Titanic: Ship of Dreams - 9. The Long Hours Before Dawn

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Titanic’s chief baker pulls off a miraculous drunken escape. Fierce rows break out as to whether to go back and search for survivors. Jimmy McGann balances on top of an upturned lifeboat, while a British baronet offers money to the crew in another. And as the cries of the dying subside, the lucky ones wait desperately for sunrise… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Josyann Abisaab, Stephanie Barczewski, Jerome Chertkoff, Julian Fellowes, Tim Maltin, Stephen McGann, Susie Millar, Claes-Göran Wetterholm. Special thanks to Southampton Archives, Culture and Tourism for the use of the Eva Hart archive. Visit SeaCity Museum for an interactive experience of the Titanic story (seacitymuseum.co.uk) Written by Duncan Barrett | Produced by Miriam Baines and Duncan Barrett | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design & audio editing by Miri Latham | Assembly editing by Dorry Macaulay and Anisha Deva | Compositions by Oliver Baines and Dorry Macaulay | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Recording engineer: Joseph McGann | Nautical consultant: Aaron Todd. Get every episode of Titanic: Ship of Dreams two weeks early and ad-free by joining Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get to Toronto's main venues like Budweiser Stage and the new Rogers Stadium with Go Transit. Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fares, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday anywhere along the Go network. And the weekday group passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online Go pass ahead of the show at gotransit.com slash tickets. Starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online Go Pass ahead of the show at gotransit.com slash tickets. It's 2.19 a.m. on April the 15th, 1912. RMS Titanic is sliding under the surface of the water. At the stern of the ship, a large number of the 1,500-odd men, women and children still on board have gathered,

buying themselves a few more precious moments. Hardly any of them will survive the sinking of the biggest ship in the world. But one man surprisingly will. His name is Charles Jokin, and he is Titanic's chief baker, a diminutive man just five and a half feet tall from Birkenhead, who first went to sea at the age of eleven. Now in his mid-thirties, Jokin is a seasoned sailor, with the liver of the saltiest sea dog. Half an hour earlier, when he realized he wasn't going to find a place on any of the remaining lifeboats, Jokin did what came most naturally to him.

He went back down to his quarters to get a drink. The exact tipple he knocks back in Titanic's final minutes will be debated over the years. Jockin will claim it was whiskey. Others will suggest it may have been his own home-brewed schnapps. Either way, by the time he returns to the boat deck, he's buzzing. Jockin goes onto second class promenade on B deck, where he starts flinging wooden deck chairs into the water, reasoning that these might serve as life rafts once the ship goes down. He then pops into the pantry on A deck and swiftly downs a glass of water. After all, if he does survive the night, he doesn't want to wake up with a hangover. Now Joggin hears the ship begin to creak, as the weight of the stern,

tilting out of the water at a steep angle, starts to rip it in two. He makes for the third-class poop deck, all the way aft. It's here that the remaining passengers are scrambling to make their last stand. Jockin grabs hold of a railing as Titanic begins to slide into the deep. By the time she goes under, the way he tells it at least, he simply steps off into the water as it rises to meet him, like somebody gently alighting from a moving lift. Jockin claims he doesn't even get his hair wet. It's a far-fetched story, the kind you might expect from a salty sea dog,

but the next bit is even more extraordinary. And for the most part, at least, it seems to be true. Somehow, while almost every passenger in the water succumbs to hypothermia, Jockens survives long enough to make his way to a lifeboat. Collapsible B, the half-sunk upside-down raft on which my great-uncle Jimmy and the ship's second officer, Charles Lightoller, are balancing precariously. A gang of men tightly gripping each other's shoulders, doing their best to prevent the flimsy wooden structure from capsizing. But there's no room for Jockin to join them. One of Titanic's cooks, Isaac Maynard, offers him a hand in the dark, but they can't risk bringing him on board and sinking the raft.

