Irish Aboard Titanic (2 page)

Another steerage passenger, Olaus Abelseth, also displayed blithe acceptance of a hierarchy of human life. He spoke of steerage being allowed onto the forward well deck, where further advance was prevented to higher decks where the lifeboats were. But he also told his audience of incredulous senators that steerage passengers still had plenty of opportunity to get up. It turned out he was talking about the danger-fraught route of climbing up the deck cranes and inching along their freezing metal arms to jump over railings and onto the forbidden territory of B deck.

Equally, it was unquestioningly assumed that the lifeboats were for passengers, and that the crew had no entitlement to them other than to serve as basic lifeboat crews. Indeed, there was resentment of sailors saved in some lifeboats, particularly among First-Class ladies who had left husbands behind. Somehow the crew were not playing the game by swimming to lifeboats or shinning down ropes. This distaste manifested itself in criticism of crewmembers for smoking, alleged but unlikely drunkenness, coarse talk and incompetence.

If some members of the crew looked after themselves and their own in a few instances, few today would blame them. They did it when they could and when officer backs were turned. One account in this book mentions the strange expression on stewards' faces as passengers were helped into boats, an intimation of sickly envy knowing what was in store for they themselves, but still following orders.

At officer level there was no question of taking a place in the boats. Devotion to duty was paramount, and with it the maintenance of discipline – so much so that officers were prepared to fire their guns. Meanwhile senior surgeon William O'Loughlin swung his lifebelt in his hand and joked to colleagues that he wouldn't be needing it – even as the foaming water roared up the wall of the forward well deck mere yards away. Second Officer Charles Lightoller, a survivor, who had straddled some lifeboats the better to help load them, bristled when later asked how he had left the ship. He replied to the effect: ‘I didn't leave the ship. The ship left me.'

The honourable way of leaving the ship was an important consideration for many. A judgemental society which could write off whole nations as cowards reserved the sanction of total ostracisation for those who failed, for whatever reason, to live up to such exacting standards. The managing director and chairman of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay, who left in collapsible C, was vilified as J. ‘Brute' Ismay and shunned by much of society for the rest of his days, many of them spent at a Connemara retreat.

Some saw it coming. Canadian yachtsman Arthur Peuchen, while still aboard the rescue ship
Carpathia
, asked Officer Lightoller for a testimonial that he had climbed down a rope to a boat when instructed to do so because of his experience in yachting. Yet numbers of men who came home alive suffered calumny and backbiting gossip that they had dressed like women to enter boats.

One Irishman, Edward Ryan, freely admitted posing as a woman for this purpose. Another, the aforementioned Daniel Buckley, had womanhood thrust upon him in the shape of a shawl placed over his head by a sympathetic lady as other men who had entered a boat were ordered out. Officer Lowe, our everyman for the attitudes of the day, told of discovering a man wearing a shawl when transferring passengers prior to going back for survivors. He ‘pitched him in' to the stand-by boat because he was ‘not worth being treated better'. And his nationality? ‘Italian.' Meanwhile, one Irish survivor, Nellie O'Dwyer, recounted hearing of five or six Chinese who had escaped by fixing their hair down their backs and wrapping blankets about them in order to be taken for women. She parroted the line that ‘the Italians were the worst'.

Even having been left behind, and in the hopeless effort of trying to swim to a lifeboat, one could be up against more than just the perishing cold, according to fireman Charles Judd, saved in collapsible A and quoted in the
Daily Herald
soon after arriving home in Plymouth. He was never called to an inquiry:

I learned from other members of the crew why more Third-Class passengers were not saved. It is because somebody among the officers started the cry ‘British first'. This, of course, did not discriminate against Americans, but it encouraged forcing back into the water Portuguese (even the women), Italians, and other foreigners to save people who cried for help in English.

