What a life!..What a man!..and ends up a boatbuilder too..

[Norske3]

Mr. Lightoller..an Englishman turned Canadian cowboy for a time....a true survivor...adventurer...hero...Read all about him>>>>>> web page (http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=469555)

[ 12-03-2003, 12:38 PM: Message edited by: Norske3 ]

[Alan D. Hyde]

Thanks, Norske.

Well worth a C & P!!!

Here it is:

Cowboy, gold prospector and Titanic hero: Life of 'Lights' beats all estimates
By Terry Kirby, Chief Reporter
03 December 2003

"By the time Charles Lightoller became an officer on the White Star fleet of passenger liners at the age of 38, his life had already been one of extraordinary incident and adventure. He had survived shipwreck, fire at sea, a cyclone and malaria. He had been a gold prospector in the Klondike and a cowboy.

If that had not been plenty for one lifetime, the ship Lightoller joined at Southampton in spring 1912 for its maiden Atlantic crossing was the Titanic, pride of the White Star line, which struck an iceberg on April 14. Lightoller, the second officer, would play a key role, helping to save the lives of dozens of people, narrowly avoiding being drowned in the ship's final moments, and was the last person to be hauled from the lifeboats by the rescue ship Carpathia.

Even though his life would hold yet more adventure, it is his exploits that night for which he is most remembered. Yesterday, the enduring fascination of the Titanic disaster and his own role in it was underlined when Sotheby's sold a series of mementoes associated with Lightoller for a total of £66,750, way above pre-sales estimates.

The highest price of £28,000 - double the estimate - was paid for a Titanic postcard-size lunch menu, believed to have been given by Lightoller to his wife as a souvenir before he departed from Southampton. It listed such extravagent foods of the era as Consommi Mirrette and Salmon and Golden Plover on Toast.

Lightoller's own previously unpublished 17-page account of the final hours of the Titanic was sold for £8,400, while his wife's admission ticket to the inquiry into the disaster went for £6,600. The items were put up for sale by the couple's granddaughter and all went to private collectors.

Catherine Southon, Sotheby's specialist in maritime objects, said the high prices paid reflected Lightoller's status as a hero of the night the Titanic went down. "It is a fantastic story. The man was a complete hero and was widely admired and respected by everyone after the event. He had a huge following.''

Despite, this Lightoller, or "Lights" as he became known, was a modest man, showing loyalty to his colleagues and the White Star line afterwards and devoting only a few pages to his role in his memoirs, for which the manuscript sold yesterday appears to have been a draft.

On the night disaster struck, Lightoller was just going to sleep in his cabin at 11.40pm when he felt a grinding vibration. Within 10 minutes the alarm was sounded that water was rising through the ship and he began helping women and children on the lifeboats, using hand signals to convey instructions because of the noise of the steam from the vessel. He had to turn back the male passengers after it became clear there were insufficient lifeboats for the 2,200 on board.

His experience of a shipwreck many years previously led him to question the reluctance to lower the boats and he sought permission from Captain Herbert Smith to do so. Issued with a gun, he used it to persuade some men who had commandered one lifeboat to give up their seats for women and children.

After all the lifeboats had been lowered, Lightoller was ordered to board one of the four remaining canvas collapsible boats. "Not damn likely," he replied, and continued to prepare them for the passengers, borrowing a penknife to cut loose a second collapsible just seconds before the Titanic took a great plunge, throwing him into the water. In his memoirs, Lightoller wrote: "It was just two o'clock when she assumed the absolute perpendicular and stood there for a space of about two minutes, an amazing spectacle with her stern straight up in the air, then slowly, but with increasing speed, she quietly slipped beneath the water."

He began to swim clear when he was sucked against the grating of one of the large ventilator shafts, and he was taken down with the ship. As the water hit the still hot boilers, the blast blew him back to the surface. The Titanic went under, the forward funnel broke loose and toppled his way, narrowly missing him.

