young man leaped over the side of the liner and landed in the bottom of the lifeboat. Women shielded him with their night clothing so that sailors would not see him. They would have shot him.’ Reports of gunfire also came from one of the ship’s firemen, Walter Hurst, and Hugh Woolner, an English first-class passenger who eventually jumped into Collapsible D (the last boat to be launched) said that ‘two flashes of a pistol’ alerted him to a group of ‘five or six’ men climbing into Collapsible C. ‘We helped the officer to pull these men out, by their legs and anything we could get hold of.’ Woolner then helped to load the boat with women. One of these, Emily Badman, an eighteen-year-old servant from Southampton, told the Jersey Journal how she pushed through crowds to get to Collapsible C; May Howard, a twenty-seven-year-old laundry worker emigrating to Canada, told the Orleans American that: ‘One of the officers grabbed Mrs Goldsmith and myself and pushed us to the edge of the ship where the lifeboat [Collapsible C] was being filled with women and children first’; Mrs Emily Goldsmith, emigrating to America with her family, said that Collapsible C was surrounded by a line of seamen with linked arms, who were allowing only women and children through. Amy Stanley, a twenty-year-old servant from Oxfordshire, said that ‘as we were being lowered a man about 16 Stone jumped [in] almost on top of me. I heard a pistol fired — I believe it was done to frighten the men from rushing the boat.’
A week later, seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer — whose father John B. Thayer, the Second Vice-President of the Philadelphia Railroad, died that night — gave the following account of the activity around Collapsible C in a letter to Judge Charles L. Long, who had lost his son: ‘There was an awful crowd around the last boat of the forward part of the starboard side, pushing and shoving wildly.’ In a subsequent account, The Sinking of the SS Titanic, privately printed for his family in 1940, Jack Thayer recalled hearing an order for ‘all women to the port side’. After saying goodbye to his mother, he and his father went over to the starboard side where passengers and crew stood around wondering what was happening. ‘It seemed we were always waiting for orders,’ he wrote, ‘and no orders ever came. No one knew his boat position, as no lifeboat drill had been held.’ He then described the scene around Collapsible C: ‘There was some disturbance in loading the last two forward starboard boats. A large crowd of men were pressing to get into them. No women were around as far as I could see. I saw Ismay, who had been assisting in the loading of the last boat, push his way into it. It was really every man for himself. Many of the crew and men from the stokehole were lined up, with apparently not a thought of getting into a boat without orders… Two men, I think they were dining-room stewards, dropped into the boat from the deck above. As they jumped [an officer] fired twice into the air. I do not believe they were hit, but they were quickly thrown out.’5 Colonel Archibald Gracie, a first-class passenger, reported that there had been ‘no disorder in loading and lowering’ Collapsible C. ‘Two gentlemen got in, Mr Ismay and Mr Carter. No one told them to get in. No one else was there.’6
In an interview with the New York Times on 19 April, Abraham Hyman, a thirty- four-year-old framer from Manchester hoping to join his brother in New Jersey, gave his version of the loading of Collapsible C. There was ‘so much confusion that nobody knew what was going on… some of the people were too excited to understand what was said to them and they crowded forward and then some of the officers came and pushed them back, crying out for women to come first, and some of them said they would shoot any man who tried to get into the boats’. Hyman, whose memory of events comes closest to what must have been the truth, continued:
We got some of the women and children out of the crush and sent them to where the boats were and saw them get in until I counted on one boat thirty-two persons. Then there was a shout that no more could go into that boat, although I have since heard that the lifeboat could easily hold from forty-five to fifty persons. By this time we all felt sure we would be drowned if we stayed on the [ship] — that is, all of the steerage people thought so. And that was enough to drive them wild and a fight began among them to get to where the boat was being made ready. The forward deck was jammed with the people, all of them pushing and clawing and fighting, and so I walked forward and stepped over the end of the boat that was being got ready [Collapsible C] and sat down.
