With Titanic about to plunge beneath the waves, those left behind must decide what to do with the few precious minutes remaining. Two men are shot for disobeying orders. And Bruce Ismay makes one of the most controversial decisions in the entire Titanic story… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Josyann Abisaab, Stephanie Barczewski, Jerome Chertkoff, James Delgado, Julian Fellowes, Clifford Ismay, Tim Maltin, Stephen McGann, 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 | 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 happened to Titanic at 1:41 AM?
It's 1 41 AM on April the 15th, 1912. RMS Titanic has developed a 10 degree list to port. It's bad enough that fifth officer Wilde is ordering passengers to move over to the starboard side to compensate. The ship is not only down at the head, but twisting too, like a whale about to roll on its side as it plunges beneath the surface.
By now, all but four of the ship's wooden lifeboats are already in the water. Wild and Second Officer Lightoller are still working on filling boats four and ten on the port side. While on the starboard side, now more crowded than ever, First Officer Murdoch and Sixth Officer Moody are lowering boats thirteen and fifteen. But there's a problem.
Chapter 2: What were the challenges in launching lifeboats?
Boat 13's route down the side of Titanic is blocked by a surge of water exiting the ship. The pumps down below are sending large quantities of seawater up and out of the sinking vessel, and now it looks like number 13 may be swamped by it. Soon the flood of water is rushing into the boat. The passengers must act fast, or they'll be sunk before they've even reached the ocean.
They scrabble about for the lifeboat's long wooden oars, hoping to push themselves off from Titanic's hull. But the oars have been lashed together for safekeeping, and several people are sitting on top of them. Eventually, they manage to get at the oars and push themselves clear of the rushing torrent. They hit the surface of the ocean with a splash. But now there's a new problem.
Chapter 3: How did the passengers escape Titanic?
The outflow from the pumps is shunted lifeboat 13 towards Titanic's stern, and another boat, number 15, is directly above them. The men up on deck working the davit cranks have no idea that the boat they're lowering is heading for a collision. The passengers in 13 are shouting up at them, but in the chaos, no one can hear their cries. Fifteen is getting closer by the second.
Soon Thirteen's passengers can stand up and touch the bottom of it. They're going to be crushed, or drowned, or both. Fireman Fred Barrett has pulled out a knife. He's hacking away furiously at the ropes still holding them to the side of the sinking ship. Fifteen edges ever closer. Finally, Barret's blade cuts through. Thirteen is free.
They push off, clearing Boat 15's landing zone just as it crashes down onto the water. The screams of Titanic's passengers die down, for now at least. Soon, both 13 and 15 are moving away from Titanic. They need to get to a safe distance and fast. No one wants to be sucked into the whirlpool when the biggest ship in the world goes down.
From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is Titanic, Ship of Dreams, Part 8.
The panic seemed to me to start after the boats had gone.
Titanic survivor, Eva Hart.
When we were in the boat rowing away, then we could hear the panic of people rushing about on the deck and screaming and looking for lifeboats. I mean, you imagine being wakened, going up on deck to get in a lifeboat. You're told the ship is sinking. Where are the lifeboats? They've all gone. That's when the panic really started.
With all 14 of Titanic's regular lifeboats now launched, as well as two small wooden cutters, there are still almost 1,600 people left on the ship. Their only hope of survival is finding a place on one of the four collapsible lifeboats, A, B, C, and D. Life rafts might be a better term for them.
Flat hulls, made of a mixture of wood and cork, with canvas sides that can be pulled up to make them slightly more seaworthy. Each collapsible has room for another 47 passengers, so this is very much the last chance saloons. Professor Jerome Chertkoff, author of Don't Panic.
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Chapter 4: What were the events leading to the collapsible lifeboats?
It's around this time that my great uncle, Jimmy McGann, arrives on deck. Until now, he's been down in the boiler rooms, helping to keep the water at bay. My brother, Stephen.
The firemen were all busy. They were all downstairs. The compartments were rushing with water rushing in. They tried to control it, but eventually the water was going from one into the next. The game was up about 20 to 2, fully up.
My great-uncle was in the bottom of a ship with more than 2,000 people, some already away, 2,000 desperate people above him on walkways and gangplanes, and he's at the bottom.
