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104 Years Ago Today [April 15]: 'Titanic' Sinks

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April 15, 2015

It was the desperate cries for help that haunted John "Jack" Thayer after he witnessed the death throes of the Titanic as it reared, roared and plunged into the North Atlantic.

The shouts from those thrown into the icy water swelled into "one long continuous wailing chant", noted the teenage son of an American railway baron.

"It sounded like locusts on a midsummer night in the woods. This terrible cry lasted for twenty or thirty minutes, gradually dying away, as one after another could no longer withstand the cold and exposure."

Lost for several decades, his searing first-hand account will be published next month to mark the centennial of the catastrophe in April 1912. Amid the slew of books, documentaries, films, auctions, exhibitions and cruises commemorating the 100th anniversary of the disaster, A Survivor's Tale stands out for its power, intensity - and indisputable authenticity.

From his vantage point clinging to an upturned lifeboat, Jack watched the unthinkable befall what was supposed to be the unsinkable. All the more poignant was that his father, also called John Thayer, was among the 1,514 who perished in the seas in the early hours of April 15, 1912.

 

"We could see groups of the almost 1,500 people still aboard, clinging in clusters or bunches like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great after-part of the ship, 250 feet of it, rose into the sky, till it reached a 65 or 70-degree angle," he recalled.

In 1940, those recollections still vivid, he put them into print in privately-printed edition of just 500 copies for family and friends, which sat largely forgotten on relatives' bookshelves for the next seven decades.

Now, however, his compelling story is to be published by Thornwillow Press, specialists in hand-made letterpress printed books, after one of the originals was found by Lorin Stein, editor of the literary magazineParis Review and a distant relative of the Thayers. The copy was inscribed to his great-grandfather.

With appropriate historical resonance, the launch party for A Survivor's Tale will be hosted by the St Regis Hotel, a prestigious New York institution built by John Jacob Astor, who died on the Titanic.

"This is not just one of the most powerful first-hand descriptions of the sinking, but Jack Thayer also reflects back, after nearly three decades, on what was for him the end of the world that was, a turning-point when the modern world began," said Luke Pontifell, founder of Thornwillow.

Jack's account is brought dramatically to life by series of six illustrations, based on his graphic description of the stricken vessel's final hours and sketched just a few hours after the sinking. LD Skidmore, an artist who was aboard the SS Carpathia when it came to the rescue of the Titanic's survivors, made drawings as Jack relayed the events of the night before. According to Thayer family lore, Jack may have drawn the outlines first.

That the 17-year-old boy even lived to tell the tale defied the odds. For while 710 people, mainly female passengers, of the 2,224 aboard survived, almost all of them had escaped in lifeboats launched before the ship went down. Only about 40 who were thrown or jumped into the sea were rescued - and Jack was among them.

"About one in every 36 who went down with the ship was saved, and I happened to be one," he noted.

Mr Thayer and his wife Marian boarded with the Titanic with their son and a maid at Southampton on April 10. The ticket for two staterooms and servant quarters cost £110 17s 8d.

The vessel sped across the Atlantic at more than 20 knots on its maiden voyage, intent on a record time for the journey, despite reports of ice. "The weather was fair and clear, the ship palatial, the food delicious," he observed of life in first class.

After dinner on April 14, he walked the decks, recalling a scene so placid it was beguiling. "It was a brilliant, starry night," he wrote. "There was no moon and I have never seen the stars shine brighter; they appeared to stand right out of the sky, sparkling like cut diamonds.

"I have spent much time on the ocean, yet I have never seen the sea smoother than it was that night; it was like a mill-pond, and just as innocent looking, as the great ship quietly rippled through it."

He had said goodnight to his parents at about 11.45pm when he felt the ship sway slightly, veering to port "as though she had been gently pushed", before the engines suddenly stopped.

He and his father went upstairs to explore. The passengers remained calm, even when to their disbelief, one of the "unsinkable" ship's designers - with whom the Thayers had spent several evenings - told them he believed it would not survive an hour.

They went back to fetch Mrs Thayer and her maid, then all returned to deck, wearing life preservers of thick cork vests.

The ship's band, also in life preservers, played on as the vessel's officers remained at their posts. They fired distress rockets that illuminated the night sky, but they were ignored by at least one nearby vessel, the SS California, which passed close enough at 12.30am for its lights to be seen by many on the Titanic.

Shortly after 12.45am, stewards passed the word "All women to the port side" as lifeboats were lowered into the water, with people scrambling for spaces. The Thayers were separated in the throng - and while Jack's mother eventually made it to safety, he never saw his father again.

