As Hundreds of Men Perished, One Ignored a Rumor to Survive

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Had you been a woman traveling in second class on the Titanic a century ago, your chances of survival were quite favorable — 86 percent were saved. For the men in second class, one of whom was my grandfather Lawrence Beesley, the odds were the reverse — only 14 percent survived, and the rest were drowned in the freezing waters of the Atlantic.

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: April 9, 2012

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Lawrence Beesley.

This week: The Titanic 100 years later; the science of science festivals; and rethinking the value of pets.

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Notions of male chivalry toward the weaker sex have since been cast aside, and it is no longer de rigueur for a man to yield his seat on a bus, or a lifeboat, to someone of the opposite sex. But in the Edwardian era it was a moral code with a force stronger than law. When the order was given on the Titanic for families to be separated and for women to board lifeboats first, no man rushed ahead.

I have often wondered how my grandfather managed to beat the heavy odds against his survival. But I was too young, while he lived, ever to ask such an impertinent question. I have since come up with a possible answer, based on many readings of "The Loss of the Titanic," a book he wrote within a few weeks of his rescue.

My grandfather earned first-class honors in science at Cambridge University and had discovered a new species of algae before he graduated. But instead of pursuing a career in science he chose to become a high school physics teacher in his home town, Wirksworth, in northern England. Perhaps he needed the steadier income — he was already married to his first wife and had a young son, Alec (who was to marry Dodie Smith, the playwright and author of "101 Dalmatians").

He left his next job, as a physics master at Dulwich College in London, to become a Christian Science practitioner. Given that Christian Science values spiritual healing over scientific medicine, this was a surprising departure for him. It was to meet one of his brothers, also a Christian Scientist, in Toronto that my grandfather bought a second-class ticket on the Titanic for £13 (about $60 at the time). He boarded the ship at Southampton on April 10, 1912.

Traveling at high speed through an iceberg field without searchlights, the Titanic brushed past an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on April 14. An underwater extension of the iceberg sliced through the ship's thin metal skin so smoothly that the passengers noticed no impact. The ship was designed to stay afloat with four of its forward sections flooded, but could not survive the compromise of six. It sank at 2:20 the next morning.

The captain ordered the lifeboats to be readied shortly after midnight. Presumably he knew that there were not enough to save everyone but did not advertise this information. Many passengers were at first unwilling to leave the vast ship, believing it unsinkable, and the first lifeboats left half filled.

My grandfather was standing on the top starboard deck of the boat with a large group of men when a rumor went around that the men were to be taken off on the port side. Almost everyone moved across the ship. Only he and two others stayed where they were.

Shortly after, he heard a cry of "Any more ladies?" from a lifeboat swinging level with the deck below. Leaning over the edge of his deck, he looked down at the boat.

"Any ladies on your deck?" a crew member asked him.

"No," my grandfather replied.

"Then you had better jump."

My grandfather put his feet over the side of the deck, threw his dressing gown ahead of him, and dropped onto the stern of the lifeboat.

Why did he decide not to follow the rest of the men over to the port side? Though he owed his life to that decision, the explanation he gives in his book is not entirely satisfying. "I can personally think of no decision arising from reasoned thought that induced me to remain rather than to cross over," he says.

As if in recognition that some more positive evidence for his non-decision would be helpful, he adds, "I am convinced that what was my salvation was a recognition of the necessity of being quiet and waiting in patience for some opportunity of safety to present itself."

The two passages are puzzling because in the first he says he made no conscious decision, and in the second he describes one. Isn't there perhaps something missing here, some consideration that he declines to make explicit?

He knew the ship was in distress because it had already launched distress rockets. The drastic separation of families, so that women could be given precedence, gave him grounds to suspect that there were too few lifeboats. And if so, what more hazardous place to be than in a crowd of doomed men? By declining to follow everyone else across the ship, my grandfather improved his odds of escape considerably.

Perhaps, in a more reticent age, he hesitated to describe such a cold calculation in print. Perhaps he did not wish to contradict the explanation he had already given to a Christian Science journal — that after ship met iceberg he read and reread the 91st Psalm , a favorite of the religion's founder.

In any event, I owe my existence to the fact that in those few critical moments he had the confidence to think differently from the crowd.

Nicholas Wade is a science writer for The Times.

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