Lawrence Beesley, The Survivor Who Literally Wrote The Book On The Ship’s Sinking
Wikimedia CommonsLawrence Beesley (right).
Taking a break from his position as a science teacher at the Dulwich College in England, Lawrence Beesley boarded the Titanic at Southampton with a second-class ticket.
At the time of the collision on the evening of April 14, Beesley was reading in his cabin. Though he didn’t notice the iceberg’s impact, he did realize several minutes later that the ship had gone strangely still.
On investigating, he was told that everything was fine — but a suspicion that something serious had occurred drove him back up on deck, where he saw crew members beginning to ready the lifeboats.
As a man on board the sinking Titanic, his chances weren’t good — but luck had it that a departing lifeboat had room for one more passenger, and since no women or children were present, they invited Beesley on board.
From the lifeboat, Beesley watched the Titanic sink into the Atlantic as its lights flickered and then extinguished forever. Following his rescue, he wrote about his experience in The Loss of the SS Titanic, published just nine weeks after the disaster.
More than four decades later, during the making of the 1958 Titanic film A Night to Remember, Beesley famously crashed the set during the sinking scene hoping to “go down with the ship,” but he was removed by the director.
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 Carpathia.
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.”
