Dan Snow's History Hit - TITANIC: Survivors and Lost Souls

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

Part 3/3. News of Titanic's fate sent shockwaves around the world; stories and illustrations of that fateful night splashed across newspaper stands on every corner. One town was affected more than most: Southampton. It's said everyone in the Southern English port knew someone who had perished on the Titanic. In today's episode, Dan travels to the Southampton SeaCity museum to meet with Andy Skinner, Learning Engagement Officer and Titanic expert to discover what happened to survivors after the Carpathia arrived in New York and the effect on the town. You'll hear the stories of the crew who survived and had no choice but to go back out to sea, of artefacts rescued from the ship, like a watch that stopped at the moment its owner plunged into the freezing Atlantic and the fate of the unsinkable stoker' Arthur John Priest 'as Dan and the History Hit team search for his grave. Listen to part one of this series TITANIC: The Unsinkable Ship here and part two TITANIC: A Night to Remember here.This episode was produced by Mariana Des Forges. Mixed and mastered by Dougal Patmore. The Assistant Producer is Hannah Ward.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.We need your help! If you would like to tell us what you want to hear as part of Dan Snow's History Hit then complete our podcast survey by clicking here. Once completed you will be entered into a prize draw to win a £100 voucher to spend in the History Hit shop.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This is part three of a mini-series about Titanic, one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history. It happened 110 years ago this April. Parts one and two of the series follow the maiden voyage, a blow-by-blow account of the collision with the iceberg and the sinking of the ship. But in this part three, I'm visiting a city that was uniquely affected by the tragedy. Of the 685 crew members who perished when Titanic sank, 549 were from Southampton. So I'm heading to the Sea City Museum in Southampton. I'll be meeting Andrew Skinner.

He's a learning engagement officer at that wonderful museum. And he'll be talking me through the stories of survivors. He'll be showing me items rescued from the ship that made it back. We're also going to be finding out the astonishing fate of Arthur John Priest, the so-called unsinkable stoker, who you'll have heard about in parts one and two. And we'll be hearing about all those whose lives were changed forever. If you want to watch a documentary about Titanic as well as listen to wonderful Titanic content, you can do so at History Hit TV. It's the world's best history channel.

For a very small subscription, it's yours. It's yours for the taking. You just follow the link in the description of this podcast and you get two weeks free when you sign up today. But now, join me as I head to beautiful Southampton to check out the Sea City Museum. And you're in your wonderful museum now. there's the sound effects of the world's greatest sea city southampton we're surrounded by images of the port at its peak beautiful posters advertising exotic locations which you could travel to from here and you've got models of

some of the ships that would ply the sea routes to southampton and as part of that titanic the greatest ship then afloat was here as well absolutely but the some of the ships that would ply the sea routes to Southampton. And as part of that, Titanic, the greatest ship then afloat, was here as well. Absolutely. But the story of the Titanic in Southampton really begins in the 1840s when the docks are first built. And over the course of the second half of the 19th century, the town expands enormously. And you start seeing these great ocean liner companies like P&O, like White Star Line coming to Southampton. And it's in 1907 that White Star Line, the owner of Titanic, moved their transatlantic crossing from Southampton to America. And I guess that means they're crewing up their ships locally. Absolutely. Most of the crew that you'd have found on board these incredible ocean

liners would have been obtained in Southampton though of course they might be giving a Southampton address but they might be from elsewhere as well staying in one of the local lodges temperance hotels all of those kind of places down in the city centre and town centre as it was then before going out onto these ships and applying their trade. It does mean though that a tragedy like Titanic would have disproportionately fallen on just a few blocks and neighbourhoods of this city. Yeah often the poorer areas of the town, chapel, Northam, St Mary's, lots of stewards lived up in Shirley which are all districts of Southampton so each

had its own feel and its own sense of loss when the Titanic sank. This gallery has given me a great sense of the docks, the kind of background that's going to see the Titanic stuff. Yeah if you'd like to follow me we'll head into Southampton's Titanic story. Andy here we are we've got the noises of crowds waving goodbye to their loved ones on the quayside at Southampton. Very atmospheric. What about the other end? Well, the survivors of the Titanic arrived in New York.

