The Fatal Journey of Third Class Men on the Titanic

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Following British Board of Trade regulations, in case of an emergency there were designed routes by which passengers from each of the classes, respectively, were assured access to the lifeboats launched from the Boat Deck of the Titanic. In the testimony of Edward Wilding—a designer of both the Olympic and the Titanic--before the Parliamentary inquiry, there is a clear delineation of these routes. Wilding ‘s testimony is distilled in the form of a list in Appendix 1.

According to Wilding, the Third Class men at the forward end of the ship were intended to go in any of 3 ways up to the forward Boat Deck, where there were 6 standard lifeboats, 2 smaller emergency boats, and four collapsibles. There was an ‘outside route’ (#12), which involved the climbing of a series of ladders from the lower decks to the forward Well Deck, from there entering the front of the Bridge Deck, and then climbing one of two ladders up to the extreme forward end of the Boat Deck. Third Class passengers generally were free to go to the forward Well Deck (the ‘Third Class Open Space’), but under normal circumstances they would not have been permitted to proceed from there to the Bridge Deck and so on.

The other two were ‘inside routes’ off Scotland Road on E Deck. Each led up to First Class areas on D Deck, from there to the First Class ‘grand staircase’ and up the latter directly to the forward Boat Deck. One of these routes (#13) required the Third Class men to enter an ‘emergency door’ leading up to the forward First Class entrance on D Deck. The other (#14) corresponds to another route mentioned by Wilding (#5) designed for those in the First Class quartered relatively toward the stern on the starboard side of E Deck. It required the Third Class men to go farther aft on Scotland Road, to the so-called ‘steward’s stairway’ and from there again up to D Deck to the grand staircase. Both of the exits off Scotland Road in these last two routes were out of bounds to Third Class passengers in usual circumstances, and for that reason most of the men would not have been liable to take them, and would not have known where each led in any case..

Two things become clear from Wilding’s testimony. In order for the hundreds of men from the front quarters to have reached the forward Boat Deck, as they were intended to do in an emergency, they would have had to have been guided by those in authority through areas of the ship from which they were accustomed to being restricted, and with which they were therefore unfamiliar. Secondly, however, we can infer that had they been expeditiously guided by stewards along these 3 designed routes, it was logistically quite possible for large numbers of the men in the forward quarters to have made it up to the forward Boat Deck in time to have been loaded into the lifeboats launched from there beginning as early as 12:25 and as late as 12:45AM (Appendix 2).

The fact is, of course, that for whatever reason, and whether justified or not, no such rescue effort was made. There are numerous detailed and highly credible accounts of the loading of the First Class passengers into lifeboats on the forward Boat Deck (e.g., Gracie, 1913: 173-86; 225-48). It is, after all, the ‘stuff’ of the popular story of the Titanic. In none of these accounts is there so much as a suggestion that either prior to or during the launching of the forward lifeboats, any major contingent of Third Class men were guided up to the Boat Deck, via either the forward Well Deck or, certainly, the grand staircase. Actually, other than the occasional ‘Frenchman’ or ‘Italian’ jumping into one boat or another there are no allusions to Third Class men on the forward Boat Deck during this period at all. With one weak exception (Albert Pearcey), who we will touch upon below, no stewards or any others from the crew claimed to have directed Third Class men along one of these routes either. Nor have any surviving men reported being directed in this way. And, indeed, there were virtually no men (or women) from the Third Class loaded into the forward lifeboats;7 even those launched from the starboard side roughly half of whose occupants (among passengers) were men (Appendix 2).

There is an indication (but admittedly little more than an indication) that some Third Class men, rather than being guided to the forward Boat Deck, were to the contrary detained on the forward Well Deck. This is implied by some testimony of the AB, John Poingdestre at the British inquiry. He told of an odd scene he’d observed within the first hour of the accident, while on his way to the forward Boat Deck from the forward Well Deck. He is being questioned here by Butler Aspinall:

What are we to make of this? We can be fairly sure these men, 50 to 100 of them according to Poingdestre, did not go from the forward Well Deck up to the Boat Deck while the forward lifeboats were being loaded and launched. Conceivably the men were detained on the Well Deck until the lifeboats were safely launched and were then allowed up to the forward Boat Deck. This seems unlikely because of the two late boats, Lifeboats 2 and 4, launched at 1:45 and 1:55AM respectively (Appendix 2). By the time the latter were launched the water filling the bow was reaching up to the forward Well Deck, the latter going under at around 2:05AM (Quinn, 1997: 38). It is hard to believe the Third Class men (or the stewards) would have remained on the open deck for so long (approximately an hour and a half) under these conditions. It is more likely that shortly after Poingdestre observed them, before the water had risen too high, and probably at the behest of the stewards, the men, still carrying their baggage, went back down into the ship to E Deck, where they joined the other men on the journey along Scotland Road to the stern of the ship.

Another matter bears remarking upon here. Second Officer Lightoller—the most senior officer to survive the accident—opened up something of a can of worms in testimony before the British inquiry related to the oft-repeated charge that the lifeboats launched from the forward Boat Deck were grossly under-loaded. It was set off by an exchange, in reference to Lifeboat 6, between him and the Solicitor-General—Sir John Simon. Lightoller refers vaguely to a plan to load Third Class men into the lifeboat once it was in the water through ‘gangway doors’ located on each either side of the ship at the level of E Deck abreast of the forward end of Scotland Road. These doors (as well as similar doors amidship and at the after end of the ship) opened up just above sea level and allowed entry into lifeboats with the use of portable gangways (B.: Wilding, 20474):

Shortly afterward, the Commissioner who headed the British inquiry, Lord Mersey (nJ e John Charles Bigham), questioned Lightoller more pointedly about this apparent effort early on to load Third Class men from E Deck into the lifeboats launched from the forward Boat Deck.

In addition, there is testimony by AB Archibald Jewel, and Third Officer Pitman, respectively (B.: 130-4; 15021-7), indicating that First Officer Murdoch, who was in charge of loading and launching lifeboats on the starboard side, had a plan of the same sort as Lightoller. It seems to have entailed picking up passengers off E Deck farther aft. Jewel, who was in charge of Lifeboat 7, testified that he was told by Murdoch ‘to stand by the gangway,’ which he took to mean the door off E Deck, amidship. Pitman who was in charge of Lifeboat 5 testified that Murdoch told him to ‘[k]eep handy to the after gangway,’ indicating a notion perhaps of rescuing Third Class women and children from E Deck at the stern.

Reading between the lines of all the testimony about these plans of Lightoller and Murdoch is the hard fact that they did not come to any fruition. We know this with a certainty because none of those in the lifeboats reported picking up any passengers from E Deck, once they were in the water. Apparently, no one laid down gangways or organized the Third Class men in the front quarters to enter these side-doors, and it ended at that. Lightoller concedes this point in an exchange with the Solicitor-General, where he once again is being pressed on the order he gave the boatswain to prepare the gangway door for the loading of passengers:

The upshot of the matter, however, is expressed most succinctly by the AB Thomas Jones, who was in charge of Lifeboat 8. When asked by Senator Newland at the American inquiry: "After you got down to the water’s edge, how do you account for the fact that more men were not put in, more passengers?" Jones answered: "If they had been down there we could have taken them (A)."