The chaos continues, as more lifeboats leave the ship half empty. Fights break out on deck over the rapidly dwindling number of spaces. Titanic’s band strike up a tune, trying to keep everyone calm. A senior officer pulls a gun on a teenager. And the iceberg claims its first victim… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Josyann Abisaab, Stephanie Barczewski, Jerome Chertkoff, James Delgado, Julian Fellowes, Tim Maltin, Susie Millar, Claes-Göran Wetterholm.Special thanks to Southampton Archives, Culture and Tourism for the use of the Eva Hart archive. Visit SeaCity Museum for an interactive experience of the Titanic story (seacitymuseum.co.uk) Written by Duncan Barrett | Produced by Miriam Baines and Duncan Barrett | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design & audio editing by Miri Latham and George Tapp | Assembly editing by Dorry Macaulay and Anisha Deva | Compositions by Oliver Baines and Dorry Macaulay | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Recording engineer: Joseph McGann | Nautical consultant: Aaron Todd. Get every episode of Titanic: Ship of Dreams two weeks early and ad-free by joining Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What was the situation on Titanic's boat deck after the iceberg collision?
It's a few minutes before 1 a.m. on the night of April the 14th, 1912. RMS Titanic is stopped dead 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The ship's passengers, wearing bulky cork life jackets over their clothes, are now thronging the boat deck where the procedure for loading the lifeboats is underway.
As crew members coax anxious women and children into the small wooden craft, Titanic's giant funnels are still venting exhaust. The noise is deafening, overwhelming. The crew have to use hand gestures to communicate with each other. And then, suddenly, as the last gasps of steam escape from the rapidly cooling boilers, a deathly silence falls over the ship.
Everyone can hear themselves think again. The cheery strains of ragtime music performed by Titanic's band are clearly audible for the first time. The instructions given by the officers loading the lifeboats can be understood. For now at least, the passengers are behaving in an orderly fashion.
The officers may have armed themselves with revolvers ten minutes earlier, but it doesn't look like they'll have to use them. By 1 a.m., Titanic has taken on more than 15,000 tons of water. Mathematically, her designer has calculated, the ship is doomed. But she's sinking so slowly that there's little sense of panic up on deck. Eight decks below in boiler room five, it's a different story.
Water is pouring in through a two-foot gash in the wall. It's coming from boiler room six, which is already completely submerged. Now the engineers are trying to stop the same thing happening in number five. But thanks to the clouds of steam coming off the boilers, they can see only a few feet ahead.
Leading fireman Fred Barrett hauls open a manhole in the floor, attempting to access the pump valves. But when assistant engineer Jonathan Shepherd runs over to help, he falls into the hole, breaking his leg. Shepherd's colleagues carry him into the adjoining pump room before returning to their work. The pumps help a little, but it's not enough.
The bulkhead between boiler rooms five and six is failing. In less than 15 minutes, it gives way altogether. Thousands of gallons of water pour in. The engineers race for the ladders that lead to the deck, clambering up as the water level rises beneath them. But no one thinks of poor Jonathan Shepherd with his broken leg. He is still down below in the pump room, unable to move.
At 1.10 a.m., Shepherd drowns. the first victim of the iceberg that sinks the Titanic. From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is Titanic Ship of Dreams, part seven. While chaos reigns down in the boiler rooms, up on deck, Titanic's senior officers are doing their best to calmly usher passengers into the lifeboats.
On the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch has already lowered two boats into the water, numbers five and seven. But his counterpart on the port side, Second Officer Lightoller, has yet to launch his first. In the absence of clear instructions from Captain Smith, the two men are approaching the same job very differently.
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Chapter 2: How were lifeboats loaded and what challenges did officers face?
Specifically when it comes to the old seafaring mantra, women and children first. Closhio and Vetterholm.
Light told her on the port side he allowed no men into the boats. There were men standing by the boat and they refused to enter. And they died, of course. On the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch allowed anybody into the boats. And actually, afterwards, over 80% of all the surviving male passengers, they had their lives, thanks to William Murdoch.
For Murdoch, the priority is getting the boats lowered as quickly as possible. Sometimes that means allowing male passengers in, to encourage their wives and children to go with them.
