Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (14 page)

The senior operator, John “Jack” Phillips, was a serious young man from the village of Farncombe, near Godalming in Surrey. He had just turned twenty-five on April 11, and had been with British Marconi for six years. Phillips graduated top of his class at the Marconi training school in Liverpool, and subsequently had worked on the Teutonic,
Lusitania, Mauretania, Campania,
and Oceanic. In addition, he spent three years at the high-powered transmitting station at Cliffden in Ireland. Like many young men who become involved with emerging technologies, Phillips was enthralled by wireless, quite knowledgeable about the theory behind it, and adept at turning a practical hand to getting the best performance out of his sometimes temperamental equipment.

His assistant, the junior operator, was only twenty-two. Harold Bride hailed from Bromley in Kent, and had only been with Marconi about eighteen months, his first assignment being the Haverford in the summer of 1911, followed by short stints on the
Lusitania,
the
Laftanc,
and the Anselm.

Both Phillips and Bride had learned a great deal more at the Marconi school in Liverpool (the students there called it the Tin Tabernacle) than simply the dot-dash rudiments of Morse. Courses in electricity, magnetism, radio-wave propagation, troubleshooting of equipment, and the new regulations of the Radiotelegraphy Convention were all included. An enduring complaint about wireless of that era was the deliberate interference often caused by operators of one company with the signals of another. While such incidents did happen, they were the exception rather than the rule, since such interference could work both ways. (The worst offenders were the German Telefunken operators.) The Radiotelegraphy Convention was very clear about how wireless operators were supposed to conduct themselves, and quite explicit about certain types of transmissions. One type of message that was absolutely forbidden to be interfered with was a distress call.

The courses in radio wave propagation explained to the operators the effect of the ionosphere on wireless transmission and why both transmission and reception were clearer and longer ranged at night than during the day. Of course, this benefit in range and clarity meant that the majority of the wireless operator’s work was done during hours when most of the rest of a ship’s crew would be asleep, though not always. There was no requirement for a twenty-four-hour wireless watch to be maintained by any ships, so the wireless operators usually worked a schedule set for them by the ship’s captain. On the Titanic, this meant that Phillips and Bride alternated shifts, twelve hours on, twelve off, seven days a week. Smaller vessels with only one operator usually had a fifteen to eighteen hour shift.

The work was not difficult in the conventional sense, but the long hours of enforced immobility and intense concentration as the operator sat at his table, key at hand and headphones on, were exhausting. The pay did little to compensate for this: Phillips, for example, as senior operator, only made £8 a month, Bride only £5. It was the knowledge that they were part of a small, select fraternity, capable of snatching messages seemingly out of the thin air with their ungainly looking apparatus that kept most operators at their stations.
³⁸

Of course that ability fascinated others as well. Passengers especially took an almost childish delight in sending messages to friends and families from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, a good deal of Phillips’s and Bride’s time was taken up with private messages that had nothing to do with the ship itself, mostly of the “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here” variety. The messages had to be handled, since the passengers were paying for the service, but they tended to cause the work to get piled up and occasionally interfered with traffic important to the safe navigation of the ship. Unfortunately there was no set procedure for handling messages on the
Titanic-or
any other ship, for that matter—unless the message was specifically addressed to the captain. Otherwise, Phillips and Bride took care of any incoming messages as best they could.

April 14 was no exception. The
Titanic’s
wireless was a brand new unit—1.5 kilowatts, powerful for the day and relatively long ranged—but a bit balky, so Phillips had trouble all day getting his messages sent. About 9:00 A.M. he took down a report from the Cunard liner Caronia that told of “bergs, growlers, and field ice at 42N, from 49 to 51W.” He sent Bride to the bridge with the message, and Fourth Officer Boxhall plotted the position on the chart, as well as posting the message in the wardroom. About twenty minutes before noon the Dutch liner
Noordam
reported ice in much the same area, and at 1:42 P.M. the message from the Baltic was received. This one went directly to Captain Smith, who showed it to Ismay, who in turn pocketed it. The Amerika, a German ship, sent a warning about ice a few minutes after the Baltic, mentioning that she had passed two large bergs at 41.27 N, 50.8 W The Amerika’s message was addressed to the U.S. Hydro-graphic Office, but her set wasn’t very powerful, so she asked the Titanic to pass it on, and Phillips did so, keeping a copy for the ship.
³⁹