By 2.15am, the sinking liner was tilting sharply out of the water. "We were a mass of hopeless, dazed humanity, attempting, as the Almighty and Nature made us, to keep our final breath until the last possible moment," he noted of the mood.

The vessel then reared up and, amid a rumbling roar and muffled explosions, he decided to jump. "I was pushed out and then sucked down. The cold was terrific. The shock of the water took the breath out of my lungs.

"Down and down, I went, spinning in all directions. Swimming as hard as I could in the direction which I thought to be away from the ship, I finally came up with my lungs bursting, but not having taken any water."

Falling debris dragged him under water again and when he fought back to the surface, he came up against an overturned lifeboat. Too exhausted to haul himself, the men already clinging to it pulled him up.

To his shock, the other lifeboats, some of which had plenty of space, never returned to try and rescue those - very possibly including his father - calling for help in the water because of fears they too would be swamped.

 

 

 

"The most heartrending part of the whole tragedy was the failure, right after the Titanic sank, of those boats which were only partially loaded, to pick up the poor souls in the water. There they were, only four or five hundred yards away, listening to the cries, and still they did not come back. If they had turned back several hundred more would have been saved."

The Carpathia, a Cunard liner, had received wireless messages and was by now heading towards them. Thayer was on the last lifeboat to be rescued at about 7.30am, and at the top of the ladder, he saw his mother. Her joy was rapidly tempered. "Where's daddy?" she asked him "I don't know, mother," he replied.

The journey of the next three days was one of crushing sorrow. "The trip back to New York was one big heartache and misery," he wrote. It seemed as if there were none but widows left, each one mourning the loss of her husband. It was a most pitiful sight."

Mr Thayer later married the heiress to another railway fortune and pursued his own career in business. But in 1944, his beloved son, a US air force pilot, was killed over the Pacific and his mother also died.

Just a year later, in a tragic postscript to his tale of survival loss, Jack Thayer committed suicide, aged 50 - the same age his father when he went down with the RMS Titanic.

 

Titanic's First Story Told By Newspapers

 

A listless late shift dragged on that night in the newsroom of The Associated Press and, across town, at The New York Times.

The New York Times’ April 16, 1912, front page displays coverage of the Titanic disaster, an event that signaled the beginning of major international news story coverage.

Feet up on the AP city desk, an editor named Charles Crane read an H.G. Wells novel to while away the news-free night.

“Telegraph instruments clicked desultorily,” he said later, “and occasionally one could hear the heartbeat of the clocks.”

At the Times, the managing editor, Carr Van Anda, had returned from his usual late supper to an office where a forgettable story about a political feud was being readied for the front page. A copy boy dozed.

Amid this somnolence at a little after midnight on April 15, 1912, no one knew that, 1,000 miles away, the “story of the century” was breaking – news that would change so many things, including news coverage itself.

At that moment, off the coast of Newfoundland, the Titanic was two hours from sinking.

For more than an hour, the great ocean liner had been sending out distress signals. “CQD, CQD,” the coded Morse message repeated, then the now more familiar “SOS.”

The urgent calls were picked up by other ships – some of which turned toward the Titanic’s reported location for rescue – and the signals reached onshore receiving stations of the relatively new Marconi wireless-radio system.

There, each scrap of detail was eagerly snatched up, passed on, then passed on again.

In no time, the electrifying words reached New York. In the AP newsroom, Crane’s yawn became a gasp when a colleague burst in from an outer office waving a wire message from Canada: “Reported Titanic struck iceberg.”

Instantly, editors started contacting coastal receiving stations to glean whatever they knew, phoned the Titanic’s owners, cabled London for a list of passengers – who might now be doomed.

“We put out a ‘flash’ and the bare report of the crash,” Crane said years later in a recollection now kept in the AP Corporate Archive. That news story, stitching together the unthinkable bits of detail from wireless messages, went everywhere in seconds.

At the Times, the now wide-awake copy boy stood by as Van Anda absorbed the one-paragraph wire dispatch:

“CAPE RACE, Newfoundland, Sunday Night, April 14 (AP) – At 10:25 o’clock tonight the White Star Line steamship Titanic called ‘CQD’ to the Marconi station here, and reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said that immediate assistance was required.”

The Times presses already were running for an early edition. The managing editor fired off assignments and began composing a new front page, trying to make sense of the silence that, according to wire updates, had come after the repeated distress calls.

Editors of many other papers would respond by “playing the story safe by printing the bulletins and writing stories that indicated that no great harm could come to the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic. Not Van Anda,” wrote Meyer Berger in a history of the Times. “Cold reasoning told him she was gone. Paralyzing as the thought was, he acted on it.”

