CHAPTER 12 Going Up to See the Fun

Why is it that all the main work of breaking down human souls went on at night?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 (1971)

THE TITANIC’S LOOKOUTS HAD RUNG the warning bell three times and then telephoned the Bridge from the Crow’s Nest to inform them that they had spotted an iceberg in the ship’s path. The senior presiding officer on duty, William Murdoch, ordered evasive action to be taken by the quartermaster Robert Hitchens, who took the ten or so seconds expected to slam the wheel counterclockwise, supervised by Murdoch’s accompanying junior colleague for that shift, James Moody. The maneuver almost worked, as predicted by the positive indicators of the Titanic’s stopping and turning capabilities recorded during her trials in Belfast. One of the lookouts thought “it seemed almost as if she might clear it” until part of the iceberg made contact with the ship’s starboard, at which point Murdoch ordered the closing of the watertight doors.¹ In certain parts of the ship, the tremor of the impact was so slight that hundreds of passengers slept through it.² Those who were, like Jack, awake and in one of the A-, B-, or C-Deck cabins noticed “a funny rumbling noise,” “a grating sound,” or “a slight lift of the bed.”³ Stewards preparing the Saloon for the next morning’s breakfast unknowingly concurred with a schoolteacher reading in bed in his second-class cabin when they attributed the jolt to the Titanic throwing one of her nine propeller blades, an occupational irritant that had already happened to her sister a few months earlier and would require a few days in Belfast to right once they made it back from New York.⁴ Another passenger wondered if the sea, so calm as to be compared to “a lake” earlier that evening, had dramatically changed and the Titanic had been hit by a wave.⁵

In C-77, the Countess of Rothes was awoken by “a slight grating sound—a slight shock.”⁶ However, she then almost certainly went back to sleep for ten or fifteen minutes. The Titanic’s engines halted briefly to enable a cursory inspection about five minutes after the impact. Jack Thayer was one of the few passengers to notice when “the engines started up again—slowly—not with the bright vibration to which we were accustomed, but as though they were tired.”⁷ The engines carried the Titanic forward at half speed for about twelve minutes more, until Captain Smith ordered them stopped.⁸ It was the “terrible silence” that settled over their cabin that prompted Lady Rothes to get out of bed, wake Gladys, and ring for the steward, who told them they had struck an iceberg—news which, in Gladys’s words, “rather excited us and we put on our dressing gowns and fur coats.”⁹ Far above them, the two women heard “the awful noise of steam being let off” through the ship’s funnels, but neither they nor their steward “in the least realised there was any danger.”¹⁰

They were beaten to the deck by Jack Thayer, who had grabbed his slippers and a heavy overcoat while calling through to his parents’ bedroom that he “was going up on deck to see the fun.” John Thayer, roused from his sleep either by the cut of the engines or by Jack’s excitement, dressed more thoroughly than his son, who was one of the first two or three passengers to brave the cold.¹¹ His parents joined him on the Promenade, where they heard from a crew member that they had hit an iceberg, bits of which were still visible on the Well Deck. Marian mentioned to her son and husband that she felt a “very slight list to starboard” beneath their feet. They agreed with her, after which Marian went back inside since it was two degrees below freezing on deck and her overzealous radiator thus no longer seemed so inconvenient.¹²

The publicity surrounding Dorothy Gibson’s experiences on the Titanic produced a sufficient number of contradictory newspaper articles in the weeks immediately after the sinking to make it difficult to pinpoint where she was at the moment of the collision. It has already been mentioned that she cannot have felt “a slight jar” while playing bridge in the Lounge, as the room had been closed and she had been politely asked to leave by the stewards ten minutes before the Titanic struck the berg.¹³ Considering that she was still wearing only her evening gown with no wrap or shawl, one can also dismiss the story that she left the Lounge to stroll on the Promenade, where through the windows she allegedly saw her fellow passengers playing cards “and other forms of divertissement” as the Titanic sailed with “icebergs around us and the water filled with the shattered remains of others.”¹⁴ William Sloper, who had first met Dorothy that Sunday when she and her party “asked me if I would make a fourth at bridge,” wrote down his account of the sinking three days after it happened, in which he confirms that he, Dorothy, her mother Pauline, and their friend Frederic Seward played bridge in the Lounge until 11:30, when “the steward asked us to finish our game as everyone else had gone to bed and the lights were going to be put out in the room. We finished the game, and at 11:40 I said good-night to the ladies and was on the stairway going down to my own cabin. Suddenly there was a lurch and a creaking…”¹⁵