There were loads of people just gathered, waiting for the carpenters to come in, hoping to find loved ones and hear news. Yeah, that's absolutely right. In terms of finding out, it was much more difficult than today in terms of news gathering. You're relying on Morse code, relying on half-truths printed in newspapers. So somewhere like Southampton, where White Star Line had offices, what you would have found is hundreds of family and friends of crew members descending on the White Star Line offices and waiting for news. And that's often shown basically lists of names,

people that were lost and those few lucky survivors too. It's so interesting, as you say, to think about the technology, because presumably they would have just posted up a list of names in the window of the office or something. That was the best way of getting news out there. It's definitely a form of that. And the confusing thing there, of course, particularly with Morse code, which you could only send once, really,

names get misread or misinterpreted. So sometimes people think that their loved ones have lost and then have the fortunate news that they've survived. And, of course, the opposite is possible as well. What was the effect on Southampton when news did break? It was like a gloom of sorrow descended on the town. It is probably the best way to describe it. It goes from just a handful of days earlier

where the largest, most beautiful ship leaves to knowing that that wonderful ship has gone and so many of the crew because they lived in the town they had this intimate connection with the town and also the ship as well so it was absolutely horrific and so the crew would be likely to get onto the lifeboats, or were they sort of last in the queue? Last in the queue is fairly accurate, to be honest. Of all the sort of passengers and crew, the crew have the least likely chance of getting onto a lifeboat. For obvious reasons, you know, women and children first is the order, and lots of the crew are going to be working down at the

bottom so for logistical reasons going to be quite difficult for them to get up as well. So the vast majority of the crew are killed of which how many were Southampton locals? The number we tend to look at is about 550 who give a Southampton address are lost on the Titanic. So this is a you know we think about Aberfan, we think about the great Sheffield flood, there's these great tragedies of our history, but this is a disaster for the city of Southampton. Yeah, absolutely.

For the people of Southampton, it was said, without much exaggeration, I think, that every single person knew somebody who'd been on the Titanic and that every street was affected in some way. And I think that that is borne out by what we know about those people that were on the Titanic and where they lived. It was an absolute tragedy. And 110 years on, we're still living with some of that today.

I live just near Sampton, and you do meet a lot of people who have family connections to the disaster, don't you? It's still a real thing. Yeah, and the thing, of course, about families is they get bigger and bigger over the generations. So you're not going to have to go far now to find people who are linked to the Titanic. I do have a sort of indirect link to the Titanic through my wife, who, again, not from Southampton. We both came here. But her relative was the youngest person on the Titanic and the last survivor.

Wow, the famous woman. Noreena Dean. Right, how wonderful. And what happened in the city? Were there consequences? I mean, did the company have to support families here? What were the ripple effects, the aftershock of the loss in the city? Well, in 1912, there was not really any such thing as the welfare state as we'd think of it today.

So in the immediate aftermath, what is set up is a charity called the Titanic Relief Fund. And this wasn't just in Southampton, though it played a major part here. It was nationwide. And what would happen for orphans and bereaved families is they would be supported by this titanic relief fund so that they could still afford to live in you know it cast this awful gloom over the whole town for decades to come and the people that lived here wanted to continue marking what had happened so you don't have to go far in Southampton before you start seeing memorials and sort of tributes whether it

be to the musicians or the engineers or the restaurateurs those little physical facts on the ground that remind people of this awful tragedy. I know from the second one there's a sort of rule that merchant seamen if their ship's lost you don't get paid while you're in the lifeboat do you know if the titanic's crew the survivors were paid on the rest of the journey back to new york and then back to the uk what you say is true for merchant navy as well so indeed their pay is stopped when the titanic founders at 220 on the 15th of april 1912 so yeah they do have their pays docked but some of them are able to make money in other ways and did they get a free trip back across the

atlantic or some of them stranded in north america no they're brought over but not necessarily straight away so there's this period of time when you find lots of crew members talking to the newspapers, giving often quite flamboyant recollections of what's happened. And of course, they don't mind if they're embellishing the truth a little bit. Oh, what kind of flamboyant accounts are there? Oh, the probably famous one is Captain Smith swimming around with a baby, passing it up to the lifeboat and then swimming off again. passing it up to the lifeboat and then swimming off again. Shots fired. You know, there's a lot made about shots fired and they often appear in the newspapers.

