Key Figures Aboard RMS Titanic: Superstars & Scapegoats

By Anthony Nicholas

Titanic. The Marilyn Monroe of ocean liners. A sleek, sultry beauty, taken out way before her time. A kind of 21st century Flying Dutchman, with interiors by Cesar Ritz, still striving to achieve the waters of a port she can never reach. Fuelled by a subtle mixture of horror, fascination and sheer, fatal glamour, she surges heedlessly across the still, starlit calm of our collective subconscious, hell bent on achieving her chilling, near midnight rendezvous with her killer. Titanic is a brilliantly lit stage, carrying her cast of exotic, terminally endangered extras toward an abyss at once both unfathomable and inconceivable. Here’s where any similarity with any other tome about the Titanic ends. For the first time ever, a succession of key characters and groups of individuals come to the fore. Centre stage, over seventeen chapters, we meet the men whose decisions, actions and omissions combined like some slow burning powder trail to trigger a final, cataclysmic conclusion; the foundering, in mid Atlantic, of the biggest moving object ever seen on the face of the planet. One by one, a series of individuals take a bow. Seemingly omnipotent owners and hugely experienced ship’s officers. Engineers and designers. Would be rescuers and embattled wireless operators. We meet them as individuals, not supermen. Their histories, backgrounds and life experiences are assessed for the first time ever, putting their actions on the night that Titanic sank into a context, a light as stark as that of the distress rockets, arcing into the sky…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399086011

Book preview

Prelude

Spartans and Titans

A Convergence of the Twain

In 480

BC

, according to Greek mythology and legend, a force of some 300 Spartan troops mounted a suicidal defence of the pass at Thermopylae against the Persian forces of Xerxes the Great. According to different accounts, the army of the Persian king numbered from around 100,000 men to a force half as strong again.

The Spartans, under their commander, Leonidas, held the pass for three full days, before being killed to a man. Their brave, much touted stand was a desperate attempt to buy time for the main bulk of the Greek forces to retreat and subsequently regroup. Those Spartans knew that they would die, yet they stood their ground.

The story of the Spartans was already a worldwide legend long before James Travis, Jim Bowie, and David Crockett ever strode the battered, tumbling ramparts at the Alamo, several centuries later. It has been immortalised in books, poems, and, of course, in numerous films. In the annals of history, it has become the go-to story of a small, selfless band of men, laying down their lives so that others might live, without thought for their own safety.

One night in April 1912, another small band of brave, selfless men made another stand, on another field of battle, against an even more overwhelming and implacable foe.

They fought, alone and without any prospect of help, on a slowly flooding battlefield that history recalls as the RMS Titanic. Fatally wounded by an iceberg – one of the truly lethal ‘great whites’ of the North Atlantic – her innards would be relentlessly devoured by a tidal wave of incoming seawater, one every bit as rapacious and inexorable as the hordes of Xerxes himself.

Against this, a small band of men stood their ground in an attempt to buy as much time as possible for the masses that huddled on the Boat Deck on that silent scream of a night. Able seamen, bandsmen, and engineers. Firemen and ship’s officers. Passenger stewards and wireless operators.

To a man, they embarked on a final stand every bit as hopeless, and as thankless, as those Spartans of old. From the outset, the fate of Titanic was already as predetermined as the outcome at Thermopylae.

The majority of those brave, selfless men would die, too. Mostly, the true nature of their stories, their sacrifice, has remained in the long shadow of the stage on which they fought the irresistible forces of nature. The sinking of this unthinkable state-of-the-art Edwardian superliner would erupt with the impact of a hydrogen bomb in a world long since wedded to the idea that enough applied wealth, coupled to continual advances in technology, could achieve anything. The scale of her immolation was so spectacular, so mind numbing and unbelievable, that many of the very real heroes of that night have been far too often simply lost to view.

They deserve better. For these men were not soldiers. They were ordinary men with hopes, fears, families, and yes, flaws. Confronted with the unthinkable, they contemplated the abyss, and refused to yield to the irresistible.

This, then, is their tale. Here is the Titanic as a backdrop, rather than as the principal player. Her floodlit, sagging decks and brightly lit engine rooms are mere spotlights that pick out the heroism of men, twentieth-century Spartans on the ocean, who took their lonely, hopeless stand, and fought selflessly to the end, so that others might live.