Jokin spends about half an hour treading water, still gripping tightly onto Maynard's hand, hoping that sooner or later, one of Collapsible B's current occupants might die of cold and slide off, leaving a space for him. But no dice. Eventually, the baker decides to try another boat instead. He makes for Lifeboat 12, only 50 yards or so away. Astonished to find a survivor in the water, the crew pull him in. He sits with them, shivering, sodden and frostbitten, waiting for rescue. How Charles Jokin survived in the water for so long remains a mystery, even more than a hundred years later.

The best theory he can offer at the time is that the alcohol in his system kept the cold at bay. Titanic's Baker, so this story goes, was saved by the ultimate beer jacket. But then Jokin isn't the most reliable narrator. He later claims he saw the iceberg that sank Titanic with his own eyes, and that a polar bear waved at him as it went past. From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is Part 9 of Titanic, Ship of Dreams. I don't know fully whether it's true or not. Professor Stephanie Baczewski, author of A Night Remembered.

The baker on the Titanic, what he does, and maybe because he does have a sense of what awaits him, is he starts drinking. And so he is able to actually survive in the water for a lot longer because he's basically put this antifreeze in his blood. You know, maybe your doctor would know this better than I do, but apparently alcohol, for all that it's not good for us, right, it is a natural antifreeze. And so he survives in the water for like 45 minutes and then is pulled out, right, of the water and actually does manage to survive. Dr. Josiane Abisap,D. I certainly don't advocate for alcohol in hyperthermia situations. As far as the flask of whiskey and the baker,

it is a plausible story, but it's not recommended. You know, a good rule of thumb is that, you know, a drunk man would usually freeze faster than a sober man. And in a survival situation, having all that warm blood away from the vital organs, which is called vasodilation, which alcohol causes, puts that person at greater risk for hypothermia. In the case of the baker, the water was cold enough to quickly tighten his blood vessel and kind of cancel out the effect of the alcohol. But it's thought that the relaxing effects of alcohol gave him the uncanny ability to remain calm, not thrash around, to conserve his energy and survive. So it did, in a way, bolster his courage

and decrease that feeling of cold, and therefore he was not as panicked as other passengers. Klaus-Johan Wetterholm. He's unique because he survived. I think he was more or less marinated in liquor. By the time Jokern is finally pulled onto lifeboat 12, in the early hours of Monday morning, pretty much everyone else in the water is already dead. We tend to think of Titanic's passengers dying quietly, either pulled down underwater with the sinking ship or gradually drifting

out of consciousness on the surface. There's a poetic nobility to such deaths, captured in the 1997 Titanic movie, in which Leonardo DiCaprio quietly freezes by Kate Winslet's side. But the reality is a lot more brutal. Eva Hart. You could hear the people screaming and threshing about in the water. That was the most dreadful thing. I remember saying to my mother once how dreadful that noise was, and I always remember her reply, and she said, yes, but think back about the silence that followed it. And I know what she meant, because all of a sudden it wasn't there. The ship wasn't there, the lights weren't there, and the cries weren't there. As if the world stood still for a while.

That was terrible. And we realised then, I suppose, that the absence of noise meant that the people we'd left behind we'd never see again. For seven-year-old Eva, that includes the father she left on the boat deck just half an hour earlier. Dr. Abisab's great-grandfather, Gerios, was one of the ship's 1,500-odd victims. I don't think he died drowning because he was wearing a cork life vest. He most likely died from hypothermia. And this occurs when the body temperature drops below 35 degrees Celsius. And the water where Titanic sank in the North Atlantic

was literally minus two degrees Celsius. So at that temperature, hypothermia sets in fairly quickly, I mean, within 15 minutes. It is an agonizing death, especially when you have that first cold immersion and that cold shock. Titanic second officer Charles Leitoler described it as being like a thousand knives being driven into one's body. And at that stage, that very first cold shock stage, it's quite common to gasp and to hyperventilate, meaning breathe very fast. But then what happens is you start shivering, your teeth start chattering, and as the body temperature falls further, at some point shivering stops and movements become slow and clumsy.

