When Stephen McGann was 17, and a budding genealogist, he went to interview his Auntie Mary. She was already struggling with her memory, but in that first interview she happened to mention a man he’d never heard of: his grandfather Joseph’s brother, Jimmy. “Titanic McGann,” she called him. “He survived the Titanic.”
McGann, who is now an actor – he plays Dr Turner in Call the Midwife, the BBC’s Sunday-night drama – had been a genealogist for all of a week at this point. He couldn’t believe he had instantly struck gold. He went straight to Liverpool’s records office but could find no McGann listed among the ship’s survivors. When he went back to Auntie Mary the next day to ask more questions, her brief window of lucidity had closed, and she had forgotten all over again.
It wasn’t until much later, when his wife, Heidi Thomas – Call the Midwife’s creator – bought him a book, Archibald Gracie’s account of his journey on the doomed White Star liner, that he found corroboration for his aunt’s spark of memory. There on page 97 was the name James McGann, who turned out to be one of the 30 people Gracie recalled clinging to an upturned lifeboat with him as Titanic sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Stephen McGann is one of many voices called on to help piece together the story of the ship over 13 riveting episodes of Titanic: Ship of Dreams, a new production from the Noiser podcast network. Launched to coincide with the anniversary of the liner’s sinking, on April 15th, 1912, and narrated by Stephen’s brother Paul, the Withnail and I star (and a former Dr Who), it tells the detailed, vivid and somehow still engrossing tale of the heralded launch, four-day voyage and catastrophic confluence of events that sank the supposedly unsinkable vessel, which had left Cobh, in Co Cork, after picking up its final passengers there on April 11th.
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Despite being deeply embedded in our collective consciousness, with an ending that has so come to define the whole that you can see it before the story even begins, Titanic retains its propulsive narrative drive more than a century after it struck an iceberg 600km southeast of Newfoundland, in Canada.
Why are we still so compelled by the story of a boat that took on too much water? “There were bigger disasters,” McGann points out. “More people died in other disasters. Boats were sunk.” But the Titanic story “has narrative salience. You can lay things on to it”. It’s a story about hubris and classism, about cowardice and courage, about man versus nature, about death and survival. “It’s the ultimate story.”
Over Titanic: Ship of Dreams’s 13 episodes, these swooping narrative arcs are given their play, but it’s by drilling into the details that the podcast offers a sensory picture of the grandeur and opulence of the first-class experience – with its Turkish baths and heated swimming pool, as well as meals of salmon and mousseline sauce and grilled mutton chops – all the way down to the infernal heat and gruelling physical labour of the boiler rooms where Jimmy McGann worked as a trimmer, shovelling coal from the bunkers to the firemen for use in the furnaces and carefully ensuring that the ship’s huge stocks of the fuel remained evenly distributed, so the liner did not list to one side or the other.
For Duncan Barrett, who wrote and coproduced the series, finding new ways into the story was key, as was finding new voices to look with us through the portholes and lend fresh perspective on what we see.
It’s kind of like a cold case, in a way. These people going back over, trying to crack the case – who’s the guilty party? Who’s responsible for what happened? Which is something they were trying to do in 1912 and they’re still doing today
— Duncan Barrett
“I was very keen that we find someone who can talk about the food, that we find someone who can talk about the psychology of what people do in disasters, that we find someone who’s actually been down there and can speak about what it looks like, as well as generalists who can tell the story from beginning to end,” he says of the series’ panoply of voices. “We were looking for angles that hadn’t been told as much.”
We hear about the 154 Lebanese immigrants in steerage with their better-known Irish counterparts, only 29 of whom survived, about what they might have brought with them and why they were there. We hear about David Blair, Titanic’s original second officer, who was reassigned at the last minute and never sailed on the ship – but managed to bring the key to the crow’s nest locker with him when he left, therefore rendering inaccessible the binoculars inside it.
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We hear about the wireless operators Jack Phillips and Harry Bride, the young men responsible for the all-important message transmitted to RMS Carpathia after the crash: “It’s a CQD old man.” The initialism, which predated SOS, stood for “Come quick, danger.” We hear about Esther Hart’s terrible premonition, and her refusal to go to sleep any night on board, which left her wide awake when the ship struck the iceberg, alert to the moment she had felt all along was coming.
Scientists, historians, psychologists and meteorologists all have their say in the podcast’s painstaking examination of the uncanny overlap of elements that led to the unfathomable ending.
“It’s kind of like a cold case, in a way,” Barrett says. “These people going back over, trying to crack the case – who’s the guilty party? Who’s responsible for what happened? Which is something they were trying to do in 1912 and they’re still doing today.”
It’s a case of 1,500 lives lost, and what happened leading up to their deaths. But who gets to the tell the story, and where does the truth lie within all the disparate chroniclings of the ship’s final hours?
“All we have are these hundreds of individual accounts,” Barrett says, “and we’re trying to make sense of those and piece them together. It’s two or three, four, five, versions of the same story, and they’re all slightly different. How do you reconstruct what happens?”
That night was full of ordinary people who history touched, whether they wanted it to or not
— Stephen McGann
Even the official records can lead you astray, as Stephen McGann discovered all those years ago when he couldn’t find his great uncle’s name at the records office. In fact the records listed a J McCann as being on board the ship – a clerical error of transcription that could have kept McGann forever in the dark.
McGann instead discovers that his great-uncle Jimmy not only survived the Titanic but did so on the last lifeboat to leave the ship, the “Collapsible B”, which entered the water upside down. McGann, Gracie, Bride and Charles Lightoller, who had the misfortune to replace Blair, were among those who found themselves on top of the overturned lifeboat as, through the night, it slowly sank lower into the water – until they were finally taken on by two other lifeboats.
Jimmy McGann told the New York Tribune about the attempts to free Collapsible B from the ship, and seeing Titanic’s captain, Edward White, jumping into the ocean with a child in his arms. “I think when he struck the water the cold made him let go his hold of the child, and he must have been swept away from the boats,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t think he wanted to live after seeing how things were. Dead bodies were all around, floating in the water when he jumped, and I think it broke his heart. I wasn’t keen on living myself.”
For McGann, finding that connection with his great-uncle and hearing his voice – his state of mind, his feelings of despair – changed not only Titanic’s story but also his family’s. “Jimmy was there at an absolutely pivotal moment in human history,” he says, and “was able for a few minutes to describe how he felt about that. It’s this light that has gone on in my family”.
Alongside John Jacob Astor, one of the richest men in the world, Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line – who was decried for taking a place in a lifeboat – the Marconi men, the orchestra that played as the ship went down, and Captain Smith, there was Jimmy McGann, who made it up from the hellish bowels of the ship and on to the underside of the last lifeboat.
“That night was full of ordinary people who history touched, whether they wanted it to or not,” Stephen McGann says. “And that’s the way history happens. You turn the corner and it hits you.”
It’s a grand tale of consequence and sweep that drags us all into its 113-year wake. It’s the story of a ship that became a metaphor. And it’s the story of everyone who was there, including Jimmy McGann.
“In the end it’s the story of a man who gets the wrong job at the wrong time,” his great-nephew Stephen says. Bad luck or good luck, Jimmy McGann’s story is rooted in survival: epic, miraculous and also the day-to-day variety. “It was just a job to him.”
Titanic: Ship of Dreams is available from podcast platforms and noiser.com
