Voyagers of the Titanic (22 page)

Authors: Richard Davenport-Hines

BOOK: Voyagers of the Titanic

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Though Thomas Andrews of Harland & Wolff tried to improve liner accommodation for stewards, standards remained low. On the
Titanic
’s E deck an eight-berth cabin was shared by the bathroom steward, saloon steward, lounge steward, deck steward, smoking-room steward, second bedroom steward, and linen keeper. Such quarters were known as “glory-holes.” “No place can be so utterly devoid of ‘glory,’ of comfort and privacy and so wretched a human habitation as the usual ship’s glory-hole,” Jessop recalled. They were foul, bug-infested places where “all that was low in men seemed to gain the upper hand.”
28

Those in the Stewards’ Department acutely felt the contrasts between their working lives and the passengers’ recreations. Occasionally their envy was poignant. One of the
Titanic
’s elevator operators was aged not more than sixteen, “a bright-eyed, handsome boy, with a love for the sea and the games on deck and the view over the ocean—and he did not get any of them,” a passenger recalled. “As he put me out of my lift and saw through the vestibule windows a game of deck quoits in progress, he said, in a wistful tone, ‘My! I wish I could go out there sometimes.’ ”
29
Jessop used to stroll on the
Titanic
’s deck for a breath of fresh air before retiring each night: “If the sun did fail to shine so brightly on the fourth day out, and if the little cold nip crept into the air as evening set in,” she wrote of the final Sunday, “it only served to emphasize the warmth and luxuriousness within.”
30

In addition to the internal telephones, there was—decisively for the denouement of the
Titanic
’s history—an external Marconi communication system. In 1851 a submarine cable had joined England and France, and a cable was laid under the Atlantic in 1865. In 1894, when he was twenty, Guglielmo Marconi devised an apparatus that sent messages on the radio waves generated by the discharge of electric sparks. The first merchant vessel to carry Marconi’s wireless apparatus was the
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosser
in 1900. Next his company built high-powered radio stations to transmit marine and international messages: the Atlantic was covered by his outposts at Poldhu in Cornwall, Clifden in Ireland, and along the east coast of the United States and Canada—notably at Cape Cod and at Cape Race on the eastern tip of Newfoundland. These transmission stations made it possible for transatlantic liners to maintain contact with the land. Passengers in midocean knew within two hours of Londoners when King Edward VII died in 1910. Each morning, on White Star ships, shortly before the breakfast bugle call was sounded, stewards distributed that morning’s copy of the
Atlantic Daily Bulletin
. This was an attractive magazine, the outer pages of which had been printed ashore before sailing: these included advertisements, social and theatrical gossip, and articles about cultural trends and scientific advances. The center sheets were printed daily and contained news summaries, Stock Exchange prices in New York, London, and Paris, and racing results—as well as the coming day’s menus.

The Edwardians coined three new words as a result of Marconi’s invention:
wireless, aerial,
and
Marconigram
. In 1909—the year he shared the Nobel Prize for physics—Marconi met Godfrey Isaacs, a suitably sparky character whose history as a speculator included a Welsh gold mine, a company that tried to mine zinc in Tipperary, a weekly paper specializing in society gossip and another that dealt in mining share tips, and the syndicate that introduced motor taxicabs to London. Marconi was impressed by Isaacs’s hustling and appointed him managing director of his company. Isaacs then applied to the British government for licenses to operate a network of wireless stations linking the British Empire across the world. In March 1912 the British government signed a preliminary agreement to pay £60,000 each for a chain of Marconi stations in England, Egypt, Africa, and Singapore. Marconi shares stood at £2 8s 9d each in August 1911, £6 15s 0d in March 1912, and peaked at £9 each in April. Godfrey Isaacs owned a large holding of American Marconi shares, some of which he offered to sell to his brothers, Harry and Rufus, before the London Stock Exchange started trading them on April 19. On April 17, the day that the
Titanic
’s sinking was confirmed in London newspapers with the aid of Marconigrams, Sir Rufus Isaacs (who was attorney general, with a seat in the cabinet) bought ten thousand shares at £2 each. His subsequent dealings in the shares were soon decried as corrupt and caused a sensational political scandal.

The jobbery of high finance was a world away from Marconi’s wireless station situated abaft the
Titanic
’s officers’ quarters on the boat deck. There were three cabins: the first contained the receiver, operating table, and control gear; the second, the transmission apparatus; and the third, bunks. Two Marconi men, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, worked in alternating six-hour stretches. John Phillips had been born in 1887 in Farncombe, Surrey. His parents ran a drapery. He became a telegraphist in the Godalming Post Office and after three years, in 1906, enrolled at the Marconi training school in Liverpool. There he spent six months learning about electricity, magnetism, telegraphy, theoretical and practical information on wireless apparatus, the regulations of the Radiotelegraphy Convention, and repair skills. Then he set to work on the
Lusitania
and the
Mauretania
. In 1908 he went to the Marconi station handling transatlantic wireless traffic at Clifden. He joined the White Star liner
Adriatic
in 1911 and was promoted to be senior wireless operator on the
Titanic
in 1912. Although aged only twenty-five, he was one of the world’s most experienced wireless operators. His set on the
Titanic
was one of the most powerful available. His deputy, Harold Bride, aged twenty-two, hailed from Bromley in Kent. Like Phillips, he had begun his career as a post office telegraphist and attended the Marconi training school.