Thinking is blurred. Judgment is impaired. And people become more sluggish and slip into a coma. And then the heart and the breathing rates become slower and weaker. And eventually the heart does stop. Typically, in hypothermia, death occurs in about 30 minutes. There were reports from Titanic survivors

describing the cries of victims who were wearing their cork-like vests, lasting more than one hour. It's heart-wrenching for me to even think about my great-grandfather, you know, bopping in the ocean that night, that moonless night, and then drifting into unconsciousness. And I wondered, what was he thinking about? Alone in this vast ocean, was he thinking about his wife, Marta, and his six kids?

Was he thinking about his beautiful village in Lebanon by the Mediterranean? Was he having visions of the snow-capped mountains, the majestic mountains in Lebanon with its biblical cedar trees. I wonder whether he prayed in those moments and just put his faith in the hands of God. Yeah, it's a very hard image to think about. One by one, in the dark waters of the Atlantic, 1,500 voices fall silent. What we're left with are the often contradictory words of the survivors. 700 or so people spread across 20 separate lifeboats.

In the days and weeks after the sinking, it will become clear that those in the boats can't all agree on what they saw and heard that night. Some are adamant that the ship split in two before it sank, others that it went to the bottom in one piece. Psychology Professor Jerome Chertkoff Even in non-stressful situations, people's memory is not good. People make many mistakes. In emotional crisis, memory is even worse than it is normally. The survivors can't even agree on

what the famous band was playing before Titanic went down. Was it the 19th century hymn, Nearer My God to Thee? The popular waltz, or something else? It is very,

very confusing. There were eight musicians and they are wrongly today called the Orchestra of the Titanic. But there was a trio, and there was a quintet. And they only played together when the ship was sinking. That was the first time. Canadian passenger Vera Dick is in lifeboat three when Titanic goes down. Vera Dick and her husband survived in one of the starboard boats. And she said that she saw these musicians and she said that they were gallant, fantastic, and they played near my god to thee.

Now, Vera Dick's boat was about half a kilometer and a kilometer away from the sinking ship. So she must hear this tune when everything was collapsing and people were screaming and funnels falling and so on and so on. Second wireless operator, Harold Bride, he was jumping into the water about three minutes or so before the ship plunged. And he said, from aft came the tunes of autumn. So therefore, I tend to believe that what they did play in the end could have been very melancholic, beautiful waltz called Songe d'Automne, Autumn Dreams. Exactly what tune the band played might seem like a trivial matter. Certainly when it comes to that dark night of the soul in Titanic's twenty lifeboats,

there are more important questions to answer. This liminal period between disaster and rescue, those long hours before dawn, will later become one more source of controversy in Titanic's complex and contested story, as the ship's first and only voyage is picked over back on dry land. Nowhere is that controversy more apparent than in the case of the infamous Lifeboat One, what will come to be known as the Money Boat. Boat One is a small wooden cutter with a capacity for forty people.

But when it was launched at 1.05 that morning, there were just twelve on board, five passengers and seven crew. And despite Captain Smith's instruction to load women and children first, all but two of them were men. Two of Boat One's passengers in particular will come under scrutiny after Titanic's survivors arrive in New York. Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and his wife Lucy, otherwise known as the fashion designer Lucille. An Eton-educated baronet, Sir Cosmo isn't short of a bob or two. But his decision to offer money to the crewmen in his boat, while 1,500 people freeze to death nearby, will ultimately land Sir Cosmo in hot water. They do come in for criticism. You know, so there are these upper-class British people.

When they're in the lifeboat, the crew members start talking about how they've lost everything, right? They've lost basically all their possessions, all their uniforms. And so I think in a gesture that was genuinely meant to be a gesture of goodwill, they do give everyone in the lifeboat five pounds each to replace their lost possessions.

