CHAPTER 15 Be British

The river of death has brimmed his banks,

And England’s far, and Honour a name,

But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:

“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

This is the word that year by year,

While in her place the school is set,

Every one of her sons must hear,

And none that hears it dare forget.

Sir Henry Newbolt, “Vitaï Lampada” (1897)

AFTER NINETY MINUTES OF WATCHING the ruin of his creation, Tommy Andrews retreated to the first-class Smoking Room, where he stood brooding by its fireplace, the only passengers’ grate to use coal and wood instead of electric bars. Above the mantelpiece was the Norman Wilkinson painting Plymouth Harbour.¹ There, amid the Smoking Room’s stained-glass windows, mahogany walls accented with gold and mother-of-pearl, Andrews had halted, his arms folded, staring sightlessly.² A passing steward, John Stewart, whose normal duties had been in the adjacent Verandah Café, interrupted Andrews’s reverie with the question “Aren’t you going to try for it, Mr. Andrews?” Andrews, “like one stunned,” did not seem to hear him. In any case, he gave no response and Stewart left to see if he could be of help with the lifeboats.³

The Smoking Room, where Thomas Andrews was briefly spotted in silent despair.

It is an unforgettable vignette of a mind buckling under a sorrow and shame that few can imagine. It has been presented in several cinematic takes on the Titanic’s demise, as well as dozens of nonfiction accounts of the sinking, as the last known sighting of Tommy Andrews, often placed at about five or ten minutes past two o’clock.⁴ This particular detail is unsustainable in light of the fact that Stewart left the Titanic in Lifeboat 15, one of the aft lifeboats positioned close to the Smoking Room, which was lowered away at about 1:40 a.m.⁵ Stewart’s was the most memorable sighting of Andrews that night. It was not, however, the last, and it was definitively disproven as such as early as the autumn of 1912, when a writer commissioned by the Andrews family and the unionist politician Sir Horace Plunkett tracked down three survivors’ accounts mentioning Andrews’s behavior after his temporary stasis at about 1:30 a.m.⁶ Twelve days after the sinking, stewardess Mary Sloan wrote in a letter to her sister, “Last time I saw and heard him was about an hour later [after he had told her to put on her life belt at about 12:45 a.m.] helping to get women and children into the boats, imploring them not to hesitate, but to go when asked as there was no time to be lost, so Mr. Andrews met his fate like a true hero realising his great danger, and gave up his life to save the women and children of the Titanic.”⁷ After the last lifeboat had left, Andrews was spotted throwing deck chairs overboard to provide those jumping with something to cling to.⁸ A bellboy saw him on deck, carrying his life jacket and encouraging the Captain to don one, just before the final plunge.⁹ Of later relevance is a fourth account, not discovered by Andrews’s friends or family in 1912, which goes into more detail about where Andrews was for the final moments of the Titanic.¹⁰

During his childhood in the countryside outside Belfast, Tommy Andrews had been allowed by his parents to keep bees. One day he told his father that he could not go hunting, his favorite pastime, because he had noticed that his hive was in trouble. For the rest of the afternoon and evening, the family’s servants watched him repeatedly carrying small trays of half-famished bees from the hive to the kitchen to feed them and keep them warm.¹¹ Thomas Andrews was a man of vital compassion. His goodness was useful, rather than simply comforting. After a few moments of mental anguish in the Smoking Room, he returned on deck to continue helping with the lifeboats, and when that was no longer possible, he tossed into the ocean anything that might help those jumping from his ship.

After the last lifeboat had been safely lowered from the Titanic at 2:05 a.m., the number on board included Ida Straus, John Thayer and his son Jack, along with about fifteen hundred other people. A mission, led by Officers Murdoch and Lightoller, to free the two remaining collapsibles from the deck roof of the Officers’ Quarters failed for lack of time, and those last two lifeboats were washed off the Titanic, overturned. Of all the negligence attributed to the management of the Titanic, none appears more criminally idiotic than the White Star Line’s decision to provide twenty lifeboats with a combined capacity of 1,178 on a ship with room for 3,327 and which sailed in April 1912 with about 2,208. Their provision of lifeboats was in fact in excess of the legal stipulations laid down by the British Board of Trade, which gauged lifeboat requirements on the size of ships, rather than the number of cabins. Woefully outdated when it came to the leviathans produced by Cunard and White Star after 1907, the Board of Trade regulations stated that any ship over ten thousand tons must carry a minimum of sixteen lifeboats.

