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Show FALL 2013 UHQ pp 304-385_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/16/13 1:25 PM Page 338 UTAh hISTOrICAL QUArTErLy walked a plank. I did my duty. I hope I finished him. I don’t know. We left him on the cabin floor of the wireless room and he was not moving.”41 As Bride and Phillips ran looking for some way to save themselves, they heard the band playing a ragtime tune and then “Autumn.” The collapsible lifeboat that Bride thought he had already helped shove overboard was still on the deck. As he helped push it into the water, a “big wave carried the boat off. I had hold of an oarlock and I went off with it. The next I knew I was in the boat.” The problem was that the boat was upside down, and Bride was under it. He fought to get out from underneath the capsized lifeboat and, as he did, he saw “hundreds” of men—“the sea was dotted with them, all depending on their life belts.” As Bride looked up, he watched the Titanic as it began to move under the water—“she was a beautiful sight then.” Bride knew he had to get away from the suction, and he swam for all he was worth. He watched as “the Titanic, on her nose, with her after-quarter sticking straight up in the air, began to settle—slowly.”42 As Bride waited in the water, he quickly recognized that he was very cold and felt “like sinking” himself. He saw a boat and put all his strength into swimming for it. He realized that it was the same collapsible lifeboat he had helped to launch. As Bride approached the boat, a hand reached out and pulled him aboard. There was just room for him on the edge of the still-capsized boat. Someone sat on his legs. His legs became wedged between slats and his feet were wrenched out of shape. He hung on, even as larger and larger waves crashed over him. Someone on the boat suggested they all pray together, and they all joined in the Lord’s Prayer.43 Eventually, as the Carpathia neared them, Bride noticed that one person on their raft was dead. As he looked closely at him, he realized it was his colleague, Jack Phillips, whose relentless service had contributed so much to the successful rescue mission of the Carpathia. Bride was pulled up a rope ladder onto the deck of the Carpathia and received care for a number of hours. At that point, someone told him that the Carpathia radio operator was “getting ‘queer’” and wondered if he could take a turn on the wireless key. From then on, Bride had been sending, sending, sending. As he asked, “How could I then take news queries? Sometimes I let a newspaper ask a question and get a long string of stuff asking for full particulars about everything. Whenever I started to take such a message I thought of the poor people waiting for their messages to go—hoping for answers to them. . . . I was still sending my personal messages when Mr. Marconi and the Times reporter arrived to ask that I prepare this statement.”44 This was the story—clearly Bride’s—that Ike Russell told in his spare, graceful prose. After Bride was carried off the Carpathia on a stretcher and Marconi and 41 Ibid. Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 42 338 |
