Titanic: A Night to Remember

 

Just one-third of the Titanic's 2,200 passengers and crew survived the night of 14 April 1912. A new Folio edition of Walter Lord's classic takes us back to those fateful events.

 

At 11.40 p.m. on the night of 14 April 1912, the ocean liner RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. Everyone thinks they know what happened next. But you don’t – you really don’t – until you read Walter Lord’s classic A Night to Remember. ‘Some mishap in the kitchen,’ thinks First Class passenger Madeleine Astor, as the ship judders to a halt. The First Class dining car stewards notice: ‘a faint grinding jar – not much, but enough to break the conversation and rattle the silver.’ Railway magnate Charles Hays is not worried, however: ‘You cannot sink this boat,’ he assures a worried fellow passenger, as they watch steerage passengers playing soccer with the ice which has sheared off the berg and on to the deck.

A Titanic-obsessed writer with an unerring eye for the telling detail, Lord spent hundreds of hours interviewing survivors. The result: what historian Dominic Sandbrook, who has written the introduction to Folio’s new edition of the book, calls ‘less a history book than a classic of long-form journalism, carefully piling up human details, mercilessly playing with our emotions, revelling in the black ironies of its characters’ fates’. Here are just a few of their stories.

 

© Henry Aldridge & Son Ltd/Mary Evans

Captain Edward J. Smith

 

'Less a history book than a classic of long-form journalism... revelling in the black ironies of its characters' fates.'

Dominic Sandbrook

 

 

Jack Thayer: Seventeen-year-old son of prominent businessman John Thayer and his wife, Marian. 

It’s around 11.50 p.m., and Jack Thayer has just said good night to his parents, Marian and John, Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. As he stands in his stateroom on B Deck, adjoining his parents’, buttoning his pyjama jacket, he realises that there is no longer a breeze through his half-open porthole. The ship has stopped. He throws an overcoat over his pyjamas and takes off, calling to his parents that he is ‘going out to see the fun’. As the night wears on, Jack loses his parents in the crowd on A Deck but finds an acquaintance, Milton Long. After the last lifeboat has gone, a curious calm comes over the hundreds milling around on deck. Jack and Milton, on the starboard side, try to work out how fast the boat is sinking. They exchange messages for each other’s families. They debate whether to jump. Sometimes, they fall silent. Jack thinks of all the good times he has had and of all the things he will never enjoy again. He thinks of his father, mother, sisters and brothers. He feels far away, as though he is looking on from some distant place. Slowly, the ship’s bow dips, generating a huge wave.  Jack sees the wave: he and Milton realise the time has come to swim for their lives. They shake hands: they will never meet again. Thayer sits on the rail and jumps out as far as he can into the freezing water. The Titanic’s great funnel falls, and the resulting wave pushes him up against the keel of overturned collapsible Lifeboat B. He scrambles on. Around him, hundreds of desperate swimmers thrash and wail in the freezing ocean. It reminds him of the high-pitched hum of locusts on a midsummer night in the woods, back home in Pennsylvania.

 

MGPhoto 76/Alamy.

Titanic departing Southampton, April 10, 1912. 

 

Kathy Gilnah: Fifteen-year-old steerage passenger travelling from Ireland to see her sister in New York

The party in steerage is in full swing as a rat scurries across the room: the boys chase it and the girls squeal with excitement. Kathy Gilnagh is among them: not yet 16, she is relishing the excitement of following her sister Molly from Ireland to America. But later, around midnight, there is a knock at her cabin door. A young man who caught her eye earlier, playing the bagpipes on deck, says: ‘Get up – something is wrong with the ship.’ Along with fellow Irishwomen Kate Mullins and Kate Murphy, Kathy tries to get up on deck, but finds her way blocked: a crew member is manning one of the barriers that separate Third Class from Second Class and is refusing to budge. Suddenly, another steerage passenger, Jim Farrell, barges up. ‘Great God, man!’ he roars. ‘Open the gate and let the girls through!’ To their astonishment, the crew member complies. But in the crowd and the confusion, Kathy takes a wrong turn and loses her friends, and finds herself alone on the Second Class promenade, with no idea how to reach the boats. The deck is deserted, except for a single man staring moodily into the night. He lets her stand on his shoulders, and she manages to climb to the next deck up. When she finally reaches the boat deck, Lifeboat No.16 is just starting to be lowered. A man warns her off – there is no more room. ‘But I want to go with my sister!’ Kathy cries. Her sister, of course, is not on the boat – but it seems like a good way to move the man. And it works. ‘All right, get in,’ he sighs, and she slips into the boat as it dropped to the sea. When she arrives in New York on the Carpathia, the liner carrying other Titanic survivors, she finds her distraught sister Molly planning for her funeral.

 

Public domain

Stateroom B58.

Emory Kristof/National Geographic

The steering motor from the bridge, 1985.

 

The Countess of Rothes: British philanthropist who had upgraded to one of the Titanic's staterooms.

At just before 1 a.m., The Countess of Rothes and her cousin Gladys Cherry are having difficulty putting on their lifebelts, and a passing gentleman pauses to help them. He tops off the courtesy by handing them some raisins to eat. Out in the C Deck foyer, Purser Herbert McElroy is urging everyone to stop standing around. As the Countess passes, he calls, ‘Hurry, little lady, there is not much time. I’m glad you didn’t ask me for your jewels as some ladies have.’ As Lifeboat No. 8 draws away, the able seaman in charge, Tom Jones, puts the Countess in charge of the tiller. ‘When I saw the way she was carrying herself and heard the quiet, determined way she spoke to the others, I knew she was more of a man than any we had on board,’ he will later tell the press. A fellow passenger, 17-year-old Signora de Satode Penasco, screams constantly for her husband Victor. The Countess turns the tiller over to Cherry and starts to row beside the Signora, trying to cheer her up. Hours later, alone on the freezing sea, Able Seaman Jones spots the Carpathia coming to the Titanic’s aid. He turns to the Countess of Rothes, rowing next to him, and whispered, ‘Can you see any lights? Look on the next wave we top, but don’t say anything in case I am wrong.’ There are indeed lights: the women start to sing the Philip Bliss hymn, ‘Pull for the Shore’: Safe in the lifeboat, sailor, cling to self no more/Leave the poor old stranded wreck and pull for the shore. A year after the disaster, the Countess is dining out with friends. Suddenly, a terrible feeling of cold and intense horror comes over her. For an instant, she can’t imagine why. Then she realises: the orchestra is playing music from Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman, the last piece of music that the Titanic’s band played on 15 April.

 

Photograph by Louis Mansfield Ogden, April 15, 1912. (National Archives at New York, NARA) 

Lifeboat Collapsible D.