An air of Greek tragedy runs like some slow-burning powder trail through this entire story. In Hellenic mythology of old, the Titans were a race of all-powerful, hubristic gods, set high above any normal laws of right and wrong.

Eventually, the Titans would be defeated by another race of Greek deities called the Olympians. They slew the proud, imperious Titans and cast them down into the waters of the Aegean. Legend says that their petrified forms now make up the twelve islands of the Dodecanese.

Olympians. Titans. Names that would echo down over the centuries...

The first modern Olympic Games of the new age were staged in Athens in 1896. That was the same year that one David Banks made an interesting suggestion to the directors of the White Star Line. Along with the rival Cunard Line, White Star was the then British-owned front runner on the burgeoning transatlantic steamship trade.

Banks was then the American consul at the Court of Siam, the country that we now know as Thailand. He suggested a pair of names to the White Star Line that they might consider using in the future. Each contained the -ic suffix that had been applied to every White Star liner since the company’s first ship, the Oceanic, in 1871.

With the renaissance of the games that same year, the name of Olympic was an obvious no-brainer. And Banks, obviously a man with a keen awareness of ancient history, suggested an entirely apt, complimentary name for the second ship: Titanic.

White Star duly took his suggestions on board. Those two names, loaded with such huge historical significance, would be held back for a very special occasion.

When White Star built the second, ground-breaking Oceanic in 1899, it was also originally intended to build a twin sister to her. That ship was slated to be named as the Olympic. In the event, the order for that second ship was never placed.

Then, in 1907, the White Star Line decided to create a brace of unthinkable sister ships, half as large again as anything even being contemplated at that time. Over dinner one night at his Belgravia mansion, Lord Pirrie, the chairman of the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast and J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, let their collective imaginations run riot. Ismay and Pirrie had much more than merely fine food to chew over on that warm summer night.

The rival Cunard Line was about to sweep the board on the Atlantic crossing with a pair of huge new ocean liners; the Clyde-built Lusitania and her near sister, the Tyne-built Mauretania.

These two stunning ships were confidently expected by everybody – Ismay and Pirrie included – to become both the largest and the fastest liners in existence. Together, the two ships constituted a truly breathtaking maritime coup.

This was a state of affairs that was patently unacceptable to either Ismay or Pirrie. Bankrolled by the almost limitless capital of J. Pierpont Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine, and fuelled by a ruthless determination that would not allow them to play second fiddle to anybody, they sat down over their after-dinner brandy and cigars, and began to sketch in the parameters of a giant, triple-pronged response.

Like Olympian gods of old, these two immensely powerful and influential men threw all pretence at mediocrity aside, and drew a bead on attaining the truly spectacular. As they talked, and then sketched, an age-old hubristic dream as archaic as Daedalus and Icarus started to surface.

Even as they savoured both their brandies and their own unfettered sense of bravado, these two men were well aware that there was no shipyard in the world currently capable of realising such a project. There was no port capable of allowing any ships on this scale to dock. There was no dry dock anywhere in the world capable of servicing them.

But to men as ambitious and forward-thinking as Lord Pirrie and Bruce Ismay, these were mere details. What mattered was the attainment of the prize; the realisation of the dream. After all, shipyards could be expanded, ripped up, and rebuilt. And they would be.

Docks, too, could be enlarged. Rivers could be dredged. New railway tracks and marshalling yards could be created. New, expansive dry docks could be carved, shaped, and moulded from the start. Ambition and vision; that was all that was truly required.

And those empirical, world-beating wonder ships would need to flaunt names that would do true justice to their swaggering sense of opulence and omnipotence. And flaunt them they certainly would. The two sisters would be christened Olympic and Titanic.

Olympians. Titans. The ageless, unheeding hubris of slain, ancient gods, dragged up from the bottom of the Aegean for air. Married in a ghastly shotgun wedding to the heroism of latter-day Spartans; a heroism shaped and moulded in a grand, gilded crucible, foundering helplessly one April night on a calm, starlit sea. A new legend, waiting to be written...

Chapter 1

Out of Sight, Out of Hope

The Battle Below Decks

Joseph Bell knew almost immediately that something was very badly wrong. The 51-year-old Chief Engineer aboard RMS Titanic was on duty in the ship’s cavernous engine room on that fateful evening of Sunday, 14 April 1912, just as he had been for much of the first five days of the liner’s maiden crossing from Southampton to New York.

