132 Pages
ISBN 978-1917120166
B&W Images
 
Charles Lightoller was one heck of a sailor, who grasped life with both hands and relished in challenging the fates; and that life was one of tragedy and perilous adventure. The son of an army captain, he was a member of a family who were prominent in the Lancashire cotton trade, and suffered several domestic tragedies in his life.
 
He was shipwrecked and faced near starvation on one of the remotest islands on Earth; he was caught up in a cyclone and nearly drowned, and he almost died of malaria; and he suffered a year of a harsh Canadian winter during the Klondike gold rush – and that was all before he was a senior officer on board RMS Titanic in 1912, when she hit an iceberg and sank with a dreadful loss of life. 
 
For gallant service during the First World War he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and bar. In 1940 he took his own 18-metre boat Sundowner out to Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo, and under enemy fire he rescued over a hundred British servicemen of the stranded British Expeditionary Force; which Winston Churchill described as a miracle.
 
He lost two of his sons in action during the Second World War, and at the end of hostilities he and his surviving son established a boat building business which specialized in maintaining river launches for the police.
 
Commander Charles Lightoller’s life was one of the most eventful on record, and it is a wonder he ever reached old age after so many close-calls.