Sidney Daniels' Oral History Interview

I joined the Olympic in 1911 on her maiden voyage and after five voyages we were in collision with the Hawke in the Solent so were put back again. Well I did about five voyages and I was transferred, selected I might say, to be conceited, selected to go to the Titanic so they were picking out the best of the crew – pat my back will you – best of the crew to go to the Titanic.

About half past 11 or 20 past 11, I was in my bunk sleeping. The night watchman came down, said, "All hands on deck, get your lifebelts on". We thought it was an emergency boat drill. We weren't very pleased with it so anyway, we eventually went up on deck and were stood by our boats. We were all allotted certain boats to go to – and mine was number 13 by the way – and we just stood around waiting for orders, dancing around to the musicians because the musicians were on board, playing the different tunes on deck and eventually they got orders to get all the women and children up to their lifeboats. I don't know what the time was, but it was getting on.

Anyway, we got them all up, well, as many as we could, and we got them into the boats. We had to forfeit our seat on the boat of course, with the passengers. Well we got away from that and got all the boats away and excepting the last boat, which was a collapsible boat, secured to the top of the wireless room, and it was lashed down with different lashings and a crowd were up there unlashing it. Someone shouted out, "Anyone got a pocket knife?" I said, "Yes I have, here you are," passed my pocket knife up and I think they cut the last lashings to the upturned lifeboat.

Well we sat there, about 20 of us, right through the night. Nothing to do, just living in hopes. Well, someone started to curse and swear farther down on the ship but someone said, "This is no time for swearing, it's time to say your prayers", which we did. So we all said our prayers there, The Lord's Prayer. All together, in a group but I said to a fellow that was sitting back to me, my back to me, I said, "I'm tired, I'm going to sleep", he said, "For God's sake son, don't go to sleep." Of course fortunately I didn't, if I had gone to sleep I'd have never woken up again, it would have been so cold.

Well coming towards the dawn more or less, the lights, a ship came in sight. "There's a ship." I said, "There's two." It turned out that one was the ship, the other was the iceberg. They were on the side of each other. It was the Carpathia came up to take us off. Well our own lifeboats by that time were able to see, the ones that were afloat proper were able to see any survivors around and came and took us off, the 20 of us in the two different boats, and they took us to the Carpathia.

Well they hauled me aboard the Carpathia, they gave me something hot to drink. I used to hate coffee. but I didn't care what it was then, it was something to warm me up, which I did. They took me down to the sick bay in the hospital and put me in a bed, shivering of course with the cold and, well there I stopped for a while.

Curator's note: The transcript published here reflects the audio that is currently in our archive. The full transcript of this interview can be read here at Paul Lee's website.