing on Sunday, and tonight the passengers wanted to take full advantage of the chief steward’s unexpected largesse.

There was no one in the second-class lounge to send the librarian looking, so he continued sitting at his table, quietly counting the day’s loan slips.

Through the long white corridors that led to the staterooms came only the murmurs of people chatting in their cabins … the distant slam of some deck-pantry door … occasionally the click of unhurried high heels – all the usual sounds of a liner at night.

Everything seemed perfectly normal – yet not quite. In his cabin on B deck, seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer had just called good night to his father and mother, Mr and Mrs John B. Thayer of Philadelphia. The Thayers had connecting staterooms, an arrangement compatible with Mr Thayer’s position as Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Now, as young Jack stood buttoning his pyjama jacket, the steady hum of the breeze through his half-opened porthole suddenly stopped.

One deck below, Mr and Mrs Henry B. Harris sat in their cabin playing double canfield. Mr Harris, a Broadway producer, was dog-tired, and Mrs Harris had just broken her arm. There was little conversation as Mrs Harris idly watched her dresses sway on their hangers from the ship’s vibration. Suddenly she noticed they had stopped jiggling.

Another deck below, Lawrence Beesley, a young science master at Dulwich College, lay in his second-class bunk reading, pleasantly lulled by the dancing motion of the mattress. Suddenly the mattress was still.

The creaking woodwork, the distant rhythm of the engines, the steady rattle of the glass dome over the A deck foyer – all the familiar shipboard sounds vanished as the Titanic glided to a stop. Far more than any jolt, silence stirred the passengers.

Steward bells began ringing, but it was hard to learn anything. ‘Why have we stopped?’ Lawrence Beesley asked a passing steward. ‘I don’t know, sir,’ came a typical answer, ‘but I don’t suppose it’s much.’