Jerome Chertkoff
Appearances
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
6. Save Our Souls
There was no ship that could come and help them in time. If another ship had been within hailing distance, that would have saved a lot of lives.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
He wasn't taking somebody's place away from them. My own feeling is if I were Ismay and they were about to lower a boat and there was plenty empty room and there was nobody else on the boat deck but me, I'd have probably gotten in, which is what he did.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
Yeah, ruined his life. He lived a semi-isolated life from then on.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
The one thing they were afraid of was panic. They were afraid the panicking crew would frighten the women and frighten the children and all the rest. I think what is remarkable is that there were so few people panicking and screaming at the time, and I don't think that would be the same today.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
Let me comment briefly on panic. Panic is a concept that researchers in this field don't agree on. Whether you can control it or not, we have no way of knowing. And whether it's rational or irrational is subjective from a viewer's point of view. And what you may think is irrational might seem to the person the perfectly rational thing to do.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
When you're caught in a situation where you're confronted with immediate death, you do what you need to do to save yourself.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
They recovered his body, but it was covered in soot and everything else.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
What account there is in the testimony I've read is he stayed on the bridge and when the Titanic sank from under him, he just stepped off into the water and nobody saw him again. I suspect he accepted the idea that the captain could go down with the ship or at the least should be the last person to get off alive. And obviously lots of people were going to die.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
He made no attempt to escape at all. And I think one can interpret from that that he felt responsible. Whether he felt sort of spiritually responsible or practically responsible, I don't think we will ever know. But personally, I think he was responsible and he knew it.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
People were calm, orderly, installing the lifeboats, at least at the beginning. That's true, actually, in most emergency situations. In buildings and land, when there's a fire, people usually file out in an orderly, even a slow fashion. There may help somebody who needs help being carried. People are generally calm, collected, and helpful.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
Where it tends to fall apart, if it does, is at the end when it becomes clear that not everybody's going to get out alive.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
the transverse walls didn't go that high in the ship. One went to C deck, the others went to D deck and E deck, which meant that when water flooded into the front compartments, it went over the top.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
I mean, to me, 100 years later, it seems rational to put men in. If all the women and children on the boat deck are loaded, and there are no more women and children, why not put the men in? But I think Lightoller was worried that if he said to one man, get in, then there are 100 men standing around, and we got a problem.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
Psychologists have studied the effect of high arousal, and usually the main effect of high arousal is, one, your perception is narrow. So instead of taking in everything that's around you, you tend to focus on one thing that stands out to you and concentrate on that at the exclusion of others. And the second problem with high arousal is that you tend to consider only one alternative.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
So you're focused on one thing, you only consider that one possibility of what to do, and other alternatives you tend not to consider.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
I don't think people often resign themselves to death, although I'm 87. At some point in the not-too-distant future, I will be faced with death, and what can you do but accept it? Everybody dies.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
Examples which are sometimes cited as suicide seem to be not suicide. If we look at the 9-11 at the World Trade Center, people jumped to their deaths. Suicide? No, I don't think that was suicide. I think you're faced with either you can get burned alive or you can die by jumping. And so that's your choice. How do you want to die? That's not suicide, the usual sense.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
You need to know how to get to the exits, and you need to have no restrictions on getting there. The first and second class passengers know how to get to the boat deck. The third class passengers, which are down in the lowest part of the accommodation to the ship, had never been allowed to go up to the boat deck. And they had no idea how to get there, and the route was complicated.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
The third-class passengers that made it out, stewards who were in charge of their cabins, gathered the women and children and said, follow me, I'll lead you out.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
He'd been responsible. for bringing everything aboard, checking it off, storing it, and so on. One of the funny things about the Titanic, given its size, was that the storage was in rather short supply. You often come across theaters that have been built with too few dressing rooms. The Titanic was quite similar. It was built with too little storage.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
And so things were sort of shut here and put in there and in this drawer and that cupboard. And David Blair knew where everything was, and they sent him off.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
I mean, I don't really subscribe to the theory that the Titanic sank because nobody had any binoculars. But I do think the fact of getting rid of the officer who knew where everything was, was a mistake.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
As always, the truth is a little bit more intricate.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
These people in first class were the super, super wealthy at the time, the Jeff Bezos of the time. Many of them were the kind of wealth that we can't even imagine. Their lifestyles were palatial.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
The Widener dinner party was attended by the Thayers, the Carters, President Taft's aide, Major Archibald Butt, and Clarence Moore, who was a traveling master of hounds that was well-known at the time. There are no menus that survive, so we don't know what they had to eat that night. But we do know that it was a very beautiful setting, as all of these restaurants were in first class.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
One thing of note about Eleanor Widener is that she had three necklaces with her on board the Titanic, which were worth $700,000. This is in 1912.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
Nearly 100 passengers came to the service and sang. And what was really ironic is the songs that they ended up singing were almost, in hindsight, telling of what they would experience later that night. Probably the most coincidental is For Those in Peril on the Sea.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave, who bidst in the mighty ocean deep its own appointed limits keep. O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea. All of these songs, you know, as you look back on that hymn service and the fact that it was within a few hours of what they were going to experience was really remarkable.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
There was a lifeboat drill planned on the Titanic, but that was canceled by Smith. So there was absolutely no practice while the ship was traveling on the transatlantic passage.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
It was assumed by sailors at the time that if you came across an iceberg dead ahead, you would see it in enough time to be able to avoid it. Captains didn't slow down or change their routes. They just told the lookouts to be alert.