Sloper’s version of events renders more credible the particular story that Dorothy was, like him, on her way to bed when she felt the corridor around her shake. On E-Deck, the force of the impact was considerably more noticeable, and when “the boat seemed to shiver” Dorothy was left badly frightened. She and her mother returned to the Grand Staircase on A-Deck, where Sloper had tracked down a few stewards who “assured everyone who asked them that the water tight bulkheads were closed and that while there was a hole in her, she could not possibly sink, and many who had got out of bed to ascertain the trouble returned satisfied. All this time the steam from the boilers was blowing off furiously overhead, and the noise on the deck was deafening.” Dorothy was not completely convinced by the reassurances of the stewards or Sloper, who said she suffered “an attack of nervous prostration, and [she] was greatly alarmed and excited, stopped everyone as they came out from the lower deck and asked them if there was any danger.”¹⁶

One person Dorothy tried to ask for more information was Thomas Andrews, when she saw him rush up the stairs from B-Deck.¹⁷ He was uncharacteristically brusque, not specifically to Dorothy, to whom he had not been introduced by the Sunday evening, but to most of the passengers attempting to stop him, although he stopped for longer when he saw Albert and Vera Dick, a couple who ate at his Saloon table and with whom he had planned to have coffee earlier that evening. He told them, “There is no cause for any excitement. All of you get what you can in the way of clothes and come on deck as soon as you can. She is torn to bits below, but she will not sink if her after bulkheads hold.”¹⁸ Dorothy thought Andrews had a “face of greenish paleness” as he went up the Grand Staircase to the Boat Deck.¹⁹ It was about forty minutes since the collision and he was on his way to make his report to the Captain, informing him that the Titanic would not survive the damage inflicted by the iceberg. Andrews had been working in his cabin when the Captain sent for him and asked him to make an inspection of the boiler rooms. The ship’s fourth officer, Joseph Boxhall, had already carried out a cursory examination, but Smith was not satisfied. After the engines had stopped for the second and final time, Ismay, sporting a coat thrown over his pajamas, visited the Bridge to ask if Smith thought the Titanic was seriously damaged. Even though he had not yet heard from Andrews, Smith told Ismay that he “thought it was.”²⁰

On his way below after receiving his commission from Smith, Andrews was hailed by Eleanor Cassebeer, wearing an evening kimono and slippers. She was sitting near the Grand Staircase with another of their Saloon set, stockbroker Harry Anderson, who had seen a 75- to 100-foot iceberg pass by the windows of the Smoking Room, the only first-class public room still open at 11:40 p.m.²¹ It was at this stage, in response to Eleanor’s numerous questions, that Andrews said the Titanic “could break in three separate and distinct parts and that each part would stay afloat indefinitely.”²² He initially expressed similar jocular confidence to the Dicks, likewise congregated near the Staircase’s torch-clutching cherub, when he told them “that he was going below to investigate. We begged him not to go, but he insisted, saying that he knew the ship as no one else did and that he might be able to allay the fears of the passengers. He went.”²³

When he reached G-Deck a few minutes later, Andrews saw clerks struggling to move the sacks of correspondence as freezing water seeped into the two-story Mail Room, as well as one of the nearby storage compartments for first-class luggage.²⁴ If he had begun to suspect the seriousness of the danger they were in, he received confirmation in the boiler rooms. Despite the gruesome insinuations of several cinematic adaptations of the sinking, no stokers were trapped or maimed as the doors had slid into place after the collision. After the doors had shut, the crew were able to make their way up ladders to escape exits that opened onto Scotland Road on E-Deck. Now they were back at their posts trying to get the fires down and to shut off the boilers. Those not needed had been assigned to help work the pumps deployed to tackle the water, but with five of the forward watertight compartments now open to the Atlantic, Andrews understood it was a question of when, rather than if, the ship would sink. He hypothesized that either a gash of about 300 feet or a series of tears had been made below the waterline, and the latter suggestion was proved right by a sonar survey of the Titanic’s wreck eighty-four years later. All bar one of the actual points of impact are now buried in sediment, but the exploration, conducted by sonar specialist Paul Matthias, determined that there were six slits of various sizes, extending at intervals across the first 230 feet of the Titanic.^I There was a small trace wound near the prow, followed by punctures of about 5 feet, then 6, then 16, then one further aft and slightly lower of 33 and finally, the only one visible to submersibles today, a gash of 45 feet.²⁵ The width of the respective tears has never been determined, either by Thomas Andrews in 1912 or by Paul Matthias in 1996, and given that each hole is likely to have buckled or distended further when the ship settled on the seafloor, it now most likely never will be.

