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.
