Titanic Crew

The Titanic’s crew was divided into several departments, consisting of the Deck, Engineering, and Victualling (or food service) Departments. Seamen and lookouts made up most of the Deck Crew, supervised by the Deck Officers, but also included the Ship's carpenter, lamp trimmer, and boot polisher.

As Titanic sank, the lifeboats were naturally manned by seamen from the Deck Department, and as a result their survival rate was much better than other members of the crew at large. This was a matter of necessity — the seamen had practical knowledgeable of small boat handling and also had the force of authority to ensure order on board the lifeboats.

The Engineering Staff consisted of 30 supervising officers and hundreds of boiler and engine room crew, who moved coal from the bunkers to the boilers and tended to Titanic's hundreds of pieces of equipment. Very few of the engineering crew and none of the Engineering Officers survived the sinking.

Titanic's largest department, and one that saw very heavy casualties, was the “Victualling” department, which provided “Hotel Services” to the passengers. An army of cooks, scullions, butchers, bakers, dining room stewards, bed room stewards, and bar men ensured that passengers on board Titanic were well looked-after.

Also on board and operating almost as a separate entity, wasTitanic's female staff. Most numerous were the stewardesses, who helped dress and attend female passengers traveling alone or without personal servants. The Matron, who acted as chaperone to “unescorted” Third-Class female passengers to prevent “unwanted attentions” by single men. Cashiers, a masseuse, and a Turkish Bath Attendant rounded out their numbers. All in all, their lives were relatively comfortable on Titanic: they were provided cabins among the passengers they served, and were fitted with similar appointments. Stewards, on the other hand, slept in dormitories of twenty men a piece. Nearly all the female staff survived.

Not all the crew on board were employees of the White Star Line. The five members of the ship's band and her two Marconi (radio) operators were actually employees of other companies. These men were simply assigned positions on Titanic and received their pay from their employers, but they still received a nominal one shilling upon signing on board to put them lawfully under the orders of the Captain.

Two additional groups on board were not White Star Line employees. The à la carte Restaurant offered a deluxe dining establishment for First-Class passengers willing and able to pay superior prices for superior food. The staff consisted entirely of an elite assembly of Restaurant professionals working directly for the subcontractor in charge of this deluxe dining room.

The second and more famous, was the “Guarantee Group” put on board by the Titanic's builders Harland and Wolff, and headed by Thomas Andrews. It was Andrew's job to travel on board the ship he helped design, and to direct a small staff of workers to correct problems that had cropped up, and make suggestions for improvements to be incorporated in future ships.

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The Aftermath, Part I

After the disaster that sunk the RMS Titanic, the British lead an official inquiry to determine what had gone so horribly wrong. Sir Alfred Chalmers of the Board of Trade was asked to justify the regulations that had been in place on the night of April 12 when the 1,517 passengers on board met their doom.

The British government wanted to be certain that this kind of maritime disaster wouldn’t happen again: it was a national tragedy that personally traumatized citizens from 44 different countries, horrified the public, and embarrassed the White Star Line as well as everyone involved in maritime legislation.

As it turns out, the regulations for lifeboats required on passenger ships hadn’t been updated since 1896. Chalmers attempted to justify this policy massive failure by giving the following reasons:

Since the original policy’s implementation in 1896, advancements in shipbuilding made adding lifeboat requirements unnecessary.

The latest boats, like the RMS Titanic, were considered virtually impenetrable and watertight, making them unlikely to require lifeboats at all.

The sea routes used were well travelled, meaning that the likelihood of a collision was minimal.

The latest boats were fitted with wireless technology, which meant they could communicate with surrounding ships in an emergency. 

Even if there were more lifeboats available, crew members might not have been able to load more than sixteen boats during a disaster.

The provision of lifeboats should be determined by the ship builders, not the Board of Trade.

Quick to defend himself and divorce himself from any blame, Chalmers came up with an even more preposterous explanation — he claimed that even fewer lifeboats would have saved lives. He reasoned that people would have panicked and rushed to the deck to try to find escape instead of waiting in their warm rooms for instructions.

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Titanic's Third-Class

 Despite the glaring differences between classes, the White Star Line offered their third-class travelers a luxurious ride relative to what people of the day were used to. The RMS Titanic's third-class experience intentionally rivaled a second-class experience on most ships of the day.

The RMS Titanic offered patrons of their third-class wash basins, electric lighting, and heated decks, none of which were standard at the time.

The White Star Line's press material boasted that "The accommodation for third class passengers in these steamers is also of a very superior character, the public rooms being large, airy apartments, suitably furnished, and in excellent positions, and the same applies to the third-class staterooms and berths.”

While this sounds like standard marketing material, here is where the story gets odd: the ship boasted five grand pianos, mechanical elevators, and an indoor pool filled with tepid sea water. Despite these opulent expenses, the third-class only held two bathtubs. There was one bathtub for men and another for women and children — that's two tubs for over 700 passengers. Strangely, The White Star Line didn't have a problem with the expense of extra tubs for the third-class: it was passengers who had the problem. The less-educated poor at the time didn't want to bathe because they believed frequent bathing caused lung disease. 