Captain Smith joined him just as the horror of the situation revealed itself to Andrews. Referring to the flooding of the watertight compartments, Andrews told the commander, “Well, three have gone [fully flooded] already, Captain.”²⁶ Smith left Andrews to complete his observations, which took another ten minutes before he was certain.²⁷ Three years earlier, the Republic had taken nine hours to founder when another ship had slammed into her side, but the Titanic was dealing with an extraordinary amount of damage, with Andrews guessing that nearly one-third of her total length had been intermittently opened to the sea. The ship’s second, third, and fourth compartments were flooding uncontrollably—the first had largely been spared by First Officer Murdoch’s attempts to turn the ship away from the iceberg. The Titanic’s forepeak tank with a capacity of 190 tons had already filled, adding critical forward weight and helping slowly yet inexorably to drag the bow lower in the water. It was in Boiler Room 6 where Andrews saw such swift flooding that he concluded that the ship had become a lost cause, even with the pumps working at full capacity. He ran up from the depths through the E-Deck corridors and the empty Reception Room, dodging the queries of passengers who had emerged from their cabins to find out why the Titanic’s engines had stopped. It was then that he brushed aside Dorothy Gibson’s questions and tried to avoid panicking the Dicks, while still admitting that the Titanic was “torn to bits” below.

Where he delivered the news to Smith is unknown, although the most likely place was either on the Bridge or in the Captain’s quarters. It was a grim mathematical certainty that, having been designed to float with four, but not five, of her compartments flooded, the gathering water would pull the bow down until the seawater spilled over into the next bulkhead, and so on, until the Titanic settled by the head and sank. To Smith’s question of “time of death,” Andrews calculated somewhere between one hour and ninety minutes, depending on how long the bulkheads held.²⁸ It was a devastating prognosis, not least because of the brevity predicted by Andrews, and Smith immediately gave the order for the lifeboats to be filled and lowered.

Merriment continued on the Promenade Deck, where the Countess joined a small group of those likewise seeking information and spotted on the forecastle below third-class passengers “walking about laughing and picking up pieces of ice off the Deck.”²⁹ She spotted chunks of ice all over the ship’s bow, “but we could not see the berg,” which had retreated back into the darkness when the Titanic had briefly restarted her engines. The Countess and Gladys “watched a bit on deck and talked and then wondered if we should go back to bed or not.” Their deliberations were interrupted by the arrival of Captain Smith, who spoke to Lady Rothes in a low voice, saying, “I don’t want to frighten anyone, but will you go quietly and put on your life belts and go up on the top deck?”³⁰

Only a moment or so after she had asked Tommy Andrews if the Titanic had been badly damaged, Dorothy questioned another crew member passing by the Grand Staircase. He “said that the water was rushing in through the squash court wall, and that she was filling rapidly.”³¹ As stewards circulated with the Captain’s request for passengers to dress warmly and put on their life jackets, Dorothy was one of the few in First Class who knew at this early stage that one of their public rooms, the Squash Court located on the deck below her cabin, had started to flood.

The stewards and stewardesses began to move from door to door, reviving those who had gone back to sleep trusting in earlier assurances, or waking those who had so far slept through the whole incident. None of the crew members assigned to look after the passengers had yet been told that the wound inflicted by the iceberg was fatal. Ida Straus, asleep on the starboard side of the ship when the engines fell silent, put on her dressing gown before venturing into the corridor in search of answers.³² Her maid, Ellen, one of those who had slept through the collision, believed that her employer had come across one of the ship’s officers who told her that they had struck an iceberg. None of the Titanic’s officers ventured down to the passenger corridors at this stage in the evening and Ida instead probably heard the news from one of the stewards dispatched to rouse the passengers. Ida walked down the corridor populated by an increasing number of the curious, passing twenty doors on her left until she reached her maid’s, and asked her to fetch Isidor’s valet from the next cabin “to assist him in dressing.”³³

The Strauses were asleep in their suite at the time of the collision.

The Strauses’ two servants dressed themselves before reporting to C-55, where Ida decided against wearing any other rings barring her wedding and engagement bands, donned two coats, one woolen under fur, and filled a little jewelry pouch with a golden purse, decorated with diamonds and emeralds, that Isidor had bought for her as a surprise during their stay in Paris two weeks earlier.³⁴ Once Farthing had helped Isidor, Ida put on a pair of tight-fitting leather gloves and the party moved up to A-Deck, eschewing the warmth indoors in favor of the enclosed Promenade Deck, from where rumor had it the lifeboats, if deployed, might be filled. They “mingled with other passengers and discussed the danger in a perfectly calm and collected manner. No one seemed to believe that there was any great danger of the ship sinking.”³⁵ They sat on two of the unused steamer chairs and waited.³⁶

I. Andrews’s guess that they extended for approximately 300 feet might explain why he misdiagnosed by thirty minutes to an hour the time it would take for the Titanic to founder.