The great ship’s fate wouldn’t be confirmed for many hours. White Star Line officials cast doubt on the seriousness of the accident when reporters from the AP, the Times and others called. But the Times city edition headlines anticipated the worst:

“New Liner Titanic Hits an Iceberg;

Sinking by the Bow at Midnight;

Women Put Off in Lifeboats;

Last Wireless at 12:27 a.m. Blurred”

“In terms of news dissemination, the Titanic disaster can be seen as the beginning of what media guru Marshall McLuhan called the ‘global village,’ though he coined that term with 1960s satellite communication in mind,” said communications professor Paul Heyer, author of Titanic Century: Media, Myth and the Making of a Cultural Icon.

Stories poured forth – careful and factual or speculative and wrong.

“NO LIVES LOST,” a London headline reassured in the confusing early coverage. In Paris, Le Figaro lamented “La Catastrophe du Titanic.” Front pages in Australia echoed the tragedy for days. Reporters everywhere sought to localize the story – one paper even measuring the ship’s immensity by imagining it berthed on the town’s street grid. A Kentucky headline solemnly summed up: “Millionaire and Peasant, Shoulder to Shoulder, Go to Their Death...”

Errol Somay, who oversaw a Library of Virginia exhibit of the universal coverage, said: “The thing that struck me was the news cycle – like 9/11: the coverage of the chaos of the event, then the human interest stories, then the fingerpointing. ... We have to figure out whom to blame.”

The Titanic story established “a full-speed-ahead, all-hands-on-deck kind of coverage,” as journalism educator Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute put it, that has been repeated in countless disasters since. “There’s evidence that that goes back to this event.”

The coverage showcased the benefits – and dangers – of seizing a new, instant-communication technology. It established standards and new standard-bearers.

The story became a turning point for The New York Times. Its coverage would distinguish it among the city’s 20 or so dailies, setting it on course to “secure claim to a position of preeminence ... among American newspapers that it would never relinquish,” wrote Daniel Allen Butler in his history, Unsinkable: The Full Story of RMS Titanic.

Broadcast news, too, got a strong push with this story. David Sarnoff, a young Marconi operator, made a name for himself with days of nonstop updates from a storefront window in New York, drawing crowds so large the police had to keep order. It was the start of a pioneering radio career that saw Sarnoff become the long-serving head of NBC.

The Titanic went down at a time when wireless, a technology that would become ubiquitous, was just taking hold – comparable to our adjustment today to Twitter and the like.

As the stricken ship’s messages were picked up, sometimes by amateurs with Marconi receivers, “you’d get these wireless operators that knew reporters and editors at newspapers, and they said, ‘Here’s what’s going on,’” historian Butler said in an interview. “This was very much a social network – they were using dots and dashes rather than images over an LCD screen.”

And sometimes, the fragments of news, traveling lightning fast, got garbled.

That apparently explains some first-day reports of the ship being towed to Halifax with everyone safe. Amid the wireless chatter crackling across the airwaves, someone asked about the Titanic passengers’ safety – and the response somehow got confused with a message that another vessel was safely under tow. Butler traced the mix-up to “two fragments picked up by a wireless station in Massachusetts.”

Balancing speed with accuracy is, of course, a reporting lesson that persists, as do others that unfolded with the Titanic coverage – about finagling eyewitness accounts, about debunking dubious official claims, about championing the release of information.

This news story can be divided into three parts, answering three basic questions: At first, reporters simply tried to clarify the “what” – what had happened 400 miles off the Newfoundland coast; when survivors finally arrived in New York on the rescue ship Carpathia, the “how” could be gathered from eyewitnesses; and finally, as official and journalistic investigations examined the disaster, the public would start to learn the “why” that has enthralled us for 100 years.

The Titanic’s owners, the White Star Line, contributed to the early, contradictory reporting with their silence or misleading statements. Rumors spread, along with hopeful speculation. Finally, an emotional White Star executive, Phillip A.S. Franklin, addressed the press.

He later described the scene: “I got off the first line and a half, where it said, ‘The Titanic sank at 2 o’clock a.m.,’ and there was not a reporter left in the room – they were so anxious to get out to telephone the news.”

Another information blackout followed: The Carpathia relayed lists of the survivors it had picked up but didn’t respond to the clamor for other news. It turned out that a Marconi company official had advised the ship’s telegraph operators not to divulge anything; the news would command greater value on arrival. In fact, a deal between Marconi and the Times for exclusive interviews of the radiomen had been worked out – a news-withholding arrangement that Giuseppe Marconi himself later promised not to repeat.

