Irish Aboard Titanic Read Free

certainly did not question the way things were. He told the US inquiry into the disaster that a sailor had hurried to lock an unlocked gate as he and fellow steerage passengers rushed up a staircase. Breathtakingly, Buckley, when asked by Chairman Senator William Alden Smith whether the steerage had any opportunity at all of getting out, responded: ‘I think they had as much chance as the First- and Second-Class passengers.’ Before the enormity of such a statement could sink in, Smith asked whether such equal chances had come about after the locked gate had been smashed in. Again Buckley’s reply is instructive: ‘Yes, because they were all mixed. All the steerage passengers went up on the First-Class deck at this time, when the gate was broken. They all got up there. They could not keep them down.’
    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