Fight for survival

'I don't like jazz as a rule,' said one cool customer as the band played on and the Titanic sank. Another, seeing the squash court full of water, cancelled his Monday game. To mark this week's anniversary of the disaster, John Wright looks back at the events of April 1912 and the Guernsey passengers who lived and died IT WAS only a bump.

When the Titanic hit a iceberg in the Atlantic on 14 April 1912, many of the 2,200 people on board dismissed it as nothing and went back to bed.

The time was 11.40pm and none of them knew that two hours 40 minutes later almost three-quarters of them would be dead.

It was bad enough that Captain Edward Smith had ignored seven iceberg warnings, not issued lookouts with binoculars, failed to hold even one lifeboat drill and waited almost an hour after the first alert before ordering the lifeboats to be lowered.

Did the ship's designer really need to inspect the damage below for Smith to realise that, astonishingly, the walls of the so-called watertight compartments didn't actually go all the way up? Or that it was only a matter of time, as each overflowed into the next, before the Titanic would sink like a stone?

There were 16 Guernsey passengers on board: 13 men and three women - 21-year-old Emily Rugg and Lillian Bentham, 19, and Lillian Renouf, 33, both born in America of Guernsey parentage. All three women stepped into Lifeboat No. 12 and survived. Intriguingly, so did one of the men.

Stuart Collett, 25, was allowed a luxury not afforded to 50 of the 73 children travelling in third class who died that night. The boy preacher from Cobo justified accompanying two female companions into a lifeboat, saying: 'They have been entrusted to my care,' reported the East Kent Gazette on 4 May 1965. A second Guernseyman survived too, but under different circumstances.

Some of those lost were returning to homes and jobs in America. Clifford Parker, 28, was a clerk from St Andrew's, Charles Bainbrigge, a 23-year-old horse trainer and one of the heroes, and Albert 'Bert' Denbuoy, 25, was a talented footballer. He helped 19-year-old Joseph Duquemin, from St Sampson's, to put women and children into lifeboats until the very last moments.

According to a 1962 Times-Tribune newspaper report, Mrs Renouf credited her survival to Bert, who ran down eight flights to bring her on deck.

'Bert grabbed my fur coat from a chair as we left,' she said. 'I wrapped it around Mr Fitzpatrick when we rescued him from an overturned boat.'

The plucky Lillian had to be pushed onto the lifeboat by her godfather, who went down with the ship.

Bert didn't make it. Staying until the end in order to do a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid jump off the side with Joseph, he was a bit slower and got carried down with the ship's suction. Joseph reached a lifeboat, but the effort cost him dearly. Both his legs were later amputated. Decades afterwards, American JP Eva Hart arrived in Guernsey looking for Joseph's family. She wanted to thank them because Joseph had handed her his overcoat when she stood on the sinking Titanic's deck, aged just seven.

Laurence Gavey turned 26 when the world's biggest man-made moving object left Southampton on 10 April. Nine-year-old Roland Southwell was there to see the ship sail.

'All the people on deck were waving and throwing flowers down,' he said. 'They were all going into the sea.'

Other locals included Peter McKane, farmer Edward Wheadon, 66, carter Howard Harry Williams and coach painter Henry Mitchell, 73. Travelling in a party with Emily, Bert and Laurence, Mrs Renouf would lose not only her brothers, Clifford and Ernest Jefferys, but her husband Peter, 33, as well - victims of a spur-of-the-moment decision.

'The party was to have sailed Good Friday on the Philadelphia, but decided to wait for the larger vessel,' reported the Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey on 17 April.

'It was a beautiful clear night, the stars appearing like glittering points against the dark sky,' Lillian told reporters. 'I was partially undressed when the collision occurred. Some took it as a joke, but my husband and brothers burst into the cabin and hurried me to the deck. There, for the first time, the passengers saw their peril. People were hurrying back and forth. Orders were being shouted in all directions.'

The next day she read the headline, 'Gamblers on the Titanic', in the New York Times, suggesting that at least one of her two brothers was a professional gambler and part of a New York gang planning a mid-Atlantic scam.

