What was steerage like on the titanic

He did not find him. The first class deck was higher up than the steerage deck, and there were some steps leading up to it; 9 or 10 steps, and a gate just at the top of the steps. So that this fellow that went up after him broke the lock on it, and he went after the fellow that threw him down.

He said if he could get hold of him he would throw him into the ocean. All the steerage passengers went up on the first class deck at this time, when the gate was broken. They all got up there. They could not keep them down. After The doors and gates, including the one which Buckley refers to above, between Third Class and the rest of the ship were normally kept closed to comply with immigration laws. These required physical separation between Third Class and the other classes to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases.

First, are there collapsible gates? Dividing the third class deck there is a companion; dividing the second class deck and the first class deck there is a barrier. Is that right? That is, of course, if there is nobody there on watch. There usually is a quartermaster standing by there or a seaman. Is that so? I do not think so at all. How many others? A portion of the third class stewards were room stewards, of whom I am the only survivor.

Stewards were placed all round the ship. What prevented you? Third Class men in some areas of the ship were required to wait below, under the rule of women and children first; and although there were no physical barriers preventing Third Class women and children passengers from reaching the boats, and stewards were guiding them to the boat deck, Steward Hart also recalls that many women in Third Class were unwilling to go to the lifeboats.

Some went to the boat deck but found it too cold, some felt it was safer to stay on the ship than to get into a small rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic on a dark night, and some did not want to leave their husbands:.

Two hours and forty minutes later, the ship disappeared beneath the waves with the loss of approximately 1, lives. As everybody knows, the percentage of 3rd class passengers saved, compared to those in 1st and 2nd class was appalling — of the men in steerage, 75 survived; 76 of the women escaped, along with only 27 of the 76 children. The enormously high percentage of 3rd-class casualties led to the myth that they had been deliberately detained below deck until 1st- and 2nd-class passengers were boarded into the lifeboats.

A version of events which was most memorably dramatized in movies like A Night to Remember and Titanic — A Night to Remember did, however, show that the passengers were eventually allowed up on deck, once the crew realized the ship was actually sinking, rather than just going through a temporary evacuation.

It is true that, at night, many gates in the ship were locked and that tragically this impeded the movements of some 3rd class passengers in trying to reach the Boat Deck. However, the real reason for the high percentage of 3rd class casualties was a lot less sinister, but nonetheless tragic: the 3rd class quarters were the cheapest onboard and, as such, they were located in the bottom section of the ship.

It therefore not only took the 3rd class passengers far longer to reach the lifeboats than the other passengers because of where their accommodation was, but they were also hampered by the fact that many of their stewards and stewardesses failed to impress upon them the gravity of the situation the Titanic was in. Investigating the claim that it had been malice rather than incompetence which led to so many deaths in 3rd class, the British Enquiry into the disaster, chaired by Lord Mersey, concluded:.

There appears to have been no truth in these suggestions. It is no doubt true that the proportion of third-class passengers saved falls far short of the proportion of the first and second class, but this is accounted for by the greater reluctance of the third-class passengers to leave the ship, by their unwillingness to part with their baggage, by the difficulty in getting them up from their quarters, which were at the extreme ends of the ship, and by other similar causes.

On most of her sailings between and , when the Great Depression began to strangle the luxury liner trade, the Olympic regularly sailed with most of the cabins — in all three of her classes — booked. Michael L. View Latest Articles.

All Rights Reserved. He thinks that the captain may have become traumatised when he realised there were insufficient lifeboats. The latter's promenade deck was enclosed in part, yet he ordered lifeboats to be boarded from that deck, rather than from the boat deck. The stories surrounding J Bruce Ismay, the president of the company that built the Titanic, are many but almost all centre on allegations of his cowardice in escaping the sinking ship while fellow passengers, notably women and children, were left to fend for themselves.

All of the screenplays, including the new TV series written by Julian Fellowes, portray Ismay as a coward who bullied the captain into driving the ship too fast and then saved his own skin by jumping into the first available lifeboat. He and Ismay had fallen out years before over Ismay not cooperating with the press with regard to an accident that happened to a White Star Line ship. Ismay was almost universally condemned in America, where the Hearst syndicated press ran a vitriolic campaign against him, labelling him "J Brute Ismay".

It published lists of all those who died but in the column of those saved it had just one name - Ismay's. Some survivors said he jumped on the first lifeboat, others that he had demanded his own crew to row him away and the ship's barber said that Ismay had been ordered into a boat by the Chief Officer.

Lord Mersey, who led the British Inquiry Report of into the loss of the Titanic, concluded that Ismay had helped many other passengers before finding a place for himself on the last lifeboat to leave the starboard side. The German film Titanic, commissioned by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, portrays Ismay as a power-mad Jewish businessman who bullies the brave, Teutonic captain into driving the ship too fast through the ice despite being warned that this is reckless.

The film A Night to Remember, long regarded as the most historically accurate of the Titanic films, also portrays Ismay as the villain. Louden-Brown believes this to be unfair, and raised the issue with James Cameron when he was working with him as a consultant.

In Cameron's film Ismay uses his position to influence the captain to go faster with the prospect of an earlier arrival in New York and favourable press attention.

Ismay never overcame the shame of jumping into a lifeboat and retired from the White Star Line in , a broken man. Frances Wilson, author of How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J Bruce Ismay, says she feels sympathetic towards Ismay and sees him as "an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances".

His confused and confusing behaviour on the Titanic was due to the confusion around his status - was he an ordinary passenger, as he claimed, or as the inquiries suggested a 'super-captain'? People on ships act according to rank and Ismay had no idea of what his rank was. One of the most emotive scenes in Cameron's Titanic portrays the third class passengers as being forcibly held below the decks and prevented from reaching the lifeboats.

Richard Howells argues that there is no historical evidence to support this. Gates did exist which barred the third class passengers from the other passengers. But this was not in anticipation of a shipwreck but in compliance with US immigration laws and the feared spread of infectious diseases.

Third class passengers included Armenians, Chinese, Dutch, Italians, Russians, Scandinavians and Syrians as well as those from the British Isles - all in search of a new life in America. Each class of passengers had access to their own decks and allocated lifeboats - although crucially no lifeboats were stored in the third class sections of the ship.

Third class passengers had to find their way through a maze of corridors and staircases to reach the boat deck.