Flesh and Blood Read online

  The game was up. Titanic was doomed. At twenty past one, the following order was given to the black gang by Senior Second Engineer William Farquharson: ‘All hands on deck. Put your life-preservers on.’ The ship would sink in one hour. James McGann was at the very bottom of the listing craft, under a flooding labyrinth of passages, stairs and ladders. There were 2,000 desperate souls already in front of him.

  The evidence I have for the next hours in James’s life comes from his own testimony, as well as the accounts of some famous characters in the Titanic story: Colonel Archibald Gracie, a wealthy American passenger and author of a key book on the disaster; Charles Lightoller, second officer, lifeboat hero and star of many filmed dramas of the incident; and Marconi wireless officer Harold Bride. These men shared their next hours in the close company of my great-uncle.

  By the time James made it into the fresh air, things were already well advanced. The last lifeboats were being launched containing the women and children, and directed by Officer Lightoller. The ship was sinking bow-first into the Atlantic. By two in the morning the bow itself had disappeared, and water was rising fast towards the bridge. There were still 1,500 people on board. James went straight to the bridge deck. This was a raised area to the front of the first funnel, and a place that was now threatened with imminent submersion. There remained a slim hope, however. Fastened to the top of the officers’ quarters were two Engelhardt collapsible lifeboats for use of the crew. These boats had a wooden hull with canvas sides that could be compressed for storage. There were four on the Titanic, but two had already been launched. The two remaining boats were known as Collapsible A and B. James jumped up onto the officers’ quarters and began to help try to free Collapsible B for launching on the port side. Gracie was nearby on the deck, and Lightoller was assisting James with the lifeboat. The collapsible proved difficult to dislodge. Gracie describes the crew’s struggle: ‘Some of the crew on the roof where it was, sang out, “has any passenger a knife?” I took mine out of my pocket and tossed it to him.’

  At that point, wireless operator Harold Bride arrived on the deck: ‘I saw a collapsible boat near to a funnel, and went over to it. Twelve men were trying to boost it down to the boat deck. They were having an awful time. It was the last boat left …’

  Time was short. The water was almost upon them. At last, the boat came free. They rigged up oars with which to slide it down onto the deck, but the heavy hull landed upside down, smashing several oars in the process. Before James and the others had a chance to turn the lifeboat over, the boat deck was suddenly overwhelmed by a large wave that swept a number of people, including Gracie and Bride, straight into the freezing ocean. The collapsible lifeboat floated off into the sea, upside down.

  It was now or never. The remaining men on the bridge climbed up onto the sinking deck rail and prepared to follow the boat into the water. James now found himself alongside none other than Titanic’s captain, Edward John Smith. The fate of the captain in these crucial minutes has long been a subject of debate. Many believed that Captain Smith had taken his life on the bridge before the sinking – but James McGann strongly refuted this, insisting that he was there on the bridge deck till the very end. This is how James described his last moments with the captain to the Yorkshire Post:

  ‘I was on the bridge deck’ said the fireman, whose name is James McGann, Liverpool. ‘I was helping to get off a collapsible boat. The last one was launched when the water was about to break over the bridge on which Captain Smith stood … the water reached Captain Smith’s knees … the last boat was at least twenty feet from the ship. I was standing beside him. He gave one look all around, his face firm, and his lips hard set. He looked as if he might be trying to keep back the tears, as he thought of the doomed ship. I felt mightily like crying myself as I looked at him.

  ‘Suddenly he shouted, “Well boys, you’ve done your duty, and done it well. I ask no more of you. I release you. You know the rule of the sea. It’s every man for himself now, and God bless you.” Then he took one of the two little children who were on the bridge beside him. They were both crying. He held the child, I think it was a little girl, under his right arm, and jumped into the sea. All of us jumped. I jumped right after the captain, but I grabbed the remaining child before I did so. When I struck water the cold was so great I had to let go my hold of the kiddie.’