Phillips and Bride were employed by Marconi, not White Star, and made their employer’s profits by sending passengers’ messages (costing 12½ shillings, or $3, for ten words and 9 pence, or 35 cents, per word, thereafter) rather than navigational messages between ships. They were deluged with work. Some were business messages, as millionaires tended their interests or dealt in shares. Many were social: pride at being aboard the world’s largest liner excited passengers into sending chirpy, trivial messages boasting of their whereabouts or making appointments to be met. The apparatus failed during Friday night and Saturday morning, causing a backlog of work that both men worked at full stretch to reduce. They were exhausted by Sunday. The Marconi Company stipulated that navigational messages should have priority over private messages, but on the final Sunday Phillips was haphazard in remitting navigational messages, including ice warnings, to the bridge.

It is doubtful, though, if anything would have convinced Smith to reduce speed in the ice zone. The captains of North Atlantic liners kept to allotted times regardless of weather conditions, partly because they were carrying mail on tight schedules. They ran at full speed through both storms and ice, and used wireless warnings as spurs to vigilance rather than reasons to abate their pace. No ship’s officer would dream of altering speed without his captain’s authority. They trusted to experience and believed that swift reactions would avert accidents. Collisions were not regarded as inevitably fatal. The liner
Kronprinz Wilhelm
had reached port without loss of life after ramming an iceberg and crumpling its bow in 1907.

At dusk on Friday, April 12, the
Titanic
received wireless notification from
La Touraine
of ice in the North Atlantic. On Sunday morning the
Titanic
received wireless warnings from the Cunarder
Caronia
and the Dutch liner
Noordam
of bergs, growlers, and field ice ahead. Early on Sunday afternoon came further cautions from the White Star liner
Baltic
and the German liner
Amerika
. At 5:45
P.M
., Captain Smith shifted his ship’s course to the southwest: the bridge officers believed that this was to avoid ice.
31
He did not reduce speed. It was not, then, a rule of good seamanship to do so. Captains and their officers—all trained under sail—assumed that the ship could outmaneuver any obstacle in its path. Accordingly, the ship steamed at relentless speed toward the lumbering, jagged, rock-hard shapes of ice. At seven thirty that evening a message was intercepted from the Leyland Line’s
Californian
reporting three large icebergs fifty miles ahead of the
Titanic
. About two hours later, at nine forty, the steamship
Mesaba
sent a wireless message warning of thick pack ice and large icebergs. Bride was trying to sleep when this message arrived, and Phillips was so busy sending passenger messages to Cape Race that he wedged the message under a paperweight on his desk. It never reached the bridge: the coordinates provided by the
Mesaba
would, if plotted on a chart, have shown that the
Titanic
was inside the dangerous ice zone.

The cumulative effect of these messages would have been salutary—if they had been received and read cumulatively. Instead, there was poor coordination between the radio room and the bridge. Messages were remitted at random to the bridge, where they were treated casually or ignored. Herbert Pitman, the third officer, who supervised the decks and work rosters, saw a chit marked “ice” in the chart room but only gave it a glance. Harold Lowe, the fifth officer, on his first Atlantic crossing, paid little attention because he knew the ship would not reach that position during his watch. Lightoller never noticed it. Joseph Boxhall, the fourth officer, who was responsible for charting the ship’s course and position and for displaying weather reports, remembered marking
La Touraine
’s message, but none of the others. None of the surviving officers remembered seeing the
Noordam,
Amerika
,
Californian,
or
Mesaba
messages. Smith acknowledged the
Noordam
message, but we do not know how he acted on it. He was handed the
Baltic
’s warning as he was going for luncheon, and meeting Ismay on the promenade deck, gave him the slip of paper. Ismay read it, folded it in his pocket, and later showed it to Marian Thayer and Emily Ryerson. When Smith next saw Ismay—in the early evening—he said that he wanted to post the message for his officers to read, and Ismay returned the paper; but Smith then went to dine with the Wideners, and there is no evidence that he gave the
Baltic
sighting to the bridge.

At ten in the evening there was a change of the officers’ watches, as Lightoller recalled years later. “The Senior Officer, coming on Watch, hunts up his man in the pitch darkness, and just yarns for a few minutes, whilst getting his eyesight after being in the light; when he can see all right he lets the other chap know, and officially ‘takes over’. Murdoch and I were old shipmates, and for a few minutes—as was our custom—we stood there looking ahead, and yarning over times and incidents past and present. We both remarked on the ship’s steadiness, absence of vibration, and how comfortably she was slipping along. Then we passed on to more serious subjects, such as the chances of sighting ice, reports of ice that had been sighted, and the positions.” The
Titanic
was making twenty-two knots: “it was pitch dark and dead cold,” recalled Lightoller, “not a cloud in the sky, and the sea like glass.”
32
In fifteen years he had never seen such conditions.

In clear weather, icebergs are visible by starlight half a mile ahead, but this was a moonless night. Wind and waves usually whip up white surf at the base of an iceberg, but on this night the sea was as flat as a doorstep. There was no swell, and therefore there were no breaking waves around any iceberg for the lookout, Frederick Fleet, to detect. Fleet was one of six lookouts on the ship, sharing his watch with Reginald Lee. If he seemed a morose and isolated individual, it was with good reason, for he never knew his father’s name and had been abandoned as a baby by his mother. Reared in a Dr. Barnado’s orphanage, which he left at the age of twelve for a training ship, he started work as a deck boy a few years later. By 1912 he was sufficiently trusted to be used as a special lookout. Up in the crow’s nest, late on the Sunday evening, Frederick Fleet hunched his shoulders against the cold.

Photos

The spick-and-span drawing hall at Harland & Wolff’s Belfast shipyard. It was here that the plans for the
Titanic
were drawn with immaculate precision.