It’s the night of April the 14th, 1912
and the Titanic is on its maiden voyage.
All the crew know that ice might be sighted.
However, it’s a moonless, quiet starlit night with no cloud.
The sea is as still as a millpond.
“Not a breath of wind and the sea like a sheet of glass”,
making the detection of icebergs very difficult.
A telegram is received on the Titanic’s wireless,
warning all ships of heavy icebergs in an area just ahead of the Titanic.
However the second officer,
and the one on watch, Charles Lightoller,
never receives the communication
and the ship steams on at 22 knots.
At 10 pm he is relieved by first officer William Murdoch and retires below.
A bell sharply rings out from the crows nest 3 times
and the call is heard:
“Ice right ahead sir!”
The command is given:
“Hard-a-starboard, full speed astern.”
But it’s too late
and the ship has been struck
and ice falls on the foredeck.
No one knows the ship has been pierced 6 or more times
below the waterline on the starboard side.
From this moment
nothing can save her.
Lightoller on his bunk feels a slight jar.
A “shiver that ran through the ship”.
The 4th officer puts his head around the door and says:
“Do you know we’ve struck an iceberg?
The water is up to F deck in the mail room.”
Lightoller runs up to the deck.
The ship has stopped
and the steam from all the boilers is roaring through the exhausts.
The noise is deafening.
Lightoller sees the captain,
cups his hands over his ear and shouts:
“Shall I get the women and children away sir?”
The captain nods
and Charles sets about loading the lifeboats,
strictly enforcing the women and children first protocol.
Only allowing men to board the lifeboats in the capacity of auxiliary seamen.
Everyone including Charles at this stage
thought it was just a precautionary measure
and the ship wouldn’t founder.
In his book he recounted:
“Actually the Titanic was so constructed
and divided into watertight compartments
that she would float with any two compartments full of water,
and the margin of safety made it fairly certain
that she would still have floated
even with three of the four forward compartments full up.
“Although I was fairly confident in my own mind
that she would not sink,
one has no right to risk an error of judgment
that may entail loss of life,
particularly when it is the case of the passengers you are carrying.
As it turned out,
she was holed in no less than six compartments along the starboard side,
and nothing could have saved her.”
By the time half the boats were gone
the bow started to go lower
and the creeping dread of the high water made it clear
that it was only time before she would slip beneath the surface.
The band started playing
“Nearer my God to thee”
Attempting to launch a lifeboat,
Charles found it was already occupied by 25 male passengers.
He forced them out of the boat yelling:
“Get out of there you damn cowards!
I’d like to see every one of you overboard!"
Every boat was lowered successfully
although some were not filled to capacity
in part due to concerns
that the winch system would not take the weight of a fully loaded lifeboat.
The last lifeboat was a collapsible raft
stowed upside down on the officer’s quarters.
Lightoller and another seaman cut the life raft free
and threw it down on the water which was now above the boat deck.
The Titanic took a sudden dip
and people were washed into the sea.
Lightoller started to swim away
but got sucked down and trapped against a grate.
That would have been the end for Lightoller
had a boiler not exploded.
In the swirling mass of water he got pushed back up to the surface
and found himself near the collapsible raft he had released earlier.
The raft was upside down
but Charles hung on to a rope attached to it.
The cables holding one of the Titanic’s gigantic funnels gave way
and the huge funnel fell into the icy water,
missing Charles by inches.
The impact washed the raft clear of the sinking ship.
There were about 30 people
who scrambled aboard the upturned raft including Lightoller.
Taking charge he watched as the huge liner sunk to the depths below.
He later credited his faith with his survival and said:
“With God
all things are possible.”
After being rescued
and as the most senior member of the crew
to return from that fateful voyage,
Lightholler was called to testify in several inquiries.
There was suspicion that his testimony wasn’t completely truthful
and there was a certain amount of shame
attached to being the most senior officer to survive
which must have been hard to bear.
In 1916 he was in the Royal Navy
and captain of a torpedo boat.
The boat was in the Thames Estuary
when it encountered the L31 Zeppelin.
These “super” Zeppelins were a triumph of German engineering.
They were vast at almost 200 metres long
and 24 metres wide
and had been wreaking havoc in London.
Lightoller decided to lie in wait in the Thames,
and ready the anti-aircraft gun with a tracer round.
From his book in his own words he said:
“Amongst my signalmen I had a chap
who had the most extraordinarily acute hearing.
I’ve known him to hear and describe sounds
quite outside the ken of anyone on board.
I told Number One to put him on the bridge
with nothing else to do but to keep his ears open.”
Only 10 minutes later
he signalled that he could hear something
and the Zeppelin Airship loomed into view immediately above the boat.
A battle took place
and 2 tracers hit the Zeppelin in the tail.
In return the airship dropped a storm of bombs,
in part in retaliation
but also to lighten the load
so the ship could rise and escape.
Lightoller said:
”How on earth we didn’t set him on fire and bring him down,
heaven alone knows.
Just absolute rotten bad luck.”
The Zeppelin was forced to withdraw and got away
but the encounter and his actions earned Charles the Distinguished service cross.
He was later given command of HMS Garry,
a river-class destroyer.
One of the more darker points in Lightoller’s career
occurred during this time
when as Captain, he was accused of a brutal incident.
He had successfully depth charged,
rammed and sunk a U-Boat.
The surviving crew were swimming
and Lightoller would not accept their surrender.
What’s more
the crew of the Garry allegedly opened fire on the survivors
under the orders of its captain.
In his memoirs the commander of the U-boat said
that this continued until other ships arrived at which point:
“As if by magic, the British now let down some lifeboats into the water.”
Lightoller never admitted the incident
but later wrote in his memoirs,
“…towards the submarine men,
one felt an utter disgust and loathing;
they were nothing but an abomination,
polluting the clean sea.”
After the war
Charles Lightoller retired
and purchased a motor yacht called the Sundowner.
He wrote an autobiography,
“Titanic and Other ships”
which sold well
until Marconi forced the book to be removed from sale
due to his comments on the role of the Marconi radio operators in the Titanic disaster.
In 1939 at the outbreak of war
his youngest son, Herbert
became one of the first casualties of the conflict
and was killed in action on the 4th of September.
Herbert was in the Royal Air Force
and had spoken to his father about aviation
and in particular the process of how a plane targets a ship.
Charles listened and learned.
A lesson that was particularly useful
when in 1940 the Sundowner was requisitioned by the Navy
to help with the evacuation of Dunkirk.
He was told to take his motor yacht to Ramsgate
where he would give the boat to a Navy crew.
He refused saying:
“If anyone was going to take her over, well
my eldest son and I were.”
Charles set off to cross the English Channel
with his eldest son Roger
and a 19 year old Sea scout.
The boat was licensed to carry 21 passengers.
Charles loaded the ship with 127 servicemen,
75 below deck and the rest on top.
On the way back they were attacked by a Stuka.
Charles remembered what his son Herbert had told him
and stood on the bow.
As the Stuka screamed down and lined up his bombing run
Charles waited and watched
and at the last possible moment
he yelled out to turn the boat
and the bomb splashed harmlessly
on the starboard side of the Sundowner.
Returning to Ramsgate
he unloaded the men where the chief petty officer exclaimed to Charles,
“My god mate,
where did you put ‘em?”
If parts of this story sound familiar,
in 2017 Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk was released,
where the character “Mr. Dawson”
played by Mark Rylance,
was inspired by Charles Lightoller.
Lightoller died in 1952
but his motor yacht, the Sundowner
can be visited today
in the Ramsgate Maritime Museum.
"Sorry, Jack,
there is only room for two.
Draw me like your French ladies."