If a law did not compel a company, one might query why basic sense did not. No major passenger liner carried sufficient lifeboats before 1912. Since then, they all have. However, not every industry expert was swayed even by the casualty figures of the Titanic. Twenty years later, a former captain in the Royal Navy argued,

The case of the Titanic itself is one of the very few in which boats for all could have been useful; as a general rule a disaster at sea means it is quite impossible to launch all the boats which any ship carries, while the space might be far more advantageously used for life rafts and other buoyant apparatuses. Also the heavy weights placed as high up as possible carry their own disadvantages, as was proved many times during the war when the boats-for-all slogan resulted in many ships capsizing long before they would have otherwise gone down, drowning many who would have had at least a chance of safety.¹²

Most memorably, his point had been at least partly proved by the attack by a German submarine on the Lusitania in 1915, when, while attempting to escape, dozens were killed by lifeboats tumbling from their davits onto those below them.¹³

In the case of the Titanic, more lifeboats almost certainly would have made no substantial difference to the overall loss of life. It took forty minutes from the collision for a sufficiently thorough examination to justify the decision that the lifeboats should be filled, and another fifteen to twenty minutes before the first boats were ready. The first craft was not lowered until an hour after the Titanic had struck the iceberg, and it was another forty or so minutes before most passengers were keen to get into the boats. Given that senior officers, helped by passengers and sailors, were still fighting to free two lifeboats when the ship went under, the depressing conclusion must be that even if there had been double the number of lifeboats on the Titanic there still would not have been enough time to fill them before the ship sank. The death toll was of course augmented by the initial reluctance of many passengers to leave the apparently secure Titanic, which arose from the failure to impress upon them, or many crew members, the gravity of the situation.

One of the only photographs of Captain Smith on the Titanic’s Bridge, from which he was swept or jumped into the ocean.

It was allegedly in reaction to the diminishing number of lifeboats that Captain Smith spoke to a group of stewards gathered near the Bridge, telling them, “Well, boys, do your best for the women and children, and look out for yourselves.”¹⁴ Not long before he had shared a glass of water in his cabin with first-class passenger Frederick Hoyt, who knew from Smith’s demeanor that there was not much longer left.¹⁵ Either after seeing Hoyt or warning the small group of stewards, Smith then used his megaphone to give the order to abandon ship, some time shortly after two o’clock. His precise choice of words is contested, with each of two phrases having its own proponents. It is entirely possible that both are correct, with the Captain delivering the respective cries through the megaphone on either side of his Bridge. The first claim is that he shouted, “Abandon ship! Every man for himself!” The other reports that Smith encouraged those still trapped on the Titanic, “Be British!”—by which he meant that they should remain calm while they fled, to avoid undue panic, and should maintain the proverbial stiff upper lip. In the years after the sinking, however, that latter phrase took on a totemic value that far exceeded what Smith meant when, or if, he said it.

At the time of the Titanic’s launch in 1911, a White Star magazine had predicted that with her British construction and American ownership the ship would come to “stand for the pre-eminence of the Anglo-Saxon race on the Ocean.”¹⁶ As with any good prophecy delivered by an oracle, this came to fruition in a way jarringly different from the one imagined. Within weeks of the disaster, Captain Smith’s alleged promotion in extremis of British values had been commemorated in thousands of postcards and dozens of songs. Lyrics praised the Belfast-born engineers, all of whom drowned at their posts, for remaining “in obedience to the instinct of their race and the grand old Captain’s exhortations: ‘Be British!’ ”¹⁷ Others lauded all the crew members who had “worked like Britons, side by side, all faithful to the last.”¹⁸ Newspapers carried the story to the public of how “before [Smith] was literally washed from his post of duty he called through his megaphone, ‘Be British!’ to the mass below.”¹⁹ One of the owners of the Hodder and Stoughton publishing house wrote an open letter arguing that Smith’s alleged last quote “was what we would have expected and wanted him to say. He belonged to the race of the old British sea-dogs. He believed with all his heart and soul in the British Empire. He had added that to his creed. I am glad he recited it at the end.”²⁰ By the time an admiral of the fleet, Lord Charles Beresford, was invited to unveil a memorial statue to Smith in the winter of 1912, the phrase had become so inextricably linked to the late Captain that, with the approval of Smith’s widow, it was carved on the plinth of the monument.²¹ When questioned later about the bravery of the Strauses, with their American citizenship, Lord Charles considered that Smith’s command instead spoke more broadly to the “true spirit of manly duty of the English-speaking races.”²²

