by Senan Molony
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 represen
tation, 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.
Yet the Irish stories contained in these pages are not just important for the illumination they throw on the many mysteries still surrounding those last hours of the largest steamer in the world. They are also of importance in themselves, because the Titanic was an ocean-going time capsule. Here the Irish nation of the time presents itself – in all its outlooks, attitudes and values.
The survivors’ letters, and newspaper reports about the lost fill these pages with the sights and sounds of early last century, while placing us on the deck of the Titanic. Such touchstones as religion, kindred, politics and emigration are all dwelt upon, and come into sharper focus from these contemporaneous outpourings. And 1912 was an important year for Ireland. Home Rule was a burning issue and the Bill to give it effect was introduced the same week Titanic sank. By the time of the British inquiry into the loss, the Bill had just been passed.
On 9 May 1912, trimmer George Cavell told how Third-Class men stood back as his packed No. 15 lifeboat began its descent with women and children. Counsel Sir John Simon asked whether the women in his boat were foreigners and was told they were Irish. He brought forth laughter in court when he observed: ‘A nice question, whether they were foreigners or not.’ The Irish boarding the Titanic were taking their opinions overseas, they were part of an emigration stream draining Ireland of much of her lifeblood while simultaneously transfusing America and permanently colouring much of political discourse there.
Nearly 30,000 Irish emigrated west in 1912, with more than two-thirds going to the United States and another 6,000 to Canada. It was an extraordinary human traffic that had been going on since the famine, sixty-five years before. The Titanic passenger list shows who those emigrants were in 1912: overwhelmingly young, single men and women, Roman Catholic, from labouring or farm backgrounds. They were aged in their early twenties or late teens, and they largely did not ever expect to return home. The merriment and music of ‘American wakes’ could not hide the heartache of impending separation. Older children were parting from their younger siblings (the census returns of 1901 and 1911 are startling in showing how populous Irish families could be) and the hurt remained behind. They left on sidecars, on horseback or on foot, heading to the local train station. They had saved for years to be able to afford to make the journey and they brought pitifully little with them in clothes, bags and wealth. Many had only been able to go because a family member already in the United States had sent back enough money, or a prepaid ticket, to ‘bring the next one out’.
An enormous industry had grown up on the back of Irish emigration. Any town of any consequence had its own shipping agent or sub-agent. One such outlet, O’Connor’s of Ennistymon, sold tickets, steamer trunks and religious statuary. The operators reported that almost every intending emigrant also bought some religious item to accompany them on their journey – and Irish bodies taken from the sea had Rosary beads or protective scapulars. Some brought relics. Mary McGovern had clay from a saint’s grave, promising protection against death by fire or drowning. She was saved. Meanwhile the little girl pictured in the front door of O’Connor’s herself became an emigrant and moved to Britain, where she served as a nun.
Shipping lines made a fortune from the one-way tide. So too did others. One letter home, posted in Queenstown by a man who was lost, complained about the high cost of his party’s overnight accommodation. In Queenstown alone no fewer than twenty establishments described themselves as emigrant lodging houses in 1912, with a further unspecified fourteen boarding homes and one or two hotels. All this in a town of a few thousand, making it a kind of Klondyke in reverse.
Just one week before the Titanic sailed, the local correspondent of The Cork Examiner wrote:
Standing on the highway of Queenstown (in) those days, a stranger would think it a remarkable spectacle to see thousands of country people pouring into the town carrying their belongings. But to us the spectacle is no new one, as it has been repeated year after year for decades. Time was when 20,000 people poured through the gateway of Queenstown in the first three months of the year. Formerly, by Queenstown, 100,000 would leave in one year.
Parents and every member of the family all went together. They carried their humble bedding and food vessels with them. Nowadays they come in broadcloth and minus bedding and utensils. No longer do we see parents joined up with their youngsters in the exodus. America is a closed door now, save to vigorous young people, without blemish and subject to triple medical examinations before getting passports. One of the saddest fe
atures contributing to the blood-letting of Ireland is the prepaid ticket, accounting for more than one-third of the annual drain.
The emigration rate was 6.7 per 1,000 of the population in 1912. Since the enumeration of Irish emigrants began on 1 May 1855, no less than 4,847,360 Irish people had left the country by the end of the Titanic year. Females were in a majority, with 2.6 million departures compared to 2.2 million males.
The poor cross-subsidised the rich. White Star, Cunard and others could not have afforded to extend the race for bigger, faster ships had not the emigrants provided the steady, year-long business that brought huge turnover and massive cash flow. After the disaster, one Irish newspaper observed plaintively that it did not much matter to the emigrant what day – let alone what time – he or she arrived in New York. But when striking seamen cancelled a sailing of the Olympic soon after the sinking, the British papers carried a businessman’s pompous claims that every hour’s delay was costing him hundreds of pounds.
The White Star’s annual report, published in May 1912, recorded a profit of £1,074,752 and one shilling. Nearly half the money was paid out in dividends, but the under-insured Titanic had wiped out the year’s work. The report declared: ‘The loss of this fine vessel is a source of deep regret to your directors, but it is of minor importance compared with the terrible loss of so many valuable lives.’ Curious syntax, some might think.