Until that moment, everything had proceeded with an almost dreamlike sense of calm. The Titanic was handling quite superbly; she was brand-new, sparkling clean, and in beautiful physical condition. Under Bell’s stewardship, the ship had romped gamely across a glass-calm ocean for almost five full days. Each day, the propeller revolutions increased slowly but surely, as Captain Smith gradually put the pedal to the metal. The ship’s progress was calm, measured, and majestic. On board, thoughts among both passengers and crew alike were beginning to turn to the gala reception they could expect to receive in New York. No doubt, many of the crew were looking forward to spending time ashore during the four-day turnaround in Manhattan, before beginning the return crossing to Southampton on Saturday, 20 April 1912.

All of this was suddenly interrupted by an abrupt ‘full astern’ order that came screaming down from the ship’s bridge. It was not long before midnight on the evening of Sunday, 14 April. Such an order could mean only one thing; the Titanic was scrambling desperately to avoid some potentially dangerous obstacle that was within immediate proximity to the ship.

It was too late. At 2340 that evening, the starboard bow of the Titanic glanced against a half-submerged iceberg that had been lying more or less directly in her path. The steel plates of her hull crumpled like so much rice paper as the berg punched and stabbed at the ship like some angry, jabbing fist. Rivet heads were sheared off by the score, opening up scores of small gaps between the hull plates.

A torrent of icy seawater surged into the shattered hull, and it began to steadily devour her innards. Within twenty minutes, some 14ft of frigid water was sloshing around the fatally ruptured hull. It could not be stopped. From the bridge, another order came ringing down to the engine room: ‘All stop...’

A round of hurried damage inspections uncovered a nightmare scenario; one conveyed by Captain Edward Smith to Joseph Bell in a hushed, stunned tone: the Titanic was going to sink. She had an hour or so to live, perhaps two at the most. All that could be done was to try to hold back the steadily encroaching water, in order to save as many of the 2,207 passengers and crew as possible.

This awful, immutable truth immediately put Bell and his team of sixteen engineer officers in roughly the same position as the infamous, ill-fated Spartan ‘300’ who faced an overwhelmingly superior Persian foe at the battle of Thermopylae.

They, too, were tasked with facing down enormous, ultimately unbeatable odds, in a suicidal bid to buy as much time as humanly possible for their fellow passengers and crew. With awful certainty, they would have known that not one of them was likely to survive that night.

Both Smith and Bell were confronted, and ultimately confounded, by a set of unalterable mathematical parameters that effectively boxed them in as completely as the walls of a condemned cell. The Titanic was almost 400 miles from the nearest land. She would sink in less than two hours. The nearest responsive rescue ship was something like four hours’ steaming time away. There were 2,207 passengers and crew on board the sinking liner, and a total number of places in the lifeboats for just 1,178 of those.

In sum, an absolute minimum of just over 1,000 people faced imminent, terrifying immersion in water that was several degrees below freezing that night, without any hope of salvation. In this nightmare scenario, Smith and Bell identified a pair of obvious, overwhelming priorities. Firstly, to buy as much time as possible for the sinking ship. Secondly, they needed to prevent any resultant mass panic, insofar as that could be done.

Both of these responsibilities now descended on Bell and his men like a brace of inbound asteroids, hurtling towards the stratosphere. To buy time for the ship, Bell and his fellow engineers rigged the ship’s pumps, setting them into frantic motion. Within minutes, thousands of gallons of icy green seawater were being ejected from the shattered hull, back into the freezing night air. But it was nowhere near enough. As a plan it bought time, but it could not stem the awful, encroaching tide.

Joseph Bell thus became, by default, a kind of short-lived, twentieth-century version of King Canute, fighting in vain to reverse the inevitable. From that first, fatal kiss of the iceberg, the odds were hopelessly stacked against him and his men.

The Titanic had sixteen watertight compartments. In theory, these divided the ship into a series of lateral strong boxes, mostly below the waterline. Any two of these could be flooded without seriously endangering the ship. In fact, even the first four compartments could be opened to the sea without compromising that same integrity.

But the iceberg had acted like a neatly inserted assassin’s blade. It had opened not only the first five watertight compartments, but also part of the sixth. Thomas Andrews, the man largely responsible for building the Titanic, laid it out bare to Captain Smith after a hurried tour of inspection. The ship was going to sink. It was a mathematical certainty. All that could be done was to try to buy as much time as humanly possible.

