Titanic Survivors: Lucile Carter
Wikimedia CommonsLucile Carter, Titanic survivor.
Lucile Carter boarded the Titanic with her husband, her children, a small cadre of servants, and her husband’s car: the 25 horsepower Renault automobile made famous by the 1997 film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Despite her aristocratic upbringing, Lucile wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty and help lead one of the lifeboats to safety.
“When I went over the side with my children and got in the boat, there were no seamen in it,” she later said. “There was nothing else for me to do but to take an oar.”
While Lucile emerged from the tragedy a hero, her husband, William Carter, wasn’t so lucky. Though Lucile originally claimed that her husband had led her and their children to the lifeboats before going off to wait stoically with the other men, the truth came out in the divorce papers two years later.
William had warned his wife and children that the ship was going down — and then disappeared, only to reappear miraculously safe the following day on the Carapathia.
When Lucile boarded the rescue ship, William was already there. He greeted his bedraggled wife with a cheery salutation. According to Lucile, “All he said was that he had had a jolly good breakfast and that he never thought I would make it.”
