Wednesday, January 22, 2025

The Passengers in Steerage

By Sherri Stewart


If you’ve seen Titanic, you’ll remember how Jack convinced Rose to join him for an evening on the steerage level of the ocean liner where they danced and laughed for hours. It was certainly more fun than the stuffy atmosphere of the more costly levels above. Was that a true depiction? Apparently so. Lawrence Beesley, a young English teacher traveling second class, reported: “I often noticed how the third-class passengers were enjoying every minute of the time: a most uproarious skipping game of the mixed double type was the great favorite while in and out and roundabout went a Scotchman with his bagpipes.” Mrs. Natalie Wick noted that when chunks of the fatal iceberg landed on the third-class deck space, she watched from her first-class cabin on the starboard side “as the young steerage passengers playfully threw ice at one another.”

The casual attitude of the steerage passengers was due to the fact that they didn’t know what was going on. It would be an hour and twenty minutes until the lifeboats were uncovered and then about two hours until the ship sank at 2:20 a.m. From the time when the full danger was realized until the ship went under, the steerage passengers encountered more obstacles than the ones above in their struggles to survive.


The men’s steerage quarters were forward and the women’s aft on the lowest passenger deck. As a result of this arrangement, the men in third class were aware that the ship was in danger long before the women. Daniel Buckley wrote that he woke up, jumped out of bed, and found water on the floor. He roused his mates, who told him to get back in bed, saying “You’re not in Ireland now.” (Wyn Craig Wade, "The Titanic, End of a Dream.") Other young Irishmen went to warn the young women that they were in danger. Katherine Gilnagh wrote that Eugene Daly, a young piper, alerted her that something was wrong with the ship. Katherine and her friends were among the lucky steerage passengers who were given notice of the ship’s danger. Most were not. Senator William Alden Smith, Chairman of the Senate Committee that investigated the disaster, concluded that “the small number of steerage survivors was thus due to the fact that they got no definite warning before the ship was really doomed when most of the boats had departed.” 

Even those steerage passengers who were informed were not out of danger. Gilnagh wrote that steerage passengers were barred by the crew from climbing the stairs to the boat deck, which was located above the A deck. Gilnagh and her friends Kate Mullin and Kate Murphy were the lucky few. They were rescued by Jim Farrell, an Irishman who pleaded their cause to the crew member who refused to let them climb the stairs: “Great God, man!” he roared, “open the gate and let the girls through.” To the girls’ astonishment, the sailor meekly complied. Farrell’s loyalty to friends from home saved the girls, but he himself perished. His body was one of the few recovered from the North Atlantic on April 24, 1912.


Katherine Gilnagh’s troubles were not over when the gate opened to the girls. The deck was deserted, except for a single man leaning against the rail, staring moodily into the night. He let Gilnagh stand on his shoulders, and she managed to climb to the next deck up. When she finally reached the boat deck, Lifeboat No. 16 was just starting down. A man warned her off, saying that there was no more room. “But I want to go with my sister!” Katherine cried. She had no sister, but it seemed the only way to convince the man. “All right, get in,” he sighed, and she slipped into the boat as it dropped to the sea. Gilnagh’s friend Kate Murphy and her sister Margaret escaped in Lifeboat 15, which left at the same time from the starboard side and carried about sixty second and third-class women and children. Later, Margaret and Kate Murphy would save an Irish teen who leaped overboard as the Titanic foundered. Beaten away from one partially filled lifeboat, the teen tried to climb aboard another boat only to be attacked again by the boat’s crew. The Murphy sisters reached into the water, grabbed McCormick, and pleaded with the sailors to let him aboard, which they reluctantly did. 

Dan Buckley, the only Irish passenger and one of only three third-class passengers called to testify before the Smith Committee, described the difficulty steerage passengers had in getting to the boat deck. A crew member threw the man ahead of him down the stairs, locked the gates, and fled. The man picked himself up and smashed the lock so that Buckley and other steerage passengers could climb the stairs to the boat deck. The charge that steerage passengers were allowed into the lifeboats only after cabin passengers had boarded, and that they were physically denied access to the boat deck was refuted in the Senate hearing by Titanic crewmen; however, a crew member on Boat 15 said that steerage women were accommodated only after first-class passengers. Additionally, there were fewer stewards in third class to help those in steerage make their way to the boat deck. Steward J.E. Hart testified that he had time to bring only two batches of steerage women from their quarters to the lifeboats.

Arriving in New York aboard the Carpathia, which picked up the Titanic’s surviving passengers between 4:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., rescued steerage passengers were spared the Ellis Island ordeal and were interviewed by immigration officials. One Irish girl was asked whether she had an emigration card. “Divil a bit of a card have I,” she said, wide-eyed. “I’m lucky to have me own life.” 

Selah Award finalist Sherri Stewart loves a clean novel, sprinkled with romance and a strong message that challenges her faith. She spends her working hours with books—either editing others’ manuscripts or writing her own. Her passions are traveling to the settings of her books and sampling the food. She traveled across the Atlantic on an ocean liner to research An Uncommon Gift. A widow, Sherri lives in Orlando with her lazy dog, Lily. She shares recipes, tidbits of the books' locations, and other authors' books in her newsletter.

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An Uncommon Gift

Ella Davis’s papa always told her there’d be no class difference in Heaven, but Ella has years to live on God’s green earth until she reaches her reward. She’s content to be a maid on the Huntington Estate, as long as she has her books and her kitten. But when her ladyship, Amberly Huntington, coerces Ella to take her place on the Mauretania, the fastest ocean liner in 1910, Ella’s worst nightmare has come to pass. She must pretend to be nobility for the eight days it takes to reach New York. In other words, she must live a lie—and this just before Christmas! https://bit.ly/47MTvYX

3 comments:

  1. Thank you for posting today. Happy New Year to you and your family. Such a sad event, yet miracles happened.

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    1. Happy New Year to you. The Irish passengers were overjoyed to start their new lives in America until the class system kept them in their place.

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    2. I was going to comment about that but decided to be more general. I hate that there are remnants of this discrimination alive worldwide today, despite efforts to legislate equality.

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