By this time, scores of desperately toiling firemen were working frantically to shut down the boilers, in order to prevent a possible catastrophic explosion. As ice-cold seawater swirled greedily at their ankles and around their boiler suits, they worked with manic intensity, in a tilting conga line of steel chambers full of still roaring flames and piles of suddenly redundant coal. Smothered in clouds of hissing, rapidly rising steam, those boiler rooms must have seemed like the antechamber to hell itself. Far below decks, these men were battling to regain control of what amounted to a huge, slowly sinking sauna.

With the boilers being gradually snuffed out, Bell and his engineers also had to contend with the knowledge that, sooner or later, the ship’s power supply would fail completely as a result. Nothing was more likely to ignite a panic on the sloping decks of the Titanic than their sudden, terrifying plunge into total darkness.

If any of the people huddled on those same decks were to be saved at all, then the wireless link with the outside world needed to be maintained at all costs. The ability to summon one, or more, potential rescue ships was absolutely paramount in those last, desperate hours. That knowledge formed the second key part of Bell’s battle plan, formulated in his slowly tilting war room far below decks, and farther still from any remote chance of salvation.

So the lights had to be kept on for as long as possible. Concurrent with that, power to the wireless room on the upper deck had to be kept flowing, too. These were the twin horns of the awful dilemma that Joseph Bell and his sweating, toiling band of brothers now found themselves hoist upon. As the available electric power began to slowly splutter and fail, Bell and his men swung into action, ruthlessly purging a whole raft of terminally redundant shipboard secondary services that ran right throughout the length of the doomed, sagging liner.

Facilities such as the Turkish baths, the swimming pool, and the squash court were shut down. The steady hum of a phalanx of refrigerators was stilled for good. Fans all over the ship stopped as abruptly as the Titanic’s trio of gigantic propellers. The electric cargo cranes, the steam winches, and later even the elevators all froze and died.

Even the electric power supply to the ship’s lifeboat davits was axed. This meant that each of the huge five-ton lifeboats had to be lowered by hand; a back-breaking task under any circumstances. As the Titanic flooded and failed, every decision made by Bell and his men represented an agonising trade-off. The acute mental stress that those men laboured under defies any adequate contemporary level of comprehension.

To facilitate the movement of both equipment and men down below, all of the watertight doors aft of the immediate area of the collision were re-opened. One by one, they could be closed again by hand when necessary. As the tide of cold green seawater crept through the Titanic and steadily devoured her vitals, those doors cranked sluggishly down again, one by one, like so many lethargic guillotine blades. This time, they would stay in place forever.

None of us today can even begin to imagine what that small, dedicated cadre of incredible, selfless men went through in those last terrible hours. The sounds that formed the normal backdrop to their daily working routine – the throb of the engines, and the steady humming of the propeller shafts as they whirred smoothly in their immaculate steel casings – had by now given way to a stark, almost deathly silence.

Most likely, the only sound would have been the agonised groaning of the watertight bulkheads, as they fought in vain to resist the growing weight of sea water that battered at them like wooden castle gates of old. And, just like castle gates, the bulkheads would inevitably succumb. And every last man knew it, too.

Perhaps the luckiest ones were those who could simply lose themselves in a job of work. Even the religious amongst them were deprived of the comfort of any priest, so far down below. At least they were spared the sight of the pathetic armada of mostly half-filled lifeboats, tottering in random jerks down the floodlit flanks of the sinking ship. Still, they would have been all too aware of what was happening ‘topside’ all the same. Theirs was the sure, almost certain knowledge that there was next to no chance of them reaching that same topside, and even less chance of finding a seat in a boat if they did.

Eventually, the Titanic would lose her lonely, one-sided battle with the sea. Joseph Bell and his gallant, grafting band of sixteen fellow Spartans were lost. Though one survivor’s account claims to have seen at least some of them up on deck in the last few moments, it is most likely that they died at their posts, far down below in the switchboard room, the electric engine room, or the main turbine room.

Unlike the highly visible heroics of deck officers such as Lightoller, Moody, Murdoch, and Harold Lowe, and those incredible, much respected musicians on board, Joseph Bell and his men toiled, suffered, and ultimately died out of sight of the increasingly frightened masses that they strove so selflessly to try and save. And yet, as singular acts of selfless courage go, the saga of Joseph Bell and his embattled, ultimately entombed band of brothers has become a vast, almost deathless legend; one on the scale of the ship that they fought so valiantly to save on that cold starlit night in April