Lightoller managed to board the collapsible boat he had just launched, joining 30 others who had also clambered on. But his ordeal was not over. As dawn broke, the collapsible began to sink and those on board clambered on to two other overcrowded lifeboats. Lightoller took charge and, as heavy waves threatened to sink it, managed to help everyone else onto the rope ladders lowered by the Carpathia. He was the last to leave.

As the only surviving senior officer, Lightoller would go on to become a crucial witness at the subsequent inquiries into the tragedy, compelled by loyalty to defend both his employers and his fellow officers, including the captain, Edward Smith. Lightoller took the view that no individual was to blame.

It was a loyalty born out of 12 years service on White Star ships and a love for the sea that began when, in 1888 aged just 13, Lancashire-born Lightoller was apprenticed on a four masted barque. In 1889, on his second trip, he was shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean, and the survivors spent eight days on a desert island before being rescued.

Trouble seemed to follow him around. On his third sailing trip, to Calcutta, he survived a cyclone and the following year, while third mate on a windjammer, a cargo of coal caught fire. For his efforts fighting the fire and saving the ship, he was promoted to third mate. He was still only 21.

In 1898, Lightoller went to the Yukon to prospect for gold in the Klondike Gold Rush. Unsuccessful, he had a brief stint as a cowboy in Alberta, Canada, and to return to home he became a hobo, riding the rails back across Canada. He worked his passage back as a cattle wrangler on a cattle boat. Although he arrived back in England penniless, he was determined to resume his life at sea and obtained his Master's Certificate, joining the White Star line the following year.

Lightoller, like all other surviving Titanic officers, would never go on to command a passenger liner, but his life remained one of disaster and shipwreck always around the next corner. His next White Star ship, the Oceanic, became part of the Royal Navy on the outbreak of the First World War and once again he found himself supervising evacuation when it ran aground in the Shetland Islands.

Lightoller later captained a torpedo boat and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for attacking a Zeppelin. His command of another ship, the Falcon, ended when it collided with a trawler in April 1918, eventually sinking just about the same time, six years to the day, as the Titanic. Commanding the Garry, he rammed and sank a German submarine, damaging his vessel so badly she had to steam 100 miles in reverse to reach port. Lightoller was awarded a bar to his DSC and promoted to Lieutenant Commander.

After the war, he spent several years dabbling in chicken farming and property speculation, keeping a motor yacht for leisure. But in July 1939, his adventures began again when he and his wife had a period as amateur spies, conducting a survey of the German coast at the request of the Royal Navy, posing as an elderly couple on a yachting holiday.

During the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940, Lightoller, then 66, was asked to give up his yacht, Sundowner, to a Navy crew. Lightoller is said to have informed them: "Nobody would take the Sundowner to Dunkirk, but me."

Despite the fact Sundowner had never carried more than 21 persons before and in the face of repeated Luftwaffe attacks, Lightoller, along with his son Roger, succeeded in saving 130 men from the beaches of Dunkirk. According to one account: "It is said that when one of the soldiers heard that the captain had been on the Titanic, he was tempted to jump overboard. However his mate was quick to reply that if Lightoller could survive the Titanic, he could survive anything and that was all the more reason to stay."

Lightoller was "demobbed" out of the Royal Navy in 1946, aged 72, having lost two of his sons in the war. He lived in Richmond in Surrey, where he built motor launches for the river police. He died in 1952."

Quoted from: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=469555

***

This is the man, I believe, who was so unfairly defamed in the movie Titanic.

***

Alan

[Norske3]

"Spot On".... as the Brits will say...thank you Mr. Hyde......I haven't figured out how to make "copy and paste" work for me yet...???????

...do you have any "Jekyl relatives" in your family
by the way?.. :D

[ 12-03-2003, 12:12 PM: Message edited by: Norske3 ]

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

"Sundowner" is preserved, at Dover, as a Dunkirk memorial.

There's a very good biography of "Lights", but I cannot lay my hands on it at the moment.

White Star did not repay his loyalty to them; he was reckoned to be a "Jonah" and they thought passenegers would not be happy aboard a ship commanded by him, hence the chicken farming interlude.

[ion barnes]

Wow! Now thats a history lesson.