Thanks to the accounts of Titanic survivors, Stephen has managed to piece together Jimmy's movements that night. He even found him mentioned by name in the first book published about the disaster, Colonel Archibald Gracie's The Truth About the Titanic.
From about 10 to 2, he's up on deck. I know because I then started to, in a sense, triangulate the different stories. Suddenly I realized I can do what detectives do. I can say, all right, it's 2 o'clock. Where is he at 2 o'clock? Because according to his story and Gracie's story and Lightoller's story and the telegraphist's story, they're starting to come together.
Colonel Gracie is a former soldier and an amateur military historian. His father was a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. With his broad walrus mustache, he cuts an imposing figure, and at 54, he remains a man of action. Along with Second Officer Lightoller and telegraphist Harold Bride, Gracie works to free the collapsibles from the roof of the officer's quarters, helped by Uncle Jimmy.
By the time he gets up there, there's desperation. The ship is already angled in and the front of the bow is already in the water. People are looking towards the stern because the stern's getting a bit higher. The people have still got their heads. Lightoller, helped by Gracie, helped by Bride, the telegraphist, they noticed that two of these boats are still undetached.
And so they tried to get these away, but they got stuck. The first one, A, couldn't move at all. They gave up on A. So then they tried to move B. And this is a race. This is a real race against time because they can literally see the waves coming in. There's madness all around. They're trying desperately. Gracie famously said, I threw them my penknife to help.
Jimmy's up there trying to help them. They finally get it released, and what they do on top of this first floor, like a sort of porter cabin, if you can imagine a porter cabin, they've laid oars up at the top of this porter cabin to try and get this, because it's heavy, it's a huge oak thing.
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Chapter 5: Who was Bruce Ismay and what decision did he make?
They recovered his body, but it was covered in soot and everything else.
Yeah. I mean, to be somewhat gory about it, his face was utterly, I mean, and this is a famous man, you know, everybody knew what he looked like and his face was utterly unrecognizable. So it was just the fact that because he was a rich person, his clothing was monogrammed, right? So everything was JJA and that's how they were actually able to identify him.
The collapse of one of the funnels also has an unexpected consequence. The water displaced by this sixty-ton hunk of metal is enough to get collapsible Bea afloat. The stranded raft is suddenly propelled out to sea, with telegraphist Harold Bryde and writer Archibald Gracie clinging on for dear life.
The strength funnel falls down onto the starboard wing bridge and then sploshes down into the water. It creates a tidal wave, if you like. It creates a huge wave that flips over collapsible B and pushes it away from the ray.
It's now about a quarter past two on the morning of April the 15th. With the last lifeboat gone, the 1,500 souls still on board Titanic are all out of options. Some rush desperately to the stern of the ship, which is now rising precariously up in the air. Others take their chances diving into the icy ocean. Among them, Second Officer Lightoller.
He swims in the direction of the crow's nest, which by now is only just above the water. But as he ploughs forwards, he can feel something pulling him down. And it's getting stronger. Lightoller is swimming over an air intake shaft that runs all the way down to the engine room. And the rush of water being sucked into it is now pulling him down too.
A few meters beneath the surface, he slams into the metal grating at the top of the shaft. He can't move. It looks, for all the world, like he's going to drown. Then suddenly, a massive air bubble is released, pushing Lightholler back to the surface. He swims away from Titanic, making for collapsible B.
Only a couple of minutes after Lightoller's desperate plunge, Captain Smith is seen leaping into the water as the bridge of the ship begins to sink underneath him. Though accounts of the captain's final moments vary, some have him nobly standing at his post as the bridge is submerged. Others see him valiantly rescuing babies.
There's this idea that captains are supposed to go down with their ships in this kind of heroic way, you know, help to save all the passengers and then nobly go down with a ship. Because that idea is so strong, there were certainly myths about Captain Smith that were invented later.
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Chapter 6: What were the consequences of Ismay's decision?
Somehow, Uncle Jimmy ends up in the water near Collapsible B, the very lifeboat he himself helped to launch. He clambers onto its upturned hull, shivering with the excruciating cold. Against almost unimaginable odds, this lowly trimmer has found his way off the Titanic.