‘A British life above all others', was the word passed round, said a seaman to me. There was no command as far as I know to get the steerage people up onto the decks ready for the boats. There were many babies on the deck during the last moments. One Portuguese woman had three. God knows where they all went to, but we're all pledged to tell all we know, no matter who suffers.

This book must examine the role of race because it is perforce the story of one ethnic group, the Irish, who made up part of the
Titanic
'
s multicultural mosaic. In many ways race was quite simply synonymous with status. ‘Foreigners' of all nationalities were regarded as a threat to the existing way – therefore they were not just excluded from decision-making but relegated to a subordinate position when it came to the evacuation, lest they jeopardise operations. Deep-seated attitudes and assumptions were at work.

John Edward Hart, a steward, admitted that the steerage passengers were falsely reassured and kept below decks until 1.15 a.m., when most of the boats were already gone. Clearly large numbers of crew had been delegated to this task – that of restraint. It has to be assumed that a policy of containment was decided upon at the most senior level, that of the bridge, since it was a truism that did not need to be enunciated that foreigners were hot-tempered, impervious to discipline and could be relied upon for nothing except panic. They would rock the boat.

So it was that for reasons of order, discipline, efficiency etc., most of the boats were loaded with those who were on the scene and queuing patiently, meaning First and Second Class. And there is absolutely no question that determined efforts were made to keep the steerage below decks and that at least some gates were locked to this end and hatches fastened.

Seaman John Poingdestre took a crazy risk, three-quarters of an hour after the collision, in returning to his quarters for a pair of boots. A Third-Class bulkhead burst on E deck and he was buffeted by a torrent of freezing water up to his waist. He climbed to the forward well deck and saw a hundred Third-Class men who had already evacuated, waiting with their baggage beside the only means of escape – a single ladder to Second Class. The same rules were in force at that time as always, he testified. They were not allowed up, and ‘no doubt' they would have been kept back if they attempted to rise. At this point Lord Mersey interrupted to ask: ‘Don't you know that all barriers were down?' But Poingdestre refused to be intimidated. All barriers were not down, he held firm. He never saw
any
that were down.

Was this all premeditated murder, or a necessary measure to achieve the most good in a limited time? The question is an open one, since not all doors were locked and evidence suggests a kind of controlled release of manageable numbers of steerage passengers was put into effect. Hart, the steward, led two small groups from Third Class to the boat deck and saw them into lifeboats. They were all women and children. The steerage men, as if by unspoken edict, could stand by to drown like most of their male betters above.

For those crowded nervously below, knowing the ship was sinking beneath them, having no sense of what was happening above, but naturally suspecting betrayal, there were few alternatives. They could strike out on their own through the belly of the ship looking for an escape route to ascend, try to be patient, or force their way past crew and gates. It is no wonder that large numbers of them simply broke the rules – rules that favoured the elite and middle class – and in the desperation and rage of doing so, ironically confirmed the poor opinion of them that had led to their containment in the first place.

In his book,
Titanic at Two,
Paul Quinn recounts Colonel Archibald Gracie's description, first published in 1913, of large numbers of steerage passengers suddenly emerging from the First-Class entrance to the Grand Staircase. ‘There arose before us from the decks below, a mass of humanity several lines deep, covering the boat deck facing us … there were women as well as men and they seemed to be steerage passengers who had just come up from the decks below.'

These people would have had no reason to fight their perilous way along different decks, some half-filled with water flowing from
above,
given the curious dynamics of the sinking, nor to surmount obstacles and meet the challenges of finding their way in a warren of avenues, if they had not been restrained from the normal means of progress. Quinn recreates their possible routes in a detailed and fascinating commentary, but it is enough to observe that the time at which they appeared on the boat deck was seconds before the ship lurched at the bows, flooding this mass of humanity in a giant wave and sweeping them all to their doom.

The Irish did enjoy one advantage: ‘At least this lot speak English.' They could also read notices and understand precisely what was being said to them, a colossal boon. The phrase about speaking English had been uttered by a steward at Queenstown as the
Titanic
was taking on board her rag-tag cohort of Irish emigrants four days earlier – and one can only imagine what remark might have been passed as the rejoinder.