Tim Maltin, What we find is Murdoch, who's actually allowing men to go in lifeboats with women and children, that allows families to load boats very, very quickly. Whereas Lightoller on the other side of the ship was splitting up families, which is taking a long time and causing a lot of people to reject getting in a boat at all.
So more people were saved from Murdoch's side of Titanic than they were from Lightoller's side of Titanic.
Each man believes he's interpreting Captain Smith's order correctly. And in fact, there's no formal naval rule governing the treatment of women and children in an emergency. Allowing them to leave a sinking ship first is more of a custom.
It goes back to something called the Birkenhead tradition, where the warship Birkenhead sank close to the South African coast. and there were relatives to the soldiers on board.
Six decades before Titanic, HMS Birkenhead went down with the loss of almost 700 lives. But thanks to the noble sacrifice of the men on board, every single woman and child survived.
Because they did not have enough lifeboats, they got the orchestra on the ship to stand up and play songs, marches. When women and children were put into the boats, this was shark-infested waters, and therefore very, very few of the men survived.
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Chapter 3: What is the 'women and children first' maritime custom and how was it applied on Titanic?
But Lifeboat One isn't the only one lowered well under capacity. Professor Stephanie Boczewski
Some of them go off less than a third full. And part of that's because early on, they can't really convince people to get into the lifeboats. People are like, why would I want to get off this nice warm ship and go out there in the freezing cold ocean? The ship seems a lot safer. But part of it also is because the lifeboats are not being loaded in a very kind of orderly fashion.
To be fair to those loading the boats, it may also be hard to tell when they're fully loaded.
The Board of Trade said you could fit 60 people in a lifeboat, but they didn't take into account the sweep of the oars, which took up a lot of space. In other words, if you filled the boat, you couldn't then move the oars, which is not a very sensible situation if you think you've got a 500-mile row ahead of you.
Also, it was very cold that night, and the Board of Trade didn't take into account motoring clothes and coats. Some people got in the lifeboats with luggage and even a small dog, for example. So, in other words, the sort of general chaos of it was not taken into account by the Board of Trade.
And in fact, lifeboats that, when you count them up on land, look to have been quite empty would have actually looked much more full at the time.
Unfortunately, the lifeboat drill scheduled for that morning was cancelled by Captain Smith. And these boats have never actually been lowered with people in them.
One reason for getting the lifeboats away, in some cases quite empty, was because they felt that the falls might not take the weight of everyone. They felt it was safer to load them more fully when they were actually buoyant on the surface of the sea. So that's why a lot of the boats were lowered when they weren't full.
But I do believe, controversially, I think Lightoller did have in mind that he wanted to leave a few spaces in the lifeboats for crew, and there were 900 crew, to be able to swim into the lifeboats afterwards.
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Chapter 4: Why were many lifeboats launched only partially filled?
They're going to launch the lifeboats, but you're all back on board for breakfast. And so thinking that this was what was going to happen, they started to lower the boat, and my father put my mother and I without any trouble at all.
Boat 14 is on the port side of Titanic, under the supervision of Second Officer Lightoller, meaning there's no room for Eva's father.
He told me to hold my mummy's hand and be a good girl, that's all he said. He made the attempt to get in himself. He helped other women and children. That was it. I never saw him again.
By now, it's not just first and second class passengers like the Harts who were hoping to board the lifeboats. Some steerage travelers too have made their way up onto the boat deck, very much against the odds.
The lifeboats were located on the promenade deck, and that is where first and second class were. Now, the third class promenade deck was at the stern, where there were no lifeboats. So there is a structural thing that the third class are having to travel further to get to lifeboats.
Professor Jerome Chertkov, author of Don't Panic! The Psychology of Emergency Egress and Ingress.
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.
The ship is a bewildering maze of corridors. Even the officers and the crew of the ship were not, you know, there was a new ship. Nobody was really familiar with it. So officers who had, you know, great experience at sea would say that they couldn't find their way around the ship. You know, one crewman said that he was on the ship for a week before he really knew his way around.
And so trying to get around the ship was very, very difficult. The ship was designed to make it difficult so that steerage class passengers wouldn't accidentally wander into first or second class areas.