If anyone on the bridge had bothered to plot all the positions in these reports, he would have seen an immense belt of ice seventy-eight miles wide stretching across the
Titanic’s
projected course. Instead the messages were scattered across the ship, one already plotted by Fourth Officer Boxhall, another languishing in Ismay’s pocket, the rest somewhere in limbo between the wireless office and the bridge.

About midafternoon the
Titanic’s
set went on the blink and Phillips spent the next four hours locating the fault and making repairs. It was frustrating because the traffic kept piling up, and there would be a huge backlog once the set was fixed. Just a little after 7:00 P.M. he got the wireless working again, and he began to attack the stack of messages on his desk. At 7:30 the Leyland liner Californian called to warn the Titanic about “three large bergs five miles to southward of us” and gave her position as 42.3 N, 49.9 W That meant the ice was only fifty miles ahead of the
Titanic.
⁴⁰

—Ecdesiastes 8:6

 

 

 

AT 6:00 PM. ON SUNDAY, APRIL 14, SECOND OFFICER LIGHTOLLER CAME ON watch, relieving Chief Officer Wilde on the bridge. Wilde commented to Lightoller that it felt rather colder than usual, and indeed it seemed that the temperature had plummeted once the sun had set. Lightoller agreed, and after a while decided to call up Jim Hutchinson, the ship’s carpenter. Remarking that the temperature had fallen four degrees in the past hour, Lightoller told Hutchinson to watch out for the ship’s fresh water supply—if the temperature continued to fall, there was a chance it could freeze. Hutchinson agreed to keep an eye on it. Catching the attention of Trimmer Samuel Hemming, Lightoller told him to secure the forward fo’c’s’le hatch; otherwise the glow of light coming up from below was enough to ruin the night vision of the lookouts in the crow’s nest.
¹

Lightoller was sharing the watch with Sixth Officer Moody. Recalling the message he had seen posted in the wardroom, the one from the Caronia, Lightoller decided to hold an impromptu test of Moody’s navigational skills, and asked the young sixth officer when he thought the Titanic would be nearing the ice. After a few seconds’ thought, Moody answered sometime around 11:00 P.M. Lightoller was disappointed—he had already worked out the answer as being close to 9:30. Clearly, Moody’s navigation wasn’t up to snuff.

It didn’t occur to Lightoller that Moody may have based his answer on a message the second officer hadn’t seen. In addition to the
Caronia’s
warning, there were the warnings sent by the Noordam and the Amerika, which had been sent to the bridge, although no one later seemed to know exactly what happened to them. There was also the message from the Baltic still sitting uselessly in Bruce Ismay’s jacket pocket. And, unknown to anyone on the bridge, yet another message had arrived, this one from the Atlantic Transport liner
Mesaba.
She had sent out a detailed warning, reading, “Lat. 42 N to 41.25 N, Longitude 40 W to 50.30 W, saw much heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs, also field ice.” The Titanic was already inside the rectangle described in the
Mesaba’s
message, and had Captain Smith known this he might have considered changing course or reducing speed. But this last message was still sitting under a paperweight on Phillips’s desk, and the other warnings were going unread or unheeded.

Captain Smith was mindful of the danger, however. Already he had laid out a course for the Titanic that took her at least ten miles south of the normal shipping lane, a precaution against the ice that had drifted unusually far south this spring. At dinner he tapped Ismay on the shoulder and asked for the
Baltic’s
message back, saying he needed to post it on the bridge, which he then did.
²

After dinner, George Widener invited Smith to a special reception he was giving to honor the captain’s retirement. Smith, who liked Widener and his family, was pleased to attend, and it was with some reluctance that around 9:00 P.M. he excused himself and returned to the bridge, saying that he had to attend to the ship. There he stopped to talk with his second officer as they peered out into the cold April night. It was by all reports an exceptional night—it was extraordinarily clear and calm, conditions that made both Smith and Lightoller less than happy. Smith remarked on the cold.