It then looks like afterwards that somehow they were paying off the crew members not to tell something nefarious, right, that had happened sort of in the lifeboat. Specifically, the decision not to go back and rescue passengers who were dying in the water. Susie Miller. He was supposedly giving them money so that they wouldn't go back in and risk having the lifeboat overturned. With 28 empty seats in Lifeboat One, that's a lot of lives that could have been saved. Julian Fellows.

They were accused of tipping the crew not to go back. He says it wasn't that and that it was just a gesture of goodwill because they said, you're all right, but we've lost everything. And he said, well, if we all survive this, I'll give you all a fiver, which is kind of better, I suppose. But, I mean, the this, I'll give you all a fiver, which is kind of better, I suppose. But I mean, the fact is he did give them all a fiver and he got into hot water because of it. And I mean, quite interestingly to me, my parents started going out in 1934. And at one point, my father took my mother to a drinks party of one of his great aunts in Onslow Square. And she was introduced to Lady Duff Gordon, who was still alive.

And my mother quite innocently said, that name rings a bell. And she said that Lady Duff Gordon said, we didn't do it, you know, we didn't do it, you know, and you realize that this was never below the surface with her for the rest of her life they joined is may as being the cowards of the titanic whatever the truth about sir cosmo's bunch of fibers the question of whether or not to go back and search for survivors is a tricky one. When the lifeboats are launched, most of them are not full. Some of the ones close to the end are pretty full, but most of them are not full.

There's lots of seats in them. So those lifeboats are launched. They row away from the wreck because they're afraid of the suction. There is, in fact, very little suction when the ship goes down, but they're afraid of suction when the ship goes down. So they row away from the wreck. And the other thing they're afraid of is that there's hundreds of screaming people in the water who are trying to get into a lifeboat. And there's empty places in these lifeboats. Some of the lifeboats are a third full. And so the lifeboats are then in the

dilemma of, do we go back and try to rescue people actually in the water. Between the 20 lifeboats, there should be room for almost 500 more people. And yet, when it comes to it, hardly anyone else is saved. I think we would all like to think that, of course, those lifeboats went back and they picked up people because that's what you do. Well, they didn't. The life lifeboat stayed exactly where they were because they're afraid of getting swamped right they're afraid that if they go back so many people are going to be trying to get the lifeboat that it's going to sink the lifeboat most of the lifeboats had somebody in charge it was either a junior officer or a quartermaster or some crew member who was in charge and had to make the decision ultimately whether to go back or not. And often passengers were divided according to accounts

whether they should go back or not. I think it's very difficult for people, even if somebody in the lifeboat was having a kind of twinge of moral conscience, or even if they were thinking, oh, I really want to go try to rescue my husband, you know, the other people in the boat are going to say, no, we're not going to do that. And it's very hard, right, for one person

to kind of convince a group to do something. The majority did seem to feel that it was crazy to go back because if you do, if you've had a thousand people in the water there and they're all going to try and get into our lifeboats, well, why wouldn't they? And as a result, we're going to die and they're going to die anyway, too. Tim Moulton.

Well, one of the most tragic things about Titanic is that as human beings, we're all programmed to survive. There were so many cries and screams going up that someone described it as like locusts, like listening to locusts. There was so much noise. And what we do know is the painful truth, that stronger people, such as men, were drowning weaker people, such as women and children and boys and things, because I'm afraid we are all programmed to survive, and they were all sort of a bit like rats in a trap. I don't think it's panic or irrational.

If you're in the water with a life belt on and a lifeboat comes within short swimming distance from you and 100 people, I'm going to swim to the lifeboat and try and get on before the other people do. You know, your life is now on the line. So I don't think it's panic that people were worried about. They were worried about the fact that

people would actually, in a sense, rationally decide, I'm getting on this lifeboat. I'll take a chance, it won't sink if there's more than 70 people on it, because otherwise I'm going to die. For those in the lifeboats, it's a night of tough decisions. Some of the toughest are taken on Collapsible B, the upside-down boat that my great-uncle Jimmy is balancing on top of, along with Second Officer Lightoller and a couple of dozen men. My brother, Steven.