Captain Smith and Thomas Andrews were both incorporated into pieces of didactic patriotism. Supplementary to Smith’s extolment of British values was the belief that he had done so moments before he was swept overboard. In reality, Smith did his duty by remaining with the Titanic until he was of no further perceptible use, which is not to say he intended to go down with her. De facto suicide was not required of him, even by the most extreme defenders of maritime tradition, and a steward, whose testimony of course may have been addled by the trauma suffered when he himself jumped overboard, specifically stated that Smith had leaped from the Bridge rather than be caught by a rush of water. That claim was forgotten or roundly ignored as inconvenient to a narrative that preferred Smith to die at his post. Likewise, it helped solidify the adjustment of chronology in the press and popular history to have Tommy Andrews standing in the Smoking Room with bereft stoicism at 2:05 a.m., by no coincidence immediately after the last lifeboat had been safely lowered from a davit. These edited stories unconsciously if potently mirrored the myths of ancient Greece, in which heroes like Achilles choose to embrace glorious death, rejecting the allure of home in favor of immortality and continued service.²³

Once again, it was George Bernard Shaw who dipped his pen in acid, before critiquing the lionization of Smith and what it said about British attitudes to other nations. While he had no apparent quarrel with the tributes paid to Thomas Andrews, Shaw was revolted by the panegyric heaped on Captain Smith, regarding it as a vulgar attempt to excuse posthumously Smith’s multiple errors in command. He joked that by the summer of 1912 British journalists were writing about Smith with praise that they would hesitate to bestow on the nineteenth-century naval hero, Lord Nelson. He thought the press coverage of the Titanic had descended into “ghastly, blasphemous, unhuman, braggartly lying” as newspapers eagerly embraced any anecdote that confirmed their prejudices, even though “the one thing positively known was that Captain Smith had lost his ship by deliberately and knowingly steaming into an ice field at the highest speed he had coal for. He paid the penalty; so did most of those for whose lives he was responsible. Had he brought the ship safely to land, nobody would have taken the smallest notice of him.” Shaw was also incensed by the symbiotic link established between Smith’s alleged final words and the racial judgments that peppered subsequent accounts of the disaster. He did not blame the press for creating these attitudes, confining himself to remarking that they had simply articulated ad nauseam the public’s pre-established sympathies, with accounts that sought “to assure the world that only Englishmen could have behaved so heroically, and to compare their conduct with the hypothetic dastardliness [of] Italians or foreigners.”²⁴

Edwardian attitudes to race and nationality had followed the Titanic throughout her career, and Shaw was correct when he characterized the press as a mirror rather than the person in front of it. To read dozens of survivors’ accounts of the sinking is to be struck by how often behavior, usually negative, was attributed to a person’s race. The Countess of Rothes was by far the mildest in her assumption when she heard shouting on deck and assumed it must have come from Italians.²⁵ When Marian Thayer stated later that she had seen only one man panicking, she specified that he “looked like a foreigner.”²⁶ A steward referred to passengers causing trouble at one of the lifeboats as “dagoes,” a catch-all slur for Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese.²⁷ Despite the fact that the man who disguised himself as a woman to escape the ship was a young Anglo-Irish farmer, Fifth Officer Harold Lowe told an American journalist he had been an Italian and then, in his subsequent testimony at the Senate inquiry, used “Italian” to describe unruly behavior from passengers “all glaring and ready to spring” without permission into the lifeboats.²⁸ Lowe’s pronouncements reached such a wide audience that the Marquis of Cusani Confalonieri, the Italian Ambassador to the United States, petitioned White Star for a public retraction, which Lowe was ordered to give via a published letter to the Ambassador. It was heavy on qualifying justification and jarringly low on contrition:

This is to testify that I, Harold Godfrey Lowe, of Penrallt Barmouth, fifth officer of the late steamship “Titanic,” in my testimony at the Senate of the United States stated that I fired shots to prevent Italian immigrants from jumping into my lifeboat.

I do thereby cancel the word “Italian” and substitute the words “immigrants belonging to Latin races.” In fact, I did not mean to infer that they were especially Italians, because I could only judge from their general appearance and complexion, and therefore I only meant to imply that they were of the types of the Latin races. In any case, I did not intend to cast any reflection on the Italian nation.

This is the real truth, and therefore I feel honoured to give out the present statement.

H. G. LOWE,

Fifth Officer, late steamship “Titanic”

Shortly after 2:00 a.m., as Edward Smith prepared to issue one, both, or neither of his alleged final commands as captain of the Titanic, as Tommy Andrews was throwing wooden deck chairs overboard, and as Harold Lowe was threatening to shoot men who almost certainly were not Italian, the Titanic’s band played their last set. The seven musicians had taken up their third position that night, wearing thick coats to perform outside one of the deck’s entrance doors to the Grand Staircase. This placed them on the Boat Deck somewhere between the first and second funnels, near where Thayer, Jack, and the Strauses had also congregated.²⁹ Thayer was with George Widener, near the second stack, both possessed of the misapprehension that their respective sons must have escaped in one of the starboard-side lifeboats. Jack, too, after returning to the Lounge and whipping round the Promenade Deck, concluded that his father must have been allowed to accompany Marian when she left.³⁰ Scrambling up onto the officers’ roof to help Lightoller in his attempt to disengage one of the collapsibles, Colonel Gracie spotted his friends the Strauses standing together near the Bridge. He was too busy with his task to call out to them, but he and others helping Lightoller remembered seeing Ida “clasped in her husband’s arms.”³¹