'It was said that the group included Doc Owen, Jimmie Bell and Ernest Jeffery, otherwise known as Peaches,' said the article. But Lillian denied it, saying that it was her brothers' first trip to

America. The paper claimed their main target had been the richest person aboard, the brave Colonel John Astor, 47, reputedly worth £30m. and on board with his 18-year-old-wife, Madeleine, who was pregnant.

Col Astor helped Second Officer Lightoller hand Madeleine and 35 other women and children from first class into their lifeboat and, seeing that it was only half-full, asked if he could get in too.

'Women and children only,' said Mr Lightoller.

'Stoically, he bade farewell to Madeleine and stepped back,' said reports. And, despite seeing three sailors climb down the rope into the lifeboat and seven other crewmen get in at the bottom, Col Astor didn't do the same.

This irony was made far worse by the fact that as well as the 1,000 people without lifeboat space, the officers'

wrong assumption that the boats' designed capacity of 65 was excessive caused another 500 to drown unnecessarily.

The most controversial was Emergency Boat 1. With a capacity of 40, it had only 12 people on board including the wealthy Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, who offered £5 to each of the seven crewmen on it. Some called it a bribe, direct or subtle, to prevent them returning to rescue people from the sea, for fear of the boat being swamped.

The baronet, however, insisted he 'wanted to do something' to replace lost gear.

Mr Renouf would also have known he was about to die when he made his wife safe.

'He pushed me forward and was standing on the deck as the lifeboat went over the side,' said Lillian. 'The scramble for places in the boats and the bedlam of noise was awful.'

With many men trying to force their way into the lifeboats, it made even more poignant Peter's calm heroism.

By contrast, one man who'd become legendary was Irishman Daniel Buckley.

The 21-year-old was alleged to be one of two men who, when women and children were called to get into the lifeboats, jumped in as well - apparently dressed as a woman.

Was it true?

The facts emerged at a US Senate inquiry.

One woman he says he helped into a lifeboat tried to get out again. 'She thought it was sinking and climbed one of the ropes, thinking she'd be safer in the Titanic,' said Daniel. 'A sailor pulled her down again. When a big crowd of men jumped in, I took my chance with them.

'Two officers came along and told the men to get out and let the ladies in. The men wouldn't get out, but the officers drew their revolvers and fired over our heads and they got out.

'I was crying.

'A woman in the boat had thrown a shawl over me and told me to stay there.

'They didn't see me and the boat was lowered into the water.'

Bravery took many forms that night. Emily Rugg was among 42 others in Lifeboat No. 12 including the two sailors manning it,

Jersey-born Jack Poingdestre, who was in charge, and Frederick Clench.

They might have escaped from the Titanic, but in the cold and with many of the women scantily dressed, would they survive the night?

Miss Bentham 'noticed a stoker clad only in his uniform jumper sitting with his feet in freezing water,' says Daniel Butler in the book, Unsinkable, quoting Walter Lord in The Good Years.

'The keel beneath her seat was dry, so with a forcefulness that belied her 19 years, she insisted the man trade places with her.'

Lifeboat 12 became dangerously overloaded. It picked up Charles Joughin, the chief baker who, perhaps thankfully, was full of whisky and had spent a staggering two hours in the icy sea, and 30 men including Mr Lightoller, who'd spent the night standing on an overturned collapsible boat.

This supervisor of the lifeboat-lowering had the perfect opportunity to save himself but didn't, jumping off the Titanic only seconds before it sank.

Some had been startlingly cool.

The entire engineering staff of 32 men had kept the lights blazing and all eight band members kept playing until the very last moments. 'I don't like jazz as a rule,' one passenger had remarked, nonchalantly.

Four other men were in no particular hurry. Twenty minutes before the Titanic disappeared they played one last game of cards in the first class smoking room before going up on deck.

Others did it in style.

American Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet went below to reappear a few minutes later in full evening dress.

'We've prepared to go down like gentlemen,' said survivors, quoting him in The New York Times.

Another man left £60,000 in his cabin and simply concentrated on dressing warmly.

But coolest of them all was Colonel Archibald Gracie, rewarded for his cheek by being a miraculous survivor.

Not long before the Titanic went down, bumping into the squash professional, Frederick Wright, and seeing the ship's squash court full of water, he cancelled his Monday morning booking.