Edith Russell's British Pathé Interview

Edith Louise Rosenbaum (Russell)

First-class passenger

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There was something about the Titanic that was so very formal. It was so stiff. The atmosphere was stiff. The coziness, well, you know, that kind of "get together" feeling, it didn't exist. I always remember going up on the lift. A little boy said to me, "You know, madam. It's quite an honor. I'm only 14 years old. I'm a lift boy."

There was a very slight bump. Just a little jar. Nothing at all. I went in my room. There was a second light jar. Nothing of consequence. But, you knew something had happened and one man said, "Look at that. That's an iceberg and it's a whopper, because you know, there's one eighth above the water and seven eighths below. And this blooming thing's all the way over the top of the ship." Thought nothing of it. We picked up the bits of ice and most of us played snowballs.

A little while later, a man came to my door and his teeth were chattering. He said, "Madam, get up. Get out. Do you know? They're making the women and children leave in lifeboats. They say you're coming back for breakfast. You know, these crazy English, they do anything. They make you get up, go off in boats, and go off and come back for breakfast, what do you think of that?"

But before I went, I locked every window in my three staterooms and closed every trunk and locked every trunk and took the keys with me. Nineteen keys for nineteen trunks. I had on my evening slippers, diamond buckles (you know not real diamonds, but diamond) and I had a wool cap and two fox furs and a paper-thin broad-tail coat and no underwear and no stockings, but a pair of velvet slippers and these buckles. And I lost a buckle.

And who should I see? Mr. Mock, a miniature painter, and he said, "Look, there's trouble." [unintelligible] "Well," he said, "you'll have to jump now into the lifeboat." I said, "Jump? With this thing I got on? What do you think I am? An acrobat or a monkey or something? I can't jump in this thing." "Well," he said, "you'll have to. My sister's in that lifeboat." 1

Well, I looked at that lifeboat swinging out on the davits, possibly, oh I don't know my measurements, but it was an awful long way, and down below was the sea, fourteen stories below. Well, if you jumped and you fell between...

I never would have left the ship, but a sailor came along, and he said, "Say, you. You don't want to be saved, well I'll save your baby." And he grabbed this pig from under my arm and he tossed it in the lifeboat, and I turned to this man, Mock, and I said, "That does it." But when they threw that pig, I knew it was my mother calling me.

I don't doubt that they were playing music. Other people heard it. But when people say that music played as the ship went down, that is a ghastly, horrible lie. And then, the horrible fear was in my heart, and I think everybody else's, that the dreadful, dreadful suction that had drawn us towards the Titanic would suck us under the Titanic.