Officers shooting people. And that didn't happen. Difficult to say. It's possible, but it's difficult to say. So they can make a little bit of money then and then they're brought back to Southampton. The people in charge at White Star Line really wanted the crew back as quickly as possible because they didn't really want them

caught up in the American inquiry that happened afterwards so they did come back a little bit later coming into Plymouth usually before coming back to Southampton and most of them would have gone straight back to sea I suppose or some must have been traumatized gone straight back to sea, I suppose, or some must have been traumatised. Yeah, going back to sea, absolutely right. And in those days, you get paid for the job that you're on. You don't get, it's not annualised or anything like that, so you just get back on. And there are lots of examples of seamen who just do their own thing, carrying on. Speaking of all these people going back to sea, surely none more remarkable in terms of their subsequent lives than Mr Priest.

Yeah, he's an incredible one. He's one of two crew members who is on board three Olympic-class sister ships when tragedy is before them. So he begins for our story on the Olympic. This is the Titanic sister ship, and it's sailing out from southampton in september 1911 and it hits a navy ship called hawk whose captain was impressively named captain blunt the hawk basically crashes into the olympic and two of the olympics watertight compartments are flooded but she doesn't sink and she's able to sort of hobble back to southampton and and priest is on there he's then later on the titanic and he is

able to get onto one of the last lifeboats to survive he's a fireman so he stokes the boilers by all accounts he had sort of frostbitten toes so it's a little bit uncertain is he in the water or maybe he wades through a bit of water on board the ship anyway he survives there and then just a few years later he's on the third sister ship this is hmhs britannic by now it's the first world war and britannic is sailing near some islands of greece and hits a mine that had been laid there by the german navy perhaps a month or so before and he's on this as it sinks really quite quickly so survives and all three of the sisters goes off to sea survives other shipwrecks as well it's absolutely incredible so he's sometimes known as the unsinkable stoker for that reason was he lucky or unlucky good question he claimed

later in life that people thought he was unlucky and that's why people didn't want to go and sail with him but i suppose from his own instance he was pretty lucky man i'd sail with him as long as i was handcuffed to the guy yeah yeah it's all you know he's gonna cause an accident but at least he might get out of it that's right later in the first world war he's on a hospital ship called donna gall which is torpedoed she shouldn't really do shouldn't really torpedo a hospital ship but it is and he survives this one and he says he survives because he was in his brother's bunk and his own bunk was where the torpedo struck it's just mad like i say'm going to be handcuffed to that stoker. Did the shipwrecks eventually get him,

or did he die peacefully in his bed on dry land? He died peacefully in his bed here in Southampton. So he's buried here in Southampton and resting on land. What a life. What a life. More on Titanic after this. Over on the Warfare podcast by History Hit, we bring you brand new military histories from around the world.

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rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Here we are in the kind of room that you call Marconi Room, about radio communications. Famously, Titanic was quite advanced in its ability to communicate. Yeah, Titanic had some of the best radio equipment anywhere in the world it had won marconi a nobel

prize for physics just a few years before so the titanic was equipped with a marconi wireless set and of course when it syncs they need to use the various distress signals to try and get help that's including the new SOS. Including the new SOS. Yeah, here we go. And there was tragically a ship right nearby who could have come, had they heard that, could have come to the rescue. That's right. The Californian was perhaps an hour's steaming away. And tragically, they only had one Morse code operator on board, and by the time Titanic is asking for help,

after midnight, well, he's gone off duty. It's one of those what-if moments of which there are so many on the Titanic. You've got an amazing map here, haven't you, showing the distribution of casualties. Let's go have a look. So here we are going into a really special room for us, which depicts a map of Southampton as it would have been in about 1912.

The whole town is depicted, and throughout the town there are these red dots, each marking the home of somebody who was lost at sea. It's a traditional city. Before the suburbs expanded, so you're talking about quite a small city centre, we call it now. There's just red all over it. Some adjoining, some overlapping. So there'd have been a whole street there with five or six on it.

