Titanic survivor: "I won't forget those cries for help"

Hard to believe, then, that Walter H Nichols who lies here, close to the area where he lived and where his family were raised, was a witness to history itself.

His grandson, Howard Nichols, remembers the gentle old man who doted on him as a child but who would never discuss that fateful night. “It was something you’d hear talked about by adults but never in front of me,” he says.

Howard, a former paramedic and now a cruise ship lecturer and railway buff lives in Bournemouth but was raised in Normandy, the quaintly named property on the main street of West Moors, near to the family’s post office.

He has meticulously researched his grandfather’s life for one of his ship lectures and says Walter’s existence was as extraordinary before the Titanic disaster as it was mysterious after.

“Grandfather went to sea at a very young age having been rescued from the workhouse by his older brother, who was on board a ship,” says Howard. “He wasn’t paid, he was just on the ship but had a roof over his head, somewhere to sleep and was fed.”

The minute he was able, Walter signed up to work as a steward on board immigration ship the SS St Paul and so began the career that was to lead him up the gangplank of Titanic the week before her maiden voyage, as part of her crew.

“At the beginning of 1912 there had been a long and bitter coal strike,” explains Howard. “Walter was stranded at Southampton and couldn’t be paid. Very luckily he must have thought, he and 19 other St Paul’s crew members were offered work on the Titanic.”

Walter started work the week before the maiden voyage as part of the victualling crew before he set sail as a second class saloon steward for the round trip to New York.

The next part of the story can be told in Walter’s own words because, says Howard, following the disaster he was able to sell his story for $69: “An absolute fortune,” to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper. If this sounds mercenary it’s worth remembering that like many other White Star employees on that trip, Walter’s pay was stopped on April 15, the day the ship went down, and Howard has a photocopy of the Account of Wages to prove it.

In his astonishing story Walter described how he was awakened at 11.40pm by a vibration to the vessel: “The ship went on for a bit and then the engines stopped. No one was frightened and some of the men in the room didn’t want to trouble to get up and see what had happened.”

Nobody could believe anything could go wrong as they had such faith in the ship, he said.

“Everybody believed in her.”

Even as engineers started closing the watertight doors, some of the crew went back to bed. Walter sat up talking for three quarters of an hour when he was ordered to report on deck and moved to Lifeboat 15 where he was assigned as a lifeboatman.

“On my way up I noticed some of the passengers about but no one seemed to be worried or excited and as I passed the gymnasium... inside were a number of passengers amusing themselves. One man was riding an exercise bicycle, one punching a bag.”

Arriving on deck he could see some boats already on the black waters ‘floating about in the reflection of the light from the ship.’ “The officer in charge of the boats had a revolver in his hand. He gave his orders quietly and we didn’t realise even then that anything serious was the matter. The ship was down in the water, a little forward, but you couldn’t notice it much.”

After settling in his boat and waiting to be lowered to Deck B, Walter heard the band playing.

“I was looking sharp after what I was doing and don’t remember what they were playing. Someone told me afterwards that the last piece they played was Nearer My God to Thee. They didn’t have a chance, poor devils, they were cooped up in the reception rooms and they were drowned like rats, every one of them.”

Unbelievably, as the boats were being lowered: “No-one seemed particularly anxious to get in,” said Walter.

“The officer kept talking to the women, sort of urging them. ‘Come on now,’ he’d say, ‘Get in or we’ll have to leave you behind the (life)boat’s going to leave and we can’t wait for you. One woman stepped up to the rail against which we were holding the boat, looked into it and then stepped back as though she didn’t like it.”

Walter observed that many of the lifeboats were not full (they could take up to 80).

“They all seemed to think the ship was a better place to be than a lifeboat. We only had about 50 people in ours.”

Even at this point no one believed the Titanic would sink and, he claimed, everyone expected the sister ship Olympic to arrive and pick up those left on board.

Only after they had started to row away could the scale of the damage be appreciated.

“As soon as we got a little distance off I could see that she was a good deal down by the head because the propeller was sticking half way out of the water.

“As we left the ship about four other boats got away. I kept pulling at my oar and we rowed round to keep warm. We saw the ship gradually settling down at the bow until the forward part of the ship wasn’t visible. Part of that time the band was still playing and we could hear the wireless. After about an hour after we left her, the fore part of the boat was going under and for the first time we realised that she was going to sink, because up to this time the men in the boat had taken the whole thing as a sort of holiday.”

The ship, says Walter: “...sank slowly and steadily and then we heard a little explosion that must have been the first boiler. After that the lights began to go out in different parts of the ship. Then came a big explosion and we could see a mass of black smoke. The boat seemed to lift right up out of the water and tilt up on end and then seemed to break and drop back.

“For one moment she was right up in the air, standing on her nose. That’s when the people left on board went into the water, there were 1500 to 1700 left on the ship and that’s when most of them were thrown into the water by this explosion.

“Then a horrible shriek went up, cries for help and weird shouts. You can imagine what it was like, 1500 of them. If you’ve ever been round when they are feeding a kennel of dogs that’s the only thing I can think of that it sounded like and that kept up for half an hour, growing fainter and fainter as the minutes passed. There was no other sound, just the crying of people.”

The ship, he said, quietly sank out of sight without a sound.

“We could see black spots of wreckage and hundreds of people struggling in the water. Had we got among the crowd struggling in the water it might have meant the end of us, too. With twenty grabbing the boat it would have swamped us in a minute. It was awful but there was nothing we could do but wait. I won’t forget those shrieks. For half an hour we could hear those cries for help.”

As they rowed towards the arriving Carpathia in the dawn’s early light, they started to notice the icebergs all around them. He said: “In all my sailing I’ve never seen so many icebergs in one place.”

As he settled on the Carpathia, feeling weak and sick he noticed ‘bodies floating all around and bits of wreckage.’ Yet on the voyage back to New York, the stewards still continued to wait upon their Titanic charges.

Several days later – even as he gave his interview – he was still wearing the pyjamas he’d slept in on the night of the collision. Eventually he got another job, sailing on a number of ships during war and peace, including a journey to Russia during the revolu-tion, until his retirement where he variously ran a post office and worked at the top secret Naval ordnance factory at Holton Heath. As part of his ship talks Howard speculates on Walter’s rather secretive existence. Was he a spy? “I don’t know!” he says.

What he does know is that his grandfather was a link to one of the most momentous events in modern history and his death at the age of 85 marked the end of an extraordinary life.