Every now and then in history a popular myth can be restored to its place, rather than dismissed to make way for a less poetic truth. This seems to be the case with “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” the Methodist hymn indelibly associated with the Titanic’s final moments as the last piece of music played by the ship’s orchestra before the deck tilted so far beneath them that they had to abandon their instruments. “Nearer, My God, to Thee” has been roundly dismissed as a part of the Titanic’s denouement by many specialists, who see it as pious nonsense, attempting to do for Christianity what Captain Smith’s exhortation of “Be British” did for national pride. In its place, a slow waltz, “Songe d’Automne,” was identified as one of the last pieces of music, or the very last, performed that night. However, there is persuasive evidence that “Nearer, My God, to Thee” formed the logical conclusion to a progression of music that evolved from jolly to patriotic and finally to religious. Earlier in the evening, there are accounts of the band playing “Land of Hope and Glory” and “Jerusalem” while they were stationed at the Staircase, abandoning the waltzes and ragtime they had offered in the Lounge. There are numerous quotations from survivors, including some made on their rescue ship, about hymns being played just before the ship sank, and numerous extant testimonies from survivors specifically identifying “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as a tune they heard from the Boat Deck.^I As those recollections originated with several survivors before they even reached New York, it is not possible to sustain the argument that the band chose to play only secular music because they wanted to calm rather than frighten the passengers and that the playing of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was thus invented by the newspapers. Although it is not conclusive evidence that he followed through on his intention, an interview in an English newspaper conducted with the band’s leader, Wallace Hartley, three weeks before he joined the Titanic, posed the question of what he would play if he ever found himself in a shipwreck. To which Hartley answered, “I don’t think I could do better than play ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ ”³² The Titanic’s most junior officer, James Moody, told his family, “When I read the statement in the papers that he had gone to his death leading the band in Nearer My God to Thee, I believed it. If it had been some other hymn I might not have done so, but as it is I can quite believe it. It is just what he would do.”³³ In his recent analysis of the veracity of claims concerning “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” George Behe may be correct in arguing that while the hymn may not have been the very last one heard on deck, “it is hard to envision all of the literally dozens of witnesses being wrong, or having fabricated the stories. The proof is not conclusive, but is strongly suggestive.”³⁴

A hymn was certainly in keeping with the mood on board around 2:00 a.m. Water had spilled over the forecastle, and the liner’s forward tilt, while still allowing people to stay upright, was now obvious both from the lifeboats and on the deck. The ship’s lights dipped in strength but then rose again, though not to their previous brightness. Power to the Wireless Room, where the two operators were still frantically trying to reach ships close enough to save them, vanished. A second-class passenger, Father Thomas Byles, who fourteen hours earlier had celebrated Mass in the second-class Library and then in the third-class General Room, led prayers with his colleague, Father Joseph Peruschitz. The British priest and the German priest had gone down into Third Class earlier in the night to encourage people to come up to the deck.³⁵ Now, they stood together on deck, offering absolution, praying, and “whispering words of comfort and encouragement” to the seventy-five or so passengers who approached them, most of them Irish.³⁶ A century later, the two priests have been proposed as candidates for canonization, but although they refused a place in the lifeboats and welcomed those Protestants and Jews on deck who also asked for their help, calling them “my good people,” not all were won over by the priests’ “absolute self-control.”³⁷ As Father Byles led a recitation of the Rosary, with those around him responding to the Hail Mary with “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,” August Wennerström, a socialist journalist who had decided to emigrate after the hostile reception given to his article calling for the abolition of the Swedish monarchy, was revolted by the sight of seventy-five people “in a circle with a preacher in their middle, praying, crying, asking God and Mary to help them.… They just prayed and yelled, and never lifted a hand to help themselves. They had lost their own will power and were expecting God to do all the work.”³⁸ He had, however, misunderstood the purpose of their prayers. Byles and Peruschitz were telling their impromptu flock to “prepare themselves to meet the face of God.”³⁹ They were under no illusions about the chances of physical survival. In that regard, whether one jumped or took the time to pray before doing so would make very little difference.

I. In Lifeboat 8, Lady Rothes heard music from the ship until nearly the end, but she could never swear to which tunes were floating over the water.