What is undeniable is that most of the Irish survivors who feature in this book were saved in some of the last boats to leave. They entered only a few boats in substantial numbers – Nos 13 and 15 on the starboard side, 14 and 16 on the port – and it is no coincidence that the earliest that any of these four boats departed the
Titanic
seems to have been 1.27 a.m., more than one and three-quarter hours after the ship first began taking on water. In that time, ten other boats had gone. Thus, despite an apparently orchestrated attempt by White Star Line employees at both inquiries to flatly deny any restriction of access to the boat deck, such a policy must have been forcibly maintained.

Not that the British inquiry wanted to examine that issue. The Americans may have called three steerage passengers to testify, but the subsequent British examination did not call any. Third Class did win the right to representation, but when their counsel attempted to raise a newspaper report of an Irish witness describing crewmembers beating back passengers aboard
Titanic
while also ‘fastening doors and companionways' to prevent their progress, he was ruled out of order. The question was never considered, but swept under the carpet. On separate serious allegations against the crew by two Irish male survivors, Lord Mersey, the Wreck Commissioner, asked whether the penniless pair intended coming to England from America to state their claims! Asked if their evidence could be taken on commission, Lord Mersey replied: ‘I think we are very unlikely to do that.'

The British inquiry followed immediately after the American one concluded. Not that the Americans hadn't done a good job, although the London press, an unassailable bastion of empire in 1912, lambasted their transatlantic cousins for their nautical ignorance, not to mention the ‘disrespectful' treatment of important men. In consequence, J. Bruce Ismay, the White Star's managing director who left more than 1,000 paying customers behind on
Titanic,
was cheered to the echo by sympathisers at Liverpool when he walked down the
Adriatic's
gangplank on returning.

Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist (who contributed £4 to
The Irish Times'
disaster appeal fund), had earlier taken his own delight in British discomfiture at what was happening in Washington. In a letter of 23 April 1912, he wrote with acid irony: ‘I certainly think the USA Senate is a beauty! I wonder no one has yet drawn attention to these monstrous proceedings of a foreign parliament enquiring into the loss of a British ship on the high seas, issuing subpoenas and having “flashlight” court sittings. A fine body to elicit truth! No one to me seems to realise the enormous impertinence of these proceedings …'

The British inquiry duly fulfilled its underlying function, that of producing a report which whitewashed the shortcomings of the Board of Trade, the body responsible for the legal insufficiency of lifeboats, while also absolving the owners and operators of the White Star liner. The Attorney General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, KC, MP, had opined during the sittings that passengers had no useful light to shed on the facts into which the court was inquiring, and Lord Mersey agreed, delivering the truly extraordinary remark: ‘Survivors are not necessarily of the least value.' It was clear which survivors he was talking about – since the final report accepted the evidence of surviving officers who had a vested interest in minimising much of what had happened, or in resorting to outright mendacity.

An obvious example is the inquiry's finding that the
Titanic
did not break in two when she went down. She could not do so – after all, she was the very apex of British shipbuilding. Second Officer Lightoller said she slid gracefully beneath the waves ‘absolutely intact'. Since discovery of the wreck in 1985, the world has known the opposite. The public could also have known it in 1912, had Third-Class passengers been called to give evidence. The Irish, who did not need interpreters, were among the last to the boats. Some of them were on the ship to the very end and survived on rafts or were plucked from the water. Their tales herein are emphatic and agreed:
Titanic
snapped in two.

What else were the Irish telling the truth about? One possible area is that of shootings as the ship went down. The inquiries, of course, heard only about warning shots to quell panic; but some of the Irish relate very different stories of actual killings. The reader will have to make up his or her own mind, with the added caveat that this area is a minefield of suggestibility and possible embroidery and is subject to all the usual cautions about eyewitness accounts.