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Little Luxuries

It's interesting to see how the designs of our most utilitarian items have evolved since 1912. Over a dozen ceramic toothpaste jars have been recovered from the wreck site of the RMS Titanic. Relatively speaking, these jars are coming up in large numbers, and historians assume that the White Star Line provided toothpaste as a complimentary item to the first-and second-class passengers. At the time, toothpaste was a luxury, and most people didn't have the means to indulge on a regular basis.

The stoneware jars were 4” across, and were designed by John Gosnell & Co. out of London. The lid reads “Cherry Toothpaste Patronized by the Queen, Extra Moist,” and the brand claimed it should be used “For beautifying and preserving the teeth and gums.”

These pots are delicate little pieces of stoneware, and while they may be less practical than the lumpy plastic tubes we use today, they are certainly more lovely. 

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Titanic Egg Cup

Two and a half miles under the Atlantic, there is a large concentration of kitchenware, dishes, silver, and crockery that spilled en mass the night Titanic sank. Explorers have dubbed this stretch of Titanic’s wreck site “Hell’s Kitchen,” as the scene so vividly captures the humanity of the disaster.
 

This egg cup, recovered from the wreck site in 2000, is made of ceramic and stands slightly less than three inches high.  Most likely, this particular version belonged to a passenger on board the Ship.  It is decorated with a mother hen and three chicks, and does not match any of Titanic’s other dish patterns.

 An egg cup, sometimes called egg server, is a container used for serving boiled eggs within their shells.  The upwardly concave portion holds the egg, and often egg cups include a base (informally known as a "footie”) to raise the egg-retaining portion and give stability. Although egg cups were in vogue at the turn of the century, egg cup collecting remains a popular hobby.

The White Star Line provided egg cups in their china service for Titanic passengers. The cups were delicate and small.

 

 

This ceramic egg cup is based on an egg cup recovered from the RMS Titanic. The pattern, nicknamed “Wisteria,” was replicated from an original Titanic design.

The act of collecting egg cups is referred to as “pocillovy;” it comes from the Latin “pocillum” for small cup and “ovi” for eggs.

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Titanic Interior Design

The RMS Titanic’s delicate and pristine setting has etched itself into the public’s imagination. Visually, the Ship itself has become a background to its own emotional history and the devastating loss of life. The overwhelming beauty of the RMS Titanic has contributed to the public’s long-running fascination with the Ship.

The luxury liner was absolutely stunning in her day.  Even the Third-Class cabins were lovely and well appointed. The Third-Class General Room, which was accessible to all third-class passengers, was paneled in pine and finished with white enamel. Although the design elements were minimal and a bit more utilitarian then the second- and first-classes, they were incredibly sleek and beautiful. From a modern perspective, the third-class china looks the most contemporary.







A reproduction of the Third-Class China

The Second-Class Library featured furniture made of mahogany and covered with tapestry.  Furnishings specially designed for the library in a Colonial Adams style, these fixtures evoked a design trend popular about 100 years before Titanic was built.





A reproduction of the Second-Class China, which was designed to compliment the second-class furnishings. 

The First-Class Reception Room was decorated in an adopted Jacobean English style and had white paneling carved in low relief. More ornate than the second-class motifs, the Jacobean English style  was stylistically quite different. Drawing from an even older design phase, this motif was popular as far back as the early 1600s.  









The First-Class China is the most ornate. 

The First-Class Reading and Writing Room was located directly next to the First-Class Lounge. >The Lounge had a bow window along one side of the Ship that allowed passengers an uninterrupted view of the horizon.

It took ten months to fully outfit Titanic.

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Titanic's Violet Jessop

In spite of the dark memories they might carry, people who survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic were statistically very lucky.  Out of the 2201 people on board (and that number varies between accounts), only about 32% made it through the disaster. Crew members were even less fortunate; less than a quarter of them survived that night.

But statistics hardly tell the story of Titanic and the people who lived and died. As the coverage of Titanic grew, the personal stories of the Ship’s cast began to capture the world’s attention. 

 The first-class was made up of the moneyed elite, but they weren’t able to escape the horror of the sinking Ship. 100 years later, a modern public doesn’t have the same attachments to the once-famous, and the stories of the second and third-class travelers are just as poignant and gripping.

Violet Constance Jessop was an Argentinean-born Irish girl who survived a dangerous bout of tuberculosis when she was young.  Her father died, as did three of her siblings. With a sick mother and five siblings to provide for, Violet left her home in Great Britain to work as a stewardess.  Her job with the White Star Line required 17-hour workdays on the RMS Olympic. At first, Violet’s beauty kept employers from wanting to hire her as they feared romantic complications with passengers.

On September 20, 1911, Violet’s ship, Olympic, collided with the HMS Hawke off the Isle of Wight.  Olympic made it back to port with just two compartments flooded, and Violet survived the accident.

Less than a year later, Violet boarded the RMS Titanic as a stewardess. She was one of the first to leave the Ship after an officer on board left a forgotten baby in her care.

Despite the two separate wrecks Violet Jessop survived, she served on HMS Britannic as a nurse for the British Red Cross. In 1916,Britannic struck a mine left by a German U-Boat in the Aegean Sea.  She was sucked under water towards the sinking ship, and smashed her head on the ship’s keel before she was rescued by a near by lifeboat.

Violet Jessop retired at age 63 after having survived three shipwrecks and 42 years at sea. 

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