Yeah, that's right. The worst affected street is Oxford Street, where nearly 40 crew members are living there, for want of a better word, and most of them are lost. You know, the vast majority of them are. And some buildings, sort of sailors' homes, maybe have close to 30 people staying there. I mean, it's just unbelievable the effect of the sinking had on Southampton. It's like it's engraved the name Titanic through Southampton like a stick of rock. What's this cabinet at the back here? It looks like some interesting object. There's all sorts of fascinating things here. I always say every object tells a story, and there's a couple of amazing things here.

tells a story and there's a couple of amazing things here and one of them right in the middle is this it's a bracelet that has three hazelnuts on it and the hazelnuts belongs to a steward on titanic called walter nichols and he had them in his pocket while the titanic is sinking and the reason he does that is because for a lot of the time, Stuarts didn't really get breaks. So he would just have these snacks in his pocket, presumably with a nutcracker as well. And then as the Titanic is sinking, rather than eating them on the lifeboat,

which probably lots of people would do, he decides to keep them as a keepsake, as a good luck charm. And he gives them to his wife Florence and she turns it into this bracelet that we have on display today. Yeah well he was at sea all his life he went to sea when he was about 16 sailing out of Southampton to Ellis Island in New York but unfortunately on one trip back to Southampton there was a coal strike and they couldn't bunker the ship so no ship no sail no pay so they offered him a position on a ship one over one back if he liked it and they were happy he would stay on it if not he'd go back to his own ship again. And that one ship was the Titanic.

My name is Howard Nicholls. I am the grandson of Walter Henry Nicholls. He was going to be a second-class steward. So he was looking after second-class passengers in the bar, their requirements in the bedrooms, in the staterooms. It was a full-on job. It was virtually a 20-hour day he was working. He was also a registered lifeboatman, so that was one of the reasons why he was taken on so quickly. On the night of the sinking, he'd finished work the early hours of the morning, gone back to his bunk and he said he heard the engine stop and the ship

vibrate. So the engine just cut out, they were just drifting. A few minutes later the chief steward came along, got them all up and sold them what was going on but they didn't really know what was going on. So he went up on deck to have a look, saw ice on the deck, didn't see anything untoward, went back to bed again. About three quarters of an hour later, the steward got them up, boat stations, and of course he was allocated to Lifeboat 15. So he had to get up, get prepared, get to Lifeboat 15. And Lifeboat was eventually launched and just lowered into the water and rowed away from the side.

And they just rowed all night to try and keep warm. Being part of the crew, nobody looked after them. They were just sort of abandoned in New York. In fact they were told go and find another ship that shouldn't be a problem carry on from there. Well that he could not do because his seaman's book or certificate of discharge which we all carry working on ships was at the bottom of the ocean, and you need that to sign on another ship. Luck would have it, his younger sister was working in New York. He went to see her. She was a companion to a very wealthy socialite lady in New York, whose husband was a publisher. They helped him out. They gave him fresh clothes and telegraphed home so he knew his wife was being told what was going on,

that he'd actually survived. He sold his story to the Brooklyn Eagle and it was syndicated to the New York Times. And we've got a copy of that actual newspaper with his whole story written down complete of what went on that night. Our boat was one of the last to get away. None of us had any idea that the Titanic would sink. We knew the Olympic was on the way to us

and we expected that she would come in the morning to pick up the boats and take off the people who were left on the Titanic. As soon as we got a little distance off, I could see that she was down a good deal by the head because the propeller was sticking halfway out the water. Then came a big explosion and we could see a mass of black smoke. The boat seemed to lift right up out of the water and tilt up on end and then seemed to break and drop back. For one moment, she was right up in the air standing on her nose. That's when the people left on board went into the water. There were 1,500 to 1,700 left on the ship and most of them were thrown into the water by this explosion. Then a horrible shriek went up, cries for help and weird shouts.

You can imagine what it was like, 1,500 of them. If you have ever been around when they are feeding a kennel of dogs, that's the only thing I can think of that it sounded like. Then there was no other sound, just the crying of people. The ship quietly sank out of sight without a sound. We could see black spots of wreckage and hundreds of people struggling in the water. I won't forget those shrieks. The people on the Carpathia were surprised that there were so few of us left. They had expected to pick up everybody. If they

had, I guess there wouldn't have been much room enough on board to stand up. The passengers were distributed all about, and we were told to bunk wherever we could. After the Carpathia had got us all on board from the lifeboats, she started to cruise about. Bodies were floating all around and bits of wreckage. I saw chairs, cushions and pillows floating on the water. All the clothes anyone had were those they wore in the boats. Some women only had on their nightdresses and their outer coats, which they had put on to come up on deck. A lot of the men, like myself, threw on their clothes over their pyjamas.

