National Post (National Edition)
THE BOY WHO SLEPT THROUGH THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC 109 YEARS AGO TODAY.
The RMS Titanic sank 109 years ago today. On this occasion, we present one of the lesser known aspects of the disaster, and an epic case of hard sleeping.
Every Titanic survivor remembered the screaming. Fifteen hundred people all plunged at once into waters that were minus two degrees Celsius, and begged for help in the 30 to 40 minutes that it took them to die.
The screams were all the more horrific because they were unexpected. Those drifting in lifeboats on a moonless night would have assumed that the rest of the Titanic's passengers and crew were also safely evacuated. It was only when the ship took its final plunged just after 2 a.m. that they realized they were witness to the greatest marine disaster yet seen.
And through the horror, one solitary person that night didn't bother to wake up. For all six-yearold Douglas Spedden would have remembered, he peacefully went to sleep in his first-class stateroom on the Titanic, and then woke up at dawn in a nine-metre-long lifeboat, bobbing in the middle of the North Atlantic.
Around Douglas were 37 shivering survivors of the sinking. The occupants of Lifeboat Three included newly widowed wives and crew members who would be the only members of their shifts to survive. Thomas Mayzes' job had been to stoke Titanic's coal fires before he miraculously scored a spot on Lifeboat Three. Sixteen years after the disaster, his last words on his death bed were purportedly a hysterical chant of “save the women and children!”
Compounding the shock of what they had just experienced was the uncertainty of their situation. Most Titanic evacuees would have had no idea that virtually half the ocean liners in the North Atlantic were speeding to their rescue.
But all of this was blissfully unknown to the well-rested Douglas. When the first rays of dawn started to glint off the looming field of icebergs surrounding them, Douglas turned to his nanny and said “look at the beautiful North Pole with no Santa Claus on it.”
As Douglas' mother Daisy would recount for a book published soon after the sinking, “we all couldn't refrain from smiling in spite of the tragedy of the situation.”
Children are known to have an uncanny resilience to tragedy for the simple reason that they often don't fully grasp the gravity of what's going on. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, for instance, a surprising number of those who grew up in the ruined cities of Europe remember their childhoods as being a wonderland of ruins and abandoned weapons. “Life was very interesting then! The fear was gone, the sun was shining, and there were interesting things to find,” a Berlin refugee named Andrzej would later tell the author Keith Lowe.
Douglas, too, would become an emblem of childhood innocence in the face of overwhelming tragedy. Only eight months after the sinking, his mother would present him a Christmas gift that told the story of the sinking through the eyes of Douglas' constant companion, a teddy bear named “Polar.”
The touching book, which would be published in 1994 long after the death of both Daisy and Douglas, has the bear recounting doomed crew members patting the sleepy child on his head and declaring “good bye, little man.” As his “Master” sleeps beside him, Polar describes the “heartbreaking silence and feeling of utter loneliness” of their night in the lifeboat.
Douglas' presence on the Titanic is also immortalized in one of the more famous images taken onboard the ship. Frank Brown, an Irish Jesuit priest, tagged along for the first leg of the Titanic's maiden voyage, snapping a number of photos before disembarking at the ship's last European stop in what is now Cork, Ireland. In one photo, Brown captures Douglas playing with his spinnng top on the top decks. Unbeknownst to all in the photo, within days that very section of deck would be scene of a brutal fight for some of the ship's last remaining lifeboat seats.
Of all the ways to experience the Titanic sinking that night, however, Douglas had easily experienced the most comfortable version. As a passenger in first class he was virtually guaranteed to find a seat in a lifeboat; only one first class child would die in the sinking compared to 52 from third class. When recovery ships from Halifax first steamed into the masses of human bodies left behind by the disaster, some of these children would be found still clutched to the breasts of their frozen parents.
The salvation of so many from first class was partly a function of the ship's layout. First class cabins were all on the upper levels, mere steps away from the boat deck. Most families also had private stewards who were swiftly able to inform them of the collision and personally guide them to safety. Down below in steerage, passengers needed to wend their way through a maze of corridors and dead ends with only minimal crew to direct them.
Douglas had been briefly woken with the promise that he was going to “see the stars,” and the groggy child and his parents were soon off in a lifeboat long before panic had begun to set in. When they left the Titanic only one hour after its collision with the iceberg, its lights were still blazing, its band was still playing and the top decks had only sparse crowds. Their boat, in fact, would be set off with nearly 30 empty seats because there had been nobody around to fill them.
Although the Speddens would be among the few families to emerge from the sinking intact, tragedy would nevertheless come to define them. While the Titanic did not kill Douglas, he would be taken by another modern marvel of transportation: The automobile.
His family was at their vacation home in Maine in 1915 when Douglas chased a ball into a nearby street, where he was struck by a speeding car and killed. Reportedly, the nine-year-old would be the first ever automobile fatality in the state.