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Chapter 5: How did class and ship layout affect passenger access to lifeboats?
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Did you know that the team behind Titanic Ship of Dreams makes other podcasts too? Discover them all at Noisa.com, the home of the Noisa podcast network. Real Dictators, also hosted by me, Paul McGann, returns on April the 30th with the story of Fidel Castro. Head to Noisa.com to find out more.
By half past one in the morning, it's not just passengers who are appearing on the increasingly crowded boat deck. Firemen, like my great uncle Jimmy McGann, are emerging from the bowels of the ship as well, and they are causing quite a stir.
a number of these engine room crew flooded up into what was normally passenger areas. And in fact, there is one account where a Stoker appears completely black from head to toe in coal dust, but with quite a lot of blood spattered over their face and clothes. And they were missing a number of fingers on one of their hands.
So I think it gives you a picture of how shocking that time was when people were getting ready to get in the lifeboats.
On Titanic's upper decks, the assembled masses are a motley bunch, sporting a wide variety of outfits. Financier Benjamin Guggenheim has emerged from his cabin in his best evening dress, declaring that he intends to die as a gentleman. White Star boss Bruce Ismay, meanwhile, is still in his pajamas, with a suit and coat hastily thrown on top of them.
As first-class passenger Helen Candy writes, it was a fancy dress ball in Dante's hell. Normally, men like my great-uncle Jimmy would never be sharing deck space with the ship's wealthiest passengers. Titanic has always been carefully segregated, a microcosm of Edwardian society, from the ultra-rich luxuriating upstairs to the dirt-poor migrants down in steerage. And never the twain shall meet.
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Chapter 6: What were the experiences of third-class and Lebanese passengers during evacuation?
Chapter 7: Who were some notable passengers and crew during the evacuation?
Chapter 8: What role did Titanic's band and senior officers play during the sinking?
Everyone can hear themselves think again. The cheery strains of ragtime music performed by Titanic's band are clearly audible for the first time. The instructions given by the officers loading the lifeboats can be understood. For now at least, the passengers are behaving in an orderly fashion.
The officers may have armed themselves with revolvers ten minutes earlier, but it doesn't look like they'll have to use them. By 1 a.m., Titanic has taken on more than 15,000 tons of water. Mathematically, her designer has calculated, the ship is doomed. But she's sinking so slowly that there's little sense of panic up on deck. Eight decks below in boiler room five, it's a different story.
Water is pouring in through a two-foot gash in the wall. It's coming from boiler room six, which is already completely submerged. Now the engineers are trying to stop the same thing happening in number five. But thanks to the clouds of steam coming off the boilers, they can see only a few feet ahead.
Leading fireman Fred Barrett hauls open a manhole in the floor, attempting to access the pump valves. But when assistant engineer Jonathan Shepherd runs over to help, he falls into the hole, breaking his leg. Shepherd's colleagues carry him into the adjoining pump room before returning to their work. The pumps help a little, but it's not enough.
The bulkhead between boiler rooms five and six is failing. In less than 15 minutes, it gives way altogether. Thousands of gallons of water pour in. The engineers race for the ladders that lead to the deck, clambering up as the water level rises beneath them. But no one thinks of poor Jonathan Shepherd with his broken leg. He is still down below in the pump room, unable to move.
At 1.10 a.m., Shepherd drowns. the first victim of the iceberg that sinks the Titanic. From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is Titanic Ship of Dreams, part seven. While chaos reigns down in the boiler rooms, up on deck, Titanic's senior officers are doing their best to calmly usher passengers into the lifeboats.
On the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch has already lowered two boats into the water, numbers five and seven. But his counterpart on the port side, Second Officer Lightoller, has yet to launch his first. In the absence of clear instructions from Captain Smith, the two men are approaching the same job very differently.
Specifically when it comes to the old seafaring mantra, women and children first. Closhio and Vetterholm.
Light told her on the port side he allowed no men into the boats. There were men standing by the boat and they refused to enter. And they died, of course. On the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch allowed anybody into the boats. And actually, afterwards, over 80% of all the surviving male passengers, they had their lives, thanks to William Murdoch.
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