He ends up in this lifeboat and very quickly it starts to fill up with crew members, people who are tough enough, lucky enough to get there. It's floating upside down, it's not that secure. It gets up to about 28, 30 people on this thing. And they quickly realise that it can't take any more, it's going to subside. Because there's very little buoyancy left in the upturned hull of this small, collapsible boat, which is much smaller than the other lifeboats, by the way. But they worry that new people coming on will swamp them. And then one of the most fascinating and terrible human parts of the episode starts,

related by all the major players, including my great uncle. Because what then actually happens is, we were lucky enough to get on here. If you try and climb up, we could all die. There was this dreadful decision of, in order to save who we have, we can't save more. For men like Uncle Jimmy, it must have been a horrifying experience. It's the trolley game. So they grab the oars and they're oaring their own friends, their own colleagues away. The blokes in the water, they call them. That's what he undoubtedly had to do to live i think the sinking of titanic put the people on class will be in an impossible situation i mean we talk nowadays about you know things like

ptsd but most survivors never spoke about those sort of unspeakable decisions that had to be made it's not only on collapsible b that such awful decisions are having to be made. Collapsible A, too, is very close to Titanic when she sinks. Close enough that the men and women inside it soon find themselves besieged by blokes in the water. Accounts from the official Titanic inquiry sound like something out of a zombie movie. When you read the inquiry, it becomes so alive because you think about what could I have done there? Could I have done something different? Something else?

How would I have reacted in a situation like this? I'm thinking about what another third-class passenger said. He was at boat A and they were fighting and the boat was turning up around and around and around. And he said there were about 150 people around me. And it was because I was strong and I could fight them away that I survived. It's horrible, he said afterwards, but in the circumstance like this, it's your life and nobody else's. At least on Collapsible B there's a clear chain of command to follow, thanks to the presence of Lightoller. He is the controversial figure who

launched boats half empty, rather than allowing husbands to flee with their wives. Who told thirteen-year-old boys that they should act like men rather than trying to escape the sinking ship. Now though, Lightoller is just what his fellow survivors need if they are going to make it through the night. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Lightoller was definitely someone who was capable of making very tough decisions. He was known by the other crew as a hard case. And given that the whole crew were hard cases,

he must have been a real sort of, what we would think of today as like an SAS man or a US Navy SEAL. He fairly heroically gets them to kind of lean one way or the other, keeps the thing afloat until most of them a few of them i think die because it's so difficult to stay on there but he saves most of those men the survivors on collapsible b are a mixture of titanic crew members including hard as nails black gangers like jimmy and passengers who would never normally have given them the time of day. Among them is the famous Archibald Gracie, who will later write the first book-length account of the disaster. There's a wonderful moment in Gracie's book where he's freezing cold, Gracie. This is a rich gentleman of history and leisure from the United States, a colonel and a military man's son.

His father was a confederate. And he says, and I looked at the man next to me, this lowly chap, this engine room worker, and he had a cap. And I said, good old chap, you know, you wouldn't mind lending me your cap. And this guy turned to him and he uses the phonetic and he said, and what would I do? With no deference at all, this guy's told him where to go. And all of those things, more things went to the bottom of the ocean at that time and parts of the systems that ran before went with them at that time when it's desperate and that was a very interesting moment. Gracie does manage to find some common ground with his fellow survivors.

