First Class Smoking Room's toilet

[Arun Vajpey]

If a passenger within the First Class Smoking Room wished to use the toilet, where was the nearest one?

 

[Matthew Chapman]

The Smoking Room had a bathroom forward of the galley vents in the Funnel #4 casing, directly accessed from the smoking room on either side of the casing.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Thanks. If someone emerged from that bathroom immediately after the collision, would there be a convenient window or porthole through which they could have seen the iceberg sail past? (Checking on George Rheims' statement to that effect)

 

[Matthew Chapman]

They would have had to have gone immediately to the aft staircase and onto the promenade. I doubt the iceberg would been visible through the stained-glass windows.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Thanks. I am trying to picture how George Rheims could have seen the iceberg drift past a 'window' as he came out of a toilet - as he claimed at the Limitation of Liability Hearing in November 1913. It is thought that Rheims and Joseph Loring were in the First Class Smoking Room just before the collision; from Rheims statement, it looks like that they decided to retire at some point and the French-American man went to the toilet (presumably the one closest to the smoking room) before going to his cabin. According to him he felt the jar whilst in the toilet and as he came out, saw the berg go past "through a window". He then went on to his cabin, which, as he told the Hearing, was Cabin A-21. He also told them that that cabin was on the port side, whereas it was in fact it was on the starboard side. But on his biography on ET, it says that Rheims and Loring occupied adjoining cabins on B-deck but no cabin numbers are mentioned.