Several days later and I'm still wearing mine. Eventually they shipped them back on a ship called the SS Lapland and then he had to be identified because he had no records of anything, classed as an illegal immigrant because he didn't have any details. He had to be recognised by White Star. That was difficult because he'd only signed on as a temporary, but they finally got him back to Southampton, back home to Kemp Road in Southampton.

He never uttered anything about the story of the Titanic whatsoever. We've had to do it all by research. What's your favourite object in the collection or the most special for you? Next door, there's a pocket watch that was found on the body of a crew member and it has frozen clearly when he went in the water. And, you know, there's something of that, the timelessness and that moment of tragedy and destiny all wrapped up in one. That's a pretty powerful object.

It's a very handsome watch. It's a bit tarnished. You can see it's been in the water. But it is scary. That's the point at which its owner went into the water on the most famous night in history. That's absolutely right. Those little moments connecting us to the past well we're just walking walking out of the gallery now and there's a huge wall with faces of all the crew members that were lost some we got photographs of many we don't just we don't know what they look like just simply lost

at sea written on over a silhouette an outline of a young man or woman. We just walked through the very noisy gallery when you've got amazing audio snippets of the inquiry that took place. It sounds quite adversarial. It sounds like they really did inquire very effectively into exactly what happened and try and learn lessons for the future. Yeah, there were two inquiries. There was one in the USA, which pretty much found Britain to be to blame. And then they had a much more thorough, in inverted commas,

inquiry here in Britain, up in London, where they definitely did inquire into things that had gone wrong, so the lack of enough lifeboats, or the fact the lookouts didn't have binoculars, was the Titanic going too quickly, for which they did have conclusions, though frustratingly for some, nobody was really held to blame. You know, nobody was put up in the figurative stocks, if you like. So some people always felt it was a bit of a whitewash.

Sounds very familiar. There's plenty of examples in UK history like that. What does the Titanic mean now? Because here we are in a huge museum dedicated to it. You get people from all over the world coming i mean is it what is going on with our relationship with titanic it's a really fascinating one it's one of those things that for really quite a long time after the ship sank people really didn't talk about it and it only maybe from the 1950s onwards people start becoming more interested in it then in the mid-80s when they discover the wreck that's a really big moment and then of course the various films that have been made skyrocketed its popularity particularly in the 97 movie with kate winslet and leonardo dicaprio for us here in southampton what i think is important is just getting a sense of how one tragedy can affect a whole town.

And remembering that, and with that, remembering too, the lessons that have been made in the past and trying to learn from that. Never gets boring, does it? Never gets boring. Thanks, Andy. Come to the museum, everyone. It's brilliant. So, Hannah, this is the picture. I think it's closest over there. It's a bit tricky to work it out,

but I think it might be over here. There's no headstone, which is making this slightly more complicated than it would otherwise be. Of course, there are other Titanic survivors here. They've got clear headstones. Obviously, the guy we're interested in doesn't. There's that lump. There's the stick. There's the white one.

This is where our man Arthur John Priest is buried it's hard to believe that he ended up here in his beloved Southampton beneath the turf when on so many occasions he could have died an icy death see his body lost I guess standing here is a reminder

for the people on board the Titanic even the survivors that terrifying night wasn't the end of their adventures, of their lives. Life went on. They returned to their communities, their families. They had to go back to sea in many cases. They had no choice. They had to work, make a living. So men like Arthur John Priest,

carrying the trauma of the Titanic, no doubt always within them, went on and lived very full lives in his case. Or most people focus on that spectacular wreck slowly rotting away on the Atlantic seabed. This too, this corner of a cemetery in Southampton, is also part of that story. well folks thank you very much you've been listening to history hits mini series on titanic 110 years on thank you to howard nichols tim malton andrew skinner and the sea city museum southampton it was presented by me dan snow produced by mariana day forge and hannah ward mixed and mastered by Dougal Patmore.