  The poor child. My poor great-uncle. The terror of it. The ruthless malady of exposure. The stricken sailor, jumping from the sinking ship into the black vastness of a freezing ocean. The prefrontal cortex assaulted by an adrenaline-fuelled processing of inputs from the human senses. The sudden blast of cold shock as he hit the water, forcing him to release his grip on the child. When asked about the final moments of the captain, James described those first chaotic seconds in the ocean:

  I think when he struck the water the cold made him let go his hold of the child, and he must have been swept away from the boats. Anyway, I don’t think he wanted to live after seeing how things were. Dead bodies were all around, floating in the water when he jumped, and I think it broke his heart. I wasn’t keen on living myself.

  ‘I wasn’t keen on living myself’. Such a simple comment. The enormity of the experience – actions, deeds and outlook bound synaptically to new memory. The application of his existing self to the challenge of new experience, and the dignity of his response to it.

  Just then, as Titanic increased its steep angle before sinking, the huge front funnel beside the bridge deck came loose and fell into the water, crushing many of those who’d just jumped, and washing the overturned lifeboat and other swimmers further away from the ship. James was swept away with the resulting wave, and found himself beside the upturned collapsible: ‘The next thing I knew I was swept toward the last collapsible boat which had been launched – the overturned one. I clambered aboard.’

  The overturned hull had an air pocket trapped inside it that helped retain just enough buoyancy to hold the weight of anyone who could scramble on. But how many would it hold? And for how long? James joined an increasing number of freezing survivors who were balanced precariously on the lifeboat’s hull – many of them black-gangers like himself. They were soon joined by Colonel Gracie, Harold Bride and Charles Lightoller. Oars had been lost, and some of the men were improvising with scraps of wreckage, trying to paddle the craft away from the Titanic, and the suction that could drag them down with it when it sank.

  They watched as Titanic’s great stern finally rose vertically, black against the stars, before descending into the Atlantic with an unearthly gulp of sucked air and seawater. They were now adrift in a vast wilderness of water.

  Then a new horror. The water around them was filled with desperate, freezing life – souls crying and wailing and drowning in the pitiless ocean. Gracie later described the grisly spectacle:

  There arose to the sky the most horrible sounds ever heard by mortal man except by those of us who survived this terrible tragedy. The agonizing cries of death from over a thousand throats, the wails and groans of the suffering, the shrieks of the terror-stricken and the awful gaspings for breath of those in the last throes of drowning … which floated to us over the surface of the dark waters continuously for the next hour, but as time went on, growing weaker and weaker until they died out entirely.

  What made the horror worse was that their collapsible boat now had thirty men on it, and could clearly take no more. It was dangerously low in the water. If it unbalanced and capsized, the trapped air would be released, and they would all be thrown off to die. The men on the hull had to discourage desperate survivors in the water from trying to scramble on board – sometimes by force. For the fortunate to live, the unfortunate had to die. This was exposure as both cruel statement of fortune and the harshest of questions. What will you do to live? Will the exposure to your true self in this extremity freeze you to your core? The Liverpool black-gangers on the boat made their feelings clear to Gracie, and I like to think James shared in their compassionate Scous
e profanities:

  It was at this juncture that expressions were used by some of the uncouth members of the ship’s crew, which grated upon my sensibilities. The hearts of these men, as I presently discovered, were all right and they were far from meaning any offence when they adopted their usual slang, sounding harsh to my ears, and referred to our less fortunate shipwrecked companions as ‘the blokes in the water’.

  Those ‘blokes in the water’ would likely have included James’s own workmates.

  Eventually they steered their collapsible away from the immediate vicinity of the dying swimmers to protect their slim advantage.

  Then the waiting began. Hours in the darkness, cast adrift. Crouched and soaked on a crammed, unsteady hull in the bitter cold of a North Atlantic night. The air temperature was nearly minus three Celsius without wind-chill. Exposed flesh began to blacken with frostbite. Core temperatures plummeted. Uncontrolled shivering took over their bodies. Some men fell into the sea with exhaustion, or else were discovered dead of hypothermia on the craft. The well-heeled Gracie began to covet the warm cap worn by a nearby seaman:

  He seemed so dry and comfortable while I felt so damp in my waterlogged clothing, my teeth chattering and my hair wet with the icy water, that I ventured to request the loan of his dry cap to warm my head for a short while. ‘And what wad oi do?’ was his curt reply … Poor chap, it would seem that all his possessions were lost when his kit went down with the ship …

  This recollection gives me a wry smile, despite the grim setting. That unmistakable Liverpool twang in the reply from the black-ganger, letting the wealthy Gracie know that the social deference he expected lay at the bottom of the ocean with their ship. Just like their core temperatures, the world they now inhabited had shifted by small but significant degrees.