Editors knew the story would reach a crescendo with the Carpathia’s arrival in New York harbor, and they prepared as if for war.

“The Associated Press established headquarters in a hotel facing the dock where the Carpathia landed, with special telegraph and telephone lines reaching the general office at 195 Broadway,” a brief history in AP’s corporate archive reported. Supplemental staffers arrived from Washington and Albany, and the news service’s general manager, Melville Stone, spent the night at the emergency offices.

Other news organizations similarly girded. The Times booked an entire floor of the nearby Strand Hotel, and laid plans for 16 reporters to meet the ship. Van Anda had an ace up his sleeve: He sent reporter Jim Speers to meet Marconi, who was dining with a company official, John Bottomley. The Marconi men would be among the few allowed to board the Carpathia before passengers disembarked. Reporters were strictly forbidden.

When Marconi, Bottomley and Speers arrived together at the Carpathia’s gangway, a policeman barked, “Mr. Marconi can come, and his manager.” But who was the manager? Without hesitating, reporter Speers bounded aboard with Marconi. He sought out Titanic radioman Harold Bride, and interviewed him for a riveting front page story.

“‘Men, you’ve done your full duty. ... I release you. ... Every man for himself,’” Bride quoted the Titanic’s captain as telling him and his fellow radio operator Jack Phillips, as the end neared. “I looked out. The boat deck was awash. Phillips clung on sending and sending (distress calls). He clung on for about 10 minutes, or maybe 15 minutes, after the captain had released him. The water was then coming into our cabin.”

On page 3 of that edition of the Times – and on April 19 front pages from San Francisco to Boston – another harrowing eyewitness account appeared. Minute-by-minute, it detailed the unfolding disaster, including a view from the lifeboats just after the Titanic disappeared: “There fell on the ear the most appalling cries that human being ever listened to – the cries of hundreds of our fellow beings struggling in the icy cold water, crying for help with a cry that we knew could not be answered.”

Who wrote this widely disseminated story?

It was a rescued passenger named Lawrence Beesley, an English schoolteacher, who later explained: “It was written in odd corners of the deck and saloon of the Carpathia, and fell, it seemed very happily, into the hands of the one reporter who could best deal with it, The Associated Press.”

So another forbidden reporter got on the Carpathia? This was Richard Lee, an AP staffer whose unsung duty was to be a sort of journalistic sentry, meeting incoming ships at New York harbor’s “quarantine” before they docked.

“The AP office had forgotten him,” according to internal reports in the news service’s corporate archive. But somehow Lee “boarded the Carpathia down the bay and came up with her to the dock, met Mr. Beasley (Beesley’s byline was misspelled) and secured his story.”

Yet another journalist evaded the police embargo, though his story involved luck as well as pluck. Carlos F. Hurd of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch happened to be aboard the Carpathia for a vacation with his wife when it rescued the Titanic survivors. En route back to New York, he interviewed many of them, and then, defying the crew’s orders, hurled his copy, which he’d tied to a buoy, onto a tug sent alongside in the Hudson River by the paper’s fiercely competitive owner, Joseph Pulitzer.

Although Titanic news would remain on many front pages for weeks, it became a different story now.

There was coverage of the return of the dead. From Halifax, Nova Scotia, AP’s Frank Elser described the “rough coffins” stacked at the stern of a recovery ship.

Newspapers closely followed a U.S. Senate investigation, at which, among many others, some top editors were called to testify about how well or poorly the public had been informed. AP’s Stone spoke against withholding information from the public in a major disaster, calling it a “mistake to make merchandise out of that.”

When the Senate inquiry turned to whether aid might have reached the Titanic sooner, it got an explosive assist from a news story.

There were suggestions that the ship Californian, which had stopped for the night because of the ice danger, might have been close enough to make a rescue; its captain waved the notion away. But a crewmember, Ernest Gill, told The Boston American a devastating version of events: The Californian, its wireless turned off for the night, saw the Titanic’s repeated distress flares, and the captain was informed but took no action before going back to sleep. In the story, Gill estimated the ships were just 10 miles apart.

Once again, journalism became history’s proverbial first draft. On seeing the story, the committee summoned Gill, and his testimony added another colossal what-if to the Titanic narrative that has endured for a century in poems, songs, plays, movies, right down to TV’s “Downton Abbey” today.

“It was the unthinkable tragedy,” said Heyer, the communications professor. “Every factor that played into the Titanic becoming a myth played into the news coverage.”

 

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