Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (38 page)

Senator Smith would have his moment soon enough, and when he did it would be an unforgettable experience, but there was another homecoming besides the arrival of the
Carpathia
in New York, which would take place over and over again in the days to come, a homecoming of a kind that Senator Smith could know nothing of—and would have been helpless to affect even if he had. Even while the ship was docking at Pier 54, Cottam and Bride were still busy sending personal messages from survivors, and transmitting a list of passengers-and crew who were lost in the disaster. One of the great tragedies of the
Titanic’s
sinking that often gets lost is the heavy price paid by the crew—and ultimately by their families. So many statistics and so many numbers would be introduced and paraded before the world in the two great pending investigations that one more recitation of who was lost on the Titanic would begin to lose meaning. But within the lists of those missing were the names of the crewmen who lost their lives on board the White Star liner. This was the saddest homecoming of all: the certain news that husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, would not be coming home at all.

Out of 892 crewmen, only 214 survived. Three-quarters of the crew had gone down with the ship, in proportion a far heavier toll than any of the three passenger classes. But what those numbers didn’t tell—couldn’t tell—was the overwhelming burden of grief that they brought to a single city in England.

Southampton was a city devastated by the Titanic disaster. Four of every five crewmen aboard her had come from this proud old seafaring town, whose ties to ships and the sea dated back to Roman times. Entire streets were hung with black crepe, whole rows of houses bereaved. The crowd anxiously awaiting the news was comprised almost entirely of women: young women with bright-eyed babies in their arms; middle-aged women with hands red and worn from work; old women, wrinkled and gray. They gathered outside the White Star Line’s Southampton office on April 17. Names were posted as quickly as they came in, but all too often when one of the women would leave to go home, she would be sobbing, sometimes leaning on the arm of a friend, a daughter, or mother-in-law. Sometimes, saddest of all, she left alone. In the April 23 issue of the London Daily Mail an unsigned article described how the day closed:

The story went on to tell of the working-class streets in Southampton and the loss they had suffered. It told of Mrs. Allen, whose husband George was a trimmer on the Titanic; of a woman on Union Street with three small children; of Mrs. Barnes who lost a brother; of Mr. Saunders, whose two boys were firemen; of an old man on Cable Street who had four sons aboard the
Titanic;
of a young girl, nearly mad with grief, whose husband had been a steward—they had been married only a month; of Mrs. Gosling, who lost her son; and of Mrs. Preston, a widow, who lost her son as well. But the most heartbreaking may have been Mrs. May, whose husband Arthur and eldest son, Arthur, Jr., had both gone down with the ship. There were ten more children left behind, as well as Arthur Jr.’s young wife and six-week-old baby. The father had signed on board the Titanic because a leg injury had kept him from sailing on his usual ship, the Cunard Line’s Britannia. Arthur Jr. had only signed on because the coal strike had put him out of work and he had a family to support. Now Mrs. May had ten children to care for: the oldest was nineteen and brought home a few shillings a week—her youngest was six months old.

The coal strike had wreaked havoc on the shipping industry and put so many men out of work that when the opportunity had come to get a job—any job—on the Titanic, there were more men clamoring for them than there were berths, and those who got them counted themselves lucky. Often families were forced to pawn their furniture or what pitiful few valuables they possessed just to be able to buy food, and some landlords were already serving notices to quit to tenants who were in arrears on their rent. Now, for hundreds of families, what had seemed like a godsend when the man of the house had secured a position on the Titanic had suddenly become catastrophe. The Daily
Mail’s
unknown reporter, with a lack of hyperbole remarkable for the day, personalized the tragedy:

The grief would take a long time to fade, but fortunately it would only be a few weeks before a number of relief funds were organized to assist the families of the crewmen who perished on the Titanic. The assistance said much about the character of the British people as a whole, as well as how deeply the disaster touched the entire nation: contributions to the relief funds came from every part of the country and from every strata of society. The charities ultimately collected nearly £450,000 ($2,160,000) and one of the funds was still functioning, under special circumstances, as late as the 1960s.
⁹

But over the years, the enormous number of crewmen lost has somehow been ignored or glossed over, while the plight of the Third Class passengers and the disproportionate loss of life among them when compared to First or Second Class has been heavily emphasized. It is almost as if by some unspoken consent the crew has come to be regarded as expendable, while the steerage passengers are presented as a rare and valuable commodity that was squandered for the benefit of First and Second Class. Yet there was a dynamic that shaped the destinies of those crewmen that was as powerful as any that shaped the fate of the Third Class passengers, and it was every bit as telling about the values of late-Victorian and Edwardian society.

There were a handful of virtues nearly all the Victorians and Edwardians believed in passionately, regardless of class, and whether they were mythical or not they were compelling: respect, almost reverence, for the Crown; the rigidity of the social order; honor; piety; valor; and most of all, duty. Eighty-five years later these values may seem laughable among certain post-modern intellectuals, but at the turn of the century they defined, as absolutely as class determined a man’s or woman’s station in society, how those men and women would conduct themselves. Indeed the Edwardians’ devotion to duty was so deeply ingrained, and so complete, that only after the better part of an entire generation had been slaughtered on the Western Front during World War I would that devotion’s validity be challenged. In point of fact, it is only possible to understand how the Tommies were so willing to go over the top and march into the teeth of chattering Spandaus in 1916 by understanding why so many of the crew remained aboard the Titanic in 1912.

