The man who survived

Lawrence Beesley ignored a rumour and survived the ill-fated voyage of the Titanic in 1912. A century later, his grandson Nicholas Wade tells his tale

Had you been a woman travelling in second class on the Titanic a century ago, your chances of survival were quite favourable — 86 per cent were saved. For the men in second class, one of whom was my grandfather, Lawrence Beesley, the odds were the reverse; only 14 per cent survived, and the rest drowned in the freezing waters of the Atlantic.

Notions of male chivalry toward the weaker sex have since been cast aside, and it is no longer de rigueur for a man to yield his seat on a bus, or a lifeboat, to a woman. But when the order was given on the Titanic for families to separate and for women to board lifeboats first, no man rushed ahead.

I have often wondered how my grandfather managed to beat the heavy odds against his survival. But I was too young, while he lived, to ask such an impertinent question. I have since come up with a possible answer, based on many readings of The Loss of the Titanic, a book he wrote within a few weeks of his rescue.

My grandfather earned first-class honours in science at Cambridge University but instead of pursuing a career in science, he chose to become a physics teacher in England. Perhaps he needed the steadier income — he was already married and had a young son. He gave up his job and became a Christian Science practitioner, a surprising departure for him. It was to meet one of his brothers, also a Christian Scientist, in Toronto that my grandfather bought a second-class ticket on the Titanic for £13 (about $60 at the time). He boarded the ship at Southampton on April 10, 1912.

Travelling at high speed through an iceberg field without searchlights, the Titanic brushed past an iceberg at 11:40 at night on April 14. It sank at 2:20 the next morning.

The captain ordered the lifeboats to be readied shortly after midnight, knowing there weren’t enough to save everyone. Many passengers were at first unwilling to leave the vast ship, believing it unsinkable, and the first few lifeboats left half filled.

My grandfather was standing on the top starboard deck of the boat with a group of men when a rumour went around that the men were to be taken off on the port side. Almost everyone moved across the ship. He and two others stayed put.

Shortly after, he heard a cry of “Any more ladies?” from a crew member. “No,” he replied, looking down at the boat. “Then you had better jump.” He put his feet over the side of the deck, threw his dressing gown ahead of him, and dropped onto the stern of the lifeboat.

Why did he decide not to follow the rest of the men over to the port side? The explanation he gives in his book is not entirely satisfying. “I can personally think of no decision arising from reasoned thought that induced me to remain rather than to cross over,” he says. As if in recognition that some more positive evidence for his non-decision would be helpful, he adds, “I am convinced that what was my salvation was a recognition of the necessity of being quiet and waiting in patience for some opportunity of safety to present itself.” The two passages are puzzling because in the first he says he made no conscious decision, and in the second he describes one.

He knew the ship was in distress because it had already launched distress rockets. The drastic separation of families, so that women could be given precedence, gave him grounds to suspect that there were too few lifeboats. And if so, what more hazardous place to be than in a crowd of doomed men? By declining to follow everyone else across the ship, my grandfather improved his odds of escape considerably.

Perhaps, in a more reticent age, he hesitated to describe such a cold calculation in print and did not wish to contradict the explanation he had given to a Christian Science journal — that after the ship met the iceberg, he read and reread the 91st Psalm, a favourite of the religion’s founder.

In any event, I owe my existence to the fact that in those few critical moments he had the confidence to think differently from the crowd.

©2012 The New York Times