  The ocean became more choppy as dawn approached. The collapsible was gradually losing its precious pocket of air and sinking lower. Lightoller organised the men to stand in two parallel rows on either side so they could sway in unison to counteract the ocean swell. Limbs and minds were numb. Time was running out. At last, a ship appeared on the horizon. The Carpathia was steaming to their rescue. Lightoller whistled to another of the Titanic lifeboats not far off, and James and the others carefully transferred to this other craft to wait for the steamer’s arrival. At twelve minutes past eight on the morning of 15 April, James McGann climbed a rope ladder onto the Carpathia from the last lifeboat recovered. He was saved.

  Of the 250 black-gangers who set sail on the Titanic, just forty-four firemen and nineteen trimmers survived. My great-uncle was one of them.

  The Carpathia sailed for New York, arriving on the eighteenth. James was taken by ambulance to St Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, where he was treated for frostbite to his legs. He made a good recovery. The United States was quick to organise an official inquiry into the disaster while the main players were still under their jurisdiction, and so they subpoenaed key survivors to remain. Gracie, Lightoller and Bride did so – but James was not considered sufficiently important. He and most of his colleagues were released to travel back to Britain on the SS Lapland on 20 April – and it was there on the New York dockside that James gave his priceless account to the world’s newspapers.

  Although his voice would never be heard in any official inquiry, James had ensured that I’d hear him one day, and that I’d feel that same biting cold in my own fingers. Two members of the same family had joined synapses across a century of time to bind a significant experience into their collective long-term memory. A family story is more than just an exposure to events. It’s what the exposing makes of us all – the names we give to the things that come to define us. James was now ‘Titanic McGann’. A man exposed to awful things, but not frozen by them. A man who could find goodness in horror, pity in the fear of a child, and dignity in the actions of the doomed. A man whose character had found its core temperature.

  After his return to England, James was paid off for his work on the Titanic – the princely sum of five pounds and ten shillings – and then went straight back to sea. In the two years following the Titanic’s loss he worked in the far Pacific, plying an exotic route between Australia and San Francisco, stopping off at Tahiti and Hawaii on the way. Tropical warmth to heal the chill of the Atlantic.

  Yet there was a discernible change in him. Soon after, James got married to a Liverpool woman from his own streets called Kate McMeal. It was a happy bond. A year later they had a son – Joseph. A kiddie of his own that James could hold tight to in any disaster and, this time, never let go. It was a steady new warmth to heal his frostbitten memory. An answer to the question posed by the malady of exposure.

  Just three years after that, James died of pneumonia. He was only thirty-six years old. Although his death was tragic, there was a small victory to it. He died at home in Liverpool, and not alone at sea. He was in the warm company of his wife and son, and not in the biting cold of an open ocean. Exposure had made him grow, not shrink, and love had made him unsinkable to the end.

  Two brothers. Two exposures to extreme experience. Two separate responses that show the unique paths our characters take in the face of challenge. Exposure isn’t the same dark mark left on all bodies or brains by events. It’s unique to us; a private antagonist against which we learn and grow and know ourselves, or else a pitiless self-truth from which we shrink or hide.

  *

  * Richard P. de Kerbrech, Down Amongst the Black Gang (The History Press, 2014).

  4

  TRAUMA

  Trauma n.

  1. A serious physical injury or wound to the body from an external source requiring urgent medical attention.

  2. A negative emotional or psychological response to a stressful experience or event.

  MEDICINE

  The maladies mentioned so far have largely been the result of social forces in the world beyond our bodies. Malnutrition, filthy living conditions or the consequence of wider human failings. These afflictions waited beyond the boundary of our flesh until invited in by destitution, cruelty or ill fortune. The diseased louse in a crowded Liverpool slum, thriving on deprivation; the beriberi flourishing in a prisoner’s mistreated feet; the biting cold inflicted on a stricken seaman’s limbs through hubris and human error. These adversaries attacked a body already weakened by the maladies of others.