“Yes, sir,” Lightoller replied, “it’s very cold. In fact it’s only one degree above freezing.”

“There is not much wind.”

“No, it’s a flat calm, as a matter of fact.”

“A flat calm. Yes, quite flat.”

Lightoller then remarked that it was a pity that the breeze had so completely died, since the chop a breeze usually kicked up would make it easier to spot any ice ahead as it washed up against the base of a berg or growler. Smith was sure that the visibility was good enough that even a “blue” berg, that is, one that had recently overturned, would be spotted before it could present a danger. Just before 9:30, Captain Smith told Lightoller he was going to his cabin. “If it becomes at all doubtful, let me know at once.”
³

The sudden drop in temperature had driven all but the most hardy passengers inside. Since this was the next to the last night out, it was the custom for the First Class passengers to dress in their most resplendent attire for dinner. (The last night out was reserved for packing.) The ladies looked ravishing in their evening gowns; the gentlemen were dashing in their white tie and tails. Even Mrs. Henry Harris put in an appearance, in the best theatrical tradition, though she would have been excused if she hadn’t: earlier that day she had tripped and fallen down one of the staircases, breaking a small bone in her arm. Once Assistant Surgeon Simpson had set the arm in plaster, Mrs. Harris gamely insisted on dressing for dinner, earning a compliment from Captain Smith for her pluck.
⁴

In Third Class another of the seemingly endless dances was getting under way. In the middle of the merriment, a large rat suddenly appeared out of nowhere, eliciting screams of terror, some real, some feigned, from the young women. A handful of the men dashed after the offending rodent, and the dance was under way again.
⁵

After dinner about a hundred Second Class passengers had gathered in their Dining Saloon for the traditional hymn singing, led by the Rev. Earnest Carter, an Anglican priest, while a young Scottish engineer named Douglas Norman played the piano. All of the hymns sung were chosen by request, and Reverend Carter held the little gathering’s attention by preceding each selection with a brief bit of information about the hymn’s author and sometimes a history of how the particular hymn came to be written. When Marion Wright prepared to sing “Lead Kindly Light,” he explained that the song had been written in the aftermath of a shipwreck on the North Atlantic.

Kate Buss, who had come to hear her new friend Marion Wright sing, noticed that many of the people gathered in the dining saloon were powerfully moved by Miss Wright’s singing, some of the men even having tears in their eyes. At one point, Reverend Carter’s wife Lilian was seen covering her face with her hands, lost either in deep prayer or deep emotion. Not surprisingly, then, more than a few of the hymns chosen dealt with the dangers of traveling by sea, and Lawrence Beesley, a young school teacher from London who was traveling to see his brother in America, remembered how movingly everyone joined in to sing “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.”

At 10:00 P.M. First Officer Murdoch walked onto the bridge to relieve Lightoller. The first thing he said was, “It’s pretty cold.”

“Yes it is. It’s freezing,” was Lightoller’s reply. He then went on to tell Murdoch that the ship might be up to the ice any time now, adding that the water temperature was down to thirty-one degrees and still dropping; that the carpenter had been warned not to let the fresh water supply freeze up; that the crow’s nest had been specially warned to watch out for ice, specifically small bergs and growlers; and that the captain had left word to be called if “it became at all doubtful.” With that, Lightoller, looking forward to a warm bunk, bade Murdoch good night and went off to his cabin. While Murdoch was relieving Lightoller, Quartermaster Hitchens relieved Quartermaster Oliver at the helm. “N 71 W,” Oliver murmured, giving Hitchens the
Titanic’s
current course.