Gracie and others said, look, what religion are you all? I know a bunch of Irish Catholics on there. Some of them were Methodists. Some of them said, well, all right, can we agree? Are we all up for the Lord's Prayer? And they said, yeah, okay. And they all said the Lord's Prayer on there. Because I was Catholic born and brought up in faith, prayer and they said yeah okay and they all said the lord's prayer on it because i was catholic

born and brought up in faith i don't have a faith now but i'm very grateful for the cultural faith i grew up in to get an understanding of the way that impinges on someone like gracie's worldview and on the way a human should suffer the way a catholic suffer and sacrifice, the way one can think of oneself in extremis, the way one might go into a disaster like that. It's very useful, very helpful even historically to go, oh yeah, I know that. I've heard this. I've sung these songs. I've heard this idea. It's a fascinating historical tidbit because it's about the way we see ourselves. But there's another very good reason for the men on Collapsible B to pray together. It helps drown out the screams of the remaining people in the

water. In some of the other boats, survivors have begun singing for the same reason. One of the songs performed that night is a popular hymnal, Pull for the Shore. Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore. Heed not the rolling waves, but bend to the oar. Safe in the lifeboat, sailor, cling to self no more. Leave the poor old stranded wreck and pull for the shore. We have to remember that these aren't just random people in the water, right? In many cases, they are the husbands and sons and relatives and friends and whatever of people in the lifeboats. In Lifeboat Six, the so-called unsinkable Molly Brown gets into a furious

argument with quartermaster Robert Hitchens, the man who was at Titanic's helm when the ship hit the iceberg. There are stories that said that Molly Brown and, in fact, other women in the lifeboats were saying, we need to go back. Hitchens' response is brutal. He tells them that by now there's no point looking for survivors. All they'll find in the water is a load of stiffs. And he isn't entirely wrong. By the time Lifeboat 14 returns to the scene of the disaster,

under the command of 5th Officer Harold Lowe, pretty much everyone in the water is dead. 5th Officer Lowe does go back, but even he carefully calculates, and this sounds horrible, so I apologize for having to say it, but he carefully calculates the right moment when the screams have died down, right? And he sits there and he says, OK, now there won't be so many people who will swamp us, so I can go back and at least rescue some few people.

As Lowe later explains it, he wanted to wait until the number of survivors had thinned out. We waited until it had thinned out. It's an extremely strong story in the U.S. inquiry, because the senators couldnS. inquiry. Because the senators couldn't accept it. They could not accept that somebody has the possibility to save people and still didn't do it. But under those circumstances, it was just suicide going back. You know, and this makes him sound quite callous, but in fact, again, he is the only officer who goes back, right?

The others don't go back at all. So Lowe goes back, but he only manages to pull, I think, three people out of the water. I think one of them dies later anyway. So he's miscalculated, right? He's left the people underwater for too long in that freezing water. They were all laying dead with their lifesavers on all around them. Like some horrible, bloody scene, you know? But now that the screams have stopped, there's an eerie beauty to it all as well.

There was a lot of phosphorescence in the water. And of course, you know, one doesn't think about this when there's 1,500 people struggling in the water. But as they were struggling in the water, they would have made bright fluorescent green angels as they were swimming from disturbing all the phosphorescence susie miller's great-grandfather tommy is among the 1500 who died that night you know perhaps my great-grandfather could have been rescued from the water. We just don't know. I mean, I try, I suppose, not to think about the physical aspects of what he would have gone through in those last hours of Titanic.

While I've put myself in his headspace to a certain extent, I just find it difficult to think about what it must have been like for him in those final moments. I don't want to think about that too much. For Titanic survivors, at around 4am on the morning of April the 15th, salvation arrives at last. They can just make out in the distance a rescue vessel, RMS Carpathia, steaming towards them. And then as the sun begins to rise, the new dawn reveals an astonishing scene. The lifeboats are surrounded on all sides by icebergs, 20 of them at least, each one a good 200 feet high. In the next episode, as RMS Carpathia arrives on the scene, Titanic's survivors are hauled aboard. White Star boss Bruce Ismay retreats to a private cabin,

refusing to speak to his fellow passengers. And as Carpathia makes her way to New York, both the US Senate and the American press are already planning where to pin the blame. That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Titanic Ship of Dreams right now, without waiting, by subscribing to Noisa Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description to find out more.