Titanic by Kevin Brown

Author:Kevin Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / Maritime History & Piracy
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2025-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

She noticed that the boats were not full when they were launched and believed that ‘the excessive loss of life came from gallantry carried to an extreme’ and suggested that ‘if the authorities put more lifeboats on this they must label them “for men” or they will never use them’.77 She busied herself with helping other women into the boats, speaking in French to one woman who could not understand the instructions she had been given in English. She herself felt that she owed her life to two men who had acted as escorts for her during the voyage and were to the last keeping an eye on her, the department store buyers Edward P. Calderhead and James McGough, who ‘practically threw me into the boat with the words, “you are going, too”’. The boat was lowered ‘as gently as if it were a boat drill’. At this stage, ‘it all seemed like a play, like a drama that was being enacted for entertainment. It did not seem real.’78

It was not long before this flamboyant, energetic and business-like woman took charge of the lifeboat. In order to keep warm she took an oar and helped with the rowing. Irritated by the pessimism of Robert Hichens, the quartermaster in charge of the boat, who moaned that they stood no chance of survival because they had no compass, food or drinking water, she ‘told him to be still or he would go overboard. Then he was quiet. I rowed because I would have frozen to death. I made them all row. It saved their lives.’79 Together with Helen Candee and Julia Cavendish, she argued for going back to save any survivors after the ship went down, but could not bully everyone else into agreeing with her, while Hichens told the women to row and not risk the boat being submerged by any of the survivors trying to clamber aboard.80 As the sun came up, she marvelled that:

The most wonderful dawn I have ever seen came upon us. I have just returned from Egypt. I have been all over the world, but I have never seen anything like this. First the grey and then the flood of light. Then the sun came up in a ball of red fire.81

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