Charles Lightholler was a man who survived the “unsinkable” titanic in 1912, he was a British naval officer and the second officer on board the Titanic. Charles was born in 1874 and died in 1952 at the age of 78-years. His partner was lowa Sylvania Zillah Hawley Wilson. They had five children together, 3 sons and 2 daughters.
In February 1888 at the age of 13, he began a four-year sea-going apprenticeship making his first trip aboard the Primrose Hill a steel hulled, four-masted barque of 2,500 tons.
Charles worked on titanic as a second officer on board, two weeks before the sinking. Charles boarded the Titanic in Belfast, acting as first officer. Later (approximately two weeks) when the ship collided with the iceberg, he made sure that all the children and women got on the lifeboats first. While he was examined for the incomplete loading of some lifeboats and despite his own consciousness, Charles went down with the ship, thus cementing him as a hero. Twenty-three years after the publishing of his autobiography, the film, A Night to Remember hit the theaters, painting Charles as the protagonist who saved many passengers. As the only surviving commanding officer, Lightoller had to take the blame of his deceased officers and although Lightoller’s account exposes the crew’s unpreparedness, his own gendered and racist selectivity that night, and evidence of a repressed guilt, his stubbornness to go down with the ship immortalized Lightoller as a hero. From reading Lightoller’s account, we can learn about the specific instances of the crew’s unpreparedness and unequal value of wealthy, English lives over all others, changing international safety regulations that are still in place to this.
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