Yet it is also important to remember that three-fourths of the crew didn’t have to die. Though the officers and crew of the Titanic were legally obliged to do their best to see the passengers to safety, in practice the officers had little except the force of moral authority to prevent the crew from simply shouldering the passengers aside. The growing power of the Seamen’s Union was making it more and more difficult to dismiss crewmen for breaches of discipline. In the years before and after the Titanic disaster there have been plenty of examples of crewmen commandeering a sinking ship’s lifeboats and leaving the passengers to their fate, a situation still with us as recently as 1965, when the cruise ship
Yarmouth
Castle was engulfed in flames thirty-five miles west of the Bahamas, and the first lifeboat away contained her captain, her bosun, and assorted crew members, but not one passenger.
¹⁰

Yet, on the Titanic, aside from a handful of stewards, there isn’t a single recorded incident of any crewmen trying to force their way into any of the lifeboats. On the contrary, in two separate instances (Boats 2 and 6) crewmen who had gotten into the boats and were ordered out by an officer complied without protest. Having been raised from birth with the idea that duty came above any other consideration and that obedience and duty were synonymous, it would prove to be too powerful a habit to be broken in a few hours’ time.

It was devotion to duty that caused Fireman Cavell to go back to Boiler Room 4 when he thought he might have left too early and was letting his mates down; it kept Quartermaster Rowe on the bridge wing, firing off his rockets and working the Morse lamp, no matter how futile it seemed; it kept Trimmer Hemming on board working at loading and lowering the boats long after his assigned lifeboat had gone; it kept Phillips and Bride at the wireless even after Captain Smith released them; it kept Chief Engineer Bell and the rest of the engineering staff in the engine room even when they knew that it was far too late to reach the upper decks and get away; and it kept Wallace Hartley and the band playing until they were pitched into the sea.

It can’t just be ascribed to something as simple as courage; after all, someone once made the observation that, “A hero is simply a coward who got cornered.” Instead the inescapable conclusion is that it was a sense of responsibility, of obligation to other people. It was the knowledge that people were depending on them that caused so many of the crew to remain at their posts, even at the cost of their lives. “No greater love ...” is the most eloquent way it’s been put, and it might be too simplistic to ascribe the crewmen’s action to love for their fellow men and women, but it’s in there somewhere.

Eighty-five years after the disaster, in a different country, within a society that ethnically, morally, and politically is wholly removed from the one that produced the crew of the
Titanic,
it is difficult to believe—let alone understand how—they could knowingly, willingly sacrifice themselves. Yet the evidence is undisputable: aside from the stewardesses, whom nobody ever suggested should stay behind (only three were lost), and a score or so of opportunists who managed to sneak into a boat when one of the officers wasn’t looking, the only crewmen who left the Titanic in the lifeboats were the men ordered into them by the officers. Compulsion or fear of punishment cannot explain this—the British Merchant Marine was not the Royal Navy, with its ironbound traditions, strict regulations, and rigidly enforced discipline, always backed up by the threat of a defaulter’s board or a court-martial.

Instead, it was a matter of individual choice, of a man’s sense of responsibility to his shipmates and to the people entrusted to his care; it was the idea that the young, the weak, the infirm, and the unable needed protection from circumstances that they could not ward off for themselves; it was a belief that death itself was preferable to the disgrace of being perceived a coward. These may seem like archaic notions today, but the result was that every crewman who stayed behind made room for one more passenger, one more woman or child, in the lifeboats. That many of those boats left the ship only half full was not their fault.

Nor can it be suggested that the crew members were mindless, unimaginative drudges who went to their deaths because they couldn’t think of anything better to do. While centuries of class structure had certainly created in the working class an inherent belief that they were meant to toil at the direction of their “betters” (as the language of the day expressed it), they had never been taught, nor did the upper class ever think, that they were merely expendable. The crew was certainly not under any societal imperative, self imposed or otherwise, to sacrifice themselves simply for the passengers’ sake.

What the crew had was leadership and an example to action. There’s no reason to believe that Captain Smith’s last words to his crew were, as has sometimes been reported, “Be British, men, be British!”—as if being Anglo-Saxons had given them a particular penchant for dying well—but there can be no argument that the officers, the senior engineers, the pursers, and Thomas Andrews all provided examples for the crew to follow. And follow it they did. And perhaps this was meant to be their lasting homecoming, as real as it was intangible: the example they gave by following. Not every man or woman is meant to be a leader, but it is followers who define the difference between a leader and a lonely fanatic. If there was a lasting legacy from the crew of the Titanic, something of genuine meaning that would transcend cliché and platitude that they could leave for their children and grandchildren, it was their willingness to follow men who were doing what was right and noble and good, and in so doing become right and noble and good themselves.