But in Ismay’s account of the sinking of the Titanic nothing much happened. There was no crowd around his boat and no panic, despite the fact that most of the lifeboats had now departed, that the boat deck was awash and the ship beginning to list. ‘Did you see any struggle among the men to get in?’ he was asked at the US Senate inquiry. None, he replied.
One after another eighteen lifeboats dropped into the sea, most of them half-filled.
Lifeboat number 1 contained only Lord and Lady Duff Gordon plus their staff and seven crew members. There had not been time to launch Collapsibles A and B, which floated free when the Titanic went down and were used as rafts. Because there had been no proper safety drill, most of the crew were unconfident about handling the davits and nervous about filling the boats to capacity in case they buckled. Nor did they know which boat they were assigned to: lists had been posted up, but no one had bothered looking at them. No alarm had been raised, there was no attempt at imposing discipline and no one knew what was happening or what they were meant to be doing. Some boats were manned by stewards who had never held an oar before, and some were rowed by women. Only three of the lifeboats contained lamps, and none contained compasses. Should the lifeboats encounter the 30-mile-wide ice floe that was advancing towards them, sixteen feet above the water level, there was nothing that could be done. Beneath the Titanic’s thin gleam of efficiency lay an acreage of slapdash.
The Titanic had lifeboat capacity for 1,100 of the 2,340 passengers and crew on board, but only 705 people were saved, of whom 325 were men. In meetings held in October 1909 and January 1910, Ismay — who made the final decisions about the ship’s design, decoration and equipment — had turned down the suggestion of placing three boats, rather than one, on each davit. With her sixteen wooden lifeboats and four Engelhardt collapsible boats, the Titanic was already carrying 10 per cent more than the British Board of Trade official requirements and anyway, why clutter the recreation deck unnecessarily when the ship was itself a lifeboat? ‘If a steamship had enough lifeboats for all,’ a White Star Line official patiently explained, ‘there would be no room left on deck for the passengers. The necessary number of lifeboats would be carried at the cost of many present comforts to our patrons.’ Instead of lifeboats the patrons had luxury: a palm court, a gymnasium and a Louis XVI restaurant. As it was, because the majority of passengers were not told the Titanic was sinking and few believed anyway that the ship was sinkable, most thought it safer to stay in the floating palace with its clocks and chairs and electric lights, than commit themselves to an unknown future on the watery wilderness below. ‘Most of the men thought they would be safer back on the boat,’ Abraham Hyman said, ‘and some of them smiled at us as we went down.’
Collapsible C was lowered with difficulty. The Titanic was now listing heavily towards starboard, causing the lifeboat to catch on the rivets; Jack Thayer, watching from the deck, ‘thought it would never reach the water right side up, but it did’. From inside the boat, Abraham Hyman recalled that ‘when we were nearly to the water we passed a big hole in the side of the [ship]. This was about three quarters of the way back toward the stern and the pumps were throwing a great stream of water out through it. It threatened to swamp our boat, and we got scared. There were about ten men in the boat and we each took an oar and pushed the boat away from the side of the ship. That’s all that saved us.’
George Rowe, who took charge of Collapsible C, was a thirty-two-year-old former Merchant Marine from Hampshire. Apart from Rowe, Ismay, William Carter, Albert Pearcey, Margaret Devaney, Emily Badman, May Howard, Amy Stanley, Emily Goldsmith, Shawneene George, the Nakids, and Abraham Hyman, whose experiences of the loading we have already heard, the boat contained three firemen and thirty-one further adults and children (all third-class), including twenty-three of the Titanic’s seventy-nine Lebanese passengers (of whom thirty-one were saved altogether). ‘The boat would have accommodated certainly six more passengers,’ Ismay said in his public statement to the press, ‘if there had been any on the boat deck to go.’
The Titanic was only superficially a liner for the rich: she was actually an emigrant ship. Ismay’s lifeboat consisted of the following people, several of whom were returning from visits to their family while others were hoping to start new lives:
Mrs Mariana Assaf, aged forty-five, living in Canada
Mrs Mary Abrahim, aged eighteen, living in Pennsylvania
Mrs Latifa Baclini and her three daughters: Marie, aged five, Eugenie, aged three, and Helene, nine
