The Fatal Journey of Third Class Men on the Titanic

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The troubling nature of the intentionality of the authorities when it comes to the journey of the Third Class men was not completely lost on the representative of the Third Class passengers, WD Harbinson, who pressed poor Steward Hart on the same point a bit later during the same hearing before the British inquiry. The exchange between these two gets as close to the heart of the matter perhaps, as any in the entire British inquiry:

There it is in a nutshell. If it made no sense for the men in the forward quarters to make a trek along a lower deck the length of the ship from bow to the stern, with all their possessions in hand, why did the authorities encourage them, even it seems direct them, to do so? Why didn’t the authorities, instead, direct them along the designed routes up to the forward Boat Deck, or through the gangway doors into lifeboats that were, after all, launched half-full? The full solution to this puzzle, to the degree there is one, is complex, and goes beyond the scope of this piece, but I will venture some remarks on it by way of a conclusion.

As a means of tentatively stepping into this forbidding territory, let me first quote from an unexpected source, but nonetheless perhaps the single individual in authority involved in the Titanic disaster who is universally praised for his actions that night: Captain Arthur Rostron of the Carpathia. There was no one more akin to Captain Smith as Rostron, either, in terms of what accepted wisdom would be as to how to react to particular situations that might arise in the course of their duties. In a document offered in evidence in the US Inquiry Report (A.) are Captain Rostron’s orders to the heads of various departments on the Carpathia in preparation for bringing the Titanic survivors into the ship. Here are some of his instructions to the Inspector and Chief Steward respectively (italics are added):

Much has been made of a supposed passivity in a crisis that, it is asserted, was part of the steerage culture, this being offered up as a significant reason for the high fatality rates among the Third Class.12 Not as much has been said, however, of the culture of those in authority on the Titanic. In particular, the view expressed frequently both by officers and First Class passengers, that the Third Class men were ‘dangerous individuals.’13 This comes out in its most extreme forms as racial allusions, animalistic images, tales of heroic threats, scoundrels caught, punishments meted out and so on and so forth, almost all directed at the Third Class men. Fifth Officer Lowe made such a spectacle of himself at the American inquiry that the Italian ambassador14 complained, and wrested a formal apology from him over his assertion (referring most likely to Third Class men on the after Well Deck) that:

It is not only in this extreme form, however, that the view of the Third Class men comes into play. We see it in the more benign (and more defensible) policy directive of Captain Rostron. It was, as the latter indicates, conventional wisdom to treat the steerage passengers (in particular the men) as an unpredictable and potentially destructive force that needed to be reined in. Thus, it was required, in Roston’s words, that those in steerage be ‘controlled’ and ‘kept out of the way.’

To be fair to the authorities—and in particular Captain Smith—there had been the wreck of the French ship La Bourgogne in 1898, which would certainly have been well-known in Smith’s and Rostron’s circle and no doubt had made an impression on them and other captain’s of large passenger liners. Witnesses reported that the lifeboats of La Bourgogne were overrun by men from the steerage, with women and children being forcibly prevented from entry to the point of being attacked with knives; almost no women or children survived (McKelvey, 2001). Mixed with pre-War English xenophobia and late-nineteenth-century notions of race this was strong stuff for the authorities to take.

Notable in the approach to the Third Class men adopted by the authorities on the Titanic is the connection forged between the principle of ‘women and children first’ as the operative rule for determining access to lifeboats, and the view of men from the steerage as ‘dangerous individuals.’ Apparently, the principle of ‘women and children first’ preceded by decades the wreck of the La Bourgogne, the latter indeed being infamous in good part because of its gross violation of the principle. It is said to date from the wreck of the British troop ship, the Birkenhead, in 1852. On the Birkenhead, so the story goes, the soldiers stood aside as women and children (for the most part family members of the officers) were allowed to enter lifeboats. All the women and children are said to have survived (Bristow, 1995: 99-100; McKelvey, 2001)).

The principle ‘women and children first’, for it to be a pure principle, required the sacrifice of First and Second Class men on the Titanic, who were not perceived as ‘dangerous’ but could not be exempted. And, heroically, they proved equal to the task.15 This in turn provided cover for acts of control, aimed at those whom the authorities viewed as dangerous. What was the point of bringing the men up to the forward Boat Deck if, by the principle, they would not be loaded into the lifeboats there anyway? Worse yet, on the Boat Deck these men would be infinitely more dangerous; liable to create a panic and over-run the lifeboats. This argument is all the more persuasive if, as seems to be the way Lightoller interpreted it, the principle in practice is not ‘women and children first,’ but ‘women and children only.’

This then is what we conjecture lies behind the seeming paradox of the journey of the Third Class men, whose long trek, burdened by heavy baggage, effectively led nowhere. The priority of the authorities, much like Roston’s instructions to the Inspector, was to get these dangerous passengers far away from the rescue effort. The only problem beyond that was tactical: what was the most efficient means to accomplish the end? Encouraging a movement of Third Class men the length of the ship to the stern would seem to have been that means.