  Trauma is a more uncouth foe – a devotee of the surprise attack, rather than the patient siege. It’s an enemy that doesn’t wait to be invited, but tears human flesh without warning, regardless of wider circumstances. It might be the terrible traffic accident that strikes a loved one down, or the gaping wounds torn into a healthy soldier by a grenade, severing limbs and scarring torso. It’s a blitzkrieg on the human body that shocks our immune response, poisoning our blood and driving filthy infection deep into our bodies.

  Physical trauma is a malady older than medicine – the cause of 9 per cent of all the world’s deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization.* It occurs when the human body is assaulted by an outside force that lacerates, breaks or concusses it. This can be a penetrating trauma – the invasion of the body by foreign objects. A blast from a hand grenade, for instance. Fragments of shrapnel from a grenade penetrate the flesh in multiple places, often staying lodged deep in the body. They cause open wounds, septic shock, critical blood loss and, if not removed, fatal infection. Such is the lethality of this form of trauma that grenades are specifically designed to induce it. Shrapnel consists of many fragments of filthy metal that enter the human body at high speed. The resulting wound is multiple and complex.

  The first thing the wounded soldier experiences is the body’s shock response – an immediate diversion of blood flow from cell tissue to the vital organs like the heart and brain. There’s fever-like confusion, a high heart rate, chills and shivering. Then there’s the massive immune and inflammatory responses from the body, which is an attempt to repair multiple wounds and fight the many microscopic foreign bodies that h
ave invaded the system and threaten it with infection. The body now floods with white blood cells, or leukocytes, to kill the invaders, but in doing so can place the injured system in even more toxic stress, overwhelming the functioning of vital organs in a condition called multiple organ dysfunction syndrome, or MODS. A chief contributor to MODS is the onset of multiple bacterial infections at the shrapnel wound sites, and, if the blood has become infected, system-wide. This is the dreaded sepsis or blood poisoning – a wounded soldier’s killer since the days of Troy. If wounds can’t be cleaned and the infection fought then the soldier’s organs will fail and he’ll die.

  Battlefield amputation was the main weapon against wound infection right up until the mid-nineteenth century. However, by the beginning of the twentieth, science had begun to understand its microbial nature, and soldiers started to carry antiseptic in first-aid packs to treat wounds. The First World War brought many advances: rapid evacuation of the injured away from filthy trenches, blood transfusions for critical cases, a wider recognition of the various bacteria involved in gangrene. Medical scientists like Alexander Fleming identified key pathogens like streptococci that were wreaking havoc in a soldier’s wounds. Yet once infected, there were still few ways to fight it. Things began to change with the advent of sulphonamide drugs in the thirties – an early version of antibiotics. But it was the accidental discovery by Fleming previous to this that would eventually lead to a much more potent ally. The antibiotic miracle drug penicillin.

  In 1928, Fleming discovered that a food mould called Penicillium notatum – the mould you might see on old bread – had a powerful ability to kill bacteria. Fleming shelved further study as the substance was hard to produce in large enough quantities, but a team of scientists in Oxford led by Howard Florey later picked up his work. Florey set about trying to grow enough of the mould to be useful in treatment. Early tests showed remarkable results on infected animals, yet producing enough to treat humans remained elusive. The Second World War was raging, and industrial resources in Britain were prioritised for military production, so Florey asked the United States for help. Working in secret, the US pharmaceutical firm Pfizer used a process called deep-tank fermentation to industrialise the production of penicillin at its plant in Brooklyn, New York. The first batch was completed in early 1944, and was deployed exclusively to treat servicemen fighting in the D-Day landings in Normandy: a battle expected to produce mass casualties. Precious phials of the Brooklyn penicillin were shipped across the Atlantic just in time for the battle in early June. Its successful use on D-Day would usher the antibiotic age that we take for granted today.