When I first heard about Jimmy, cynically and through ignorance, I didn't know where he was or how he might have survived. I didn't know how he got into a lifeboat. And my first cynical view was, did he sneak in like they say some of the stories where? Did he take a woman's place?
did he wear a frock how did this man was he a coward you don't know was he brave was he a coward you don't know the story and so finally finding this out you actually find out no no by sheer dint of luck he finds himself near the collapsible he's been trying to let loose it's turned upside down it has an air pocket in the bottom and one or two men are already beginning to try to scramble on it he swims up
He manages to get onto it. He's joined in the next few minutes by Gracie, by Lightoller, by a number of famous others. And very quickly, it starts to fill up with crew members, people who were tough enough and lucky enough to get there.
It's from Collapsible B that Uncle Jimmy will witness Titanic's final moments, as the ship snaps in half and then plunges under the surface. From a distance, there's a brutal elegance to it. But up close, it's utterly horrifying.
The reality of Titanic after the lifeboats left is just too ghastly. It was like a living hell. It was absolutely like carnage on the battlefield.
Everybody who's still on the ship will have retreated to the stern by that point, right? Because that's the part of the ship that's the most out of the water. But the stern, you know, I think probably, you know, all kinds of things were exploding and blowing up, you know, just as it went under.
The keel itself was actually ripped in half, if you can imagine that, by the forces of the waterlogged bow and the buoyant, still airtight, if you like, stern, sort of fighting against each other.
Titanic's stern is 30 degrees up in the air now. Water is gushing down the grand staircase. Anything not bolted to the floor and not already under water is crashing down towards the bow of the ship, putting even more pressure on its metal spine.
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Chapter 7: How did the Titanic tragedy reflect human choices?
Catholic priest Thomas Biles turned down a place in a lifeboat to minister to the steerage passengers, hearing confessions and performing the last rites. He's now on the poop deck, surrounded by kneeling men and women, praying the rosary. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Titanic's Lebanese passengers, meanwhile, are facing the end in their own way.
At the very end, when they realized that they were doomed, that they weren't going to be saved, one of them said, let's all break out in the traditional Lebanese folkloric dance called the Dapke. And so they all, you know, lined up together shoulder upon shoulder and started dancing this traditional folkloric dance.
Susie Miller's great-grandfather, Thomas, is one of almost 700 crew members still on board in the ship's final moments. Recently widowed, he's left his two sons behind him in the little village of Bonnie before.
He probably knew for most of the time that Titanic was sinking, that he wasn't going to have a chance. He was trying to give his kids a better life and he was actually ending up leaving them orphaned through no fault of his own. But those thoughts must've been going through his head that, Oh, what have I done to my children? I've left them with nobody.
Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from the Titanic disaster?
At 2.20 on the morning of April the 15th, 1912, Titanic's bow slides beneath the waves. Then the keel finally drags the rest of the ship down with it.
Some people say they were able to just step off the stern without any waves. One person says they didn't even get their head wet when they stepped off the back of the ship.
But as Titanic plunges towards the seabed, almost 4,000 meters below, the forces acting upon it begin to increase. At some point, the ship's spine is broken altogether, leaving two separate shipwrecks to make their way to the bottom. Marine archaeologist James Delgado.
The bow detached and tore away and because it is designed as a bow to move hydrodynamically, it basically just kept going. It turned a bit and just slowly dove into the seabed and struck at an angle and came in. The stern dropped more or less straight down.
There was an enormous air pocket inside the stern. And if you compress air, it becomes explosive. So the whole stern more or less imploded. So if you look at the wreck today, the whole stern is just like junkyard. The deck is turned upside down and everything is more or less completely destroyed because of this enormous pressure.
The stern is just a mess. It's just a tangled mess of metal and cables, and it's hardly recognizable at all. And you get a sense of the kind of violence of the last moments of the ship from seeing that.
And what then rains down afterwards is all of the smaller stuff, particularly those items that aren't metal, which are also sinking to the bottom.
In the next episode, with the world's largest ship disappeared without a trace, those in the lifeboats are left there in horror, bobbing in the waves. Fierce arguments break out over whether to row back and search for survivors. And as the cries of the dying give way to an eerie silence, the lucky ones must huddle together, waiting desperately for dawn. Is anyone coming to help them?
That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Titanic Ship of Dreams right now, without waiting, by subscribing to Noisa Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description to find out more.
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