Titanic survivor recalls the sinking of the ship and how more people could have been saved

More than 100 years have passed since the almighty Titanic ship sank after colliding with an iceberg, but people still learn new things about the tragedy that befell the ship that was supposed to be unsinkable. In the 1979 BBC documentary titled "The Great Liners," a man called Frank Prentice, who survived the sinking as a 23-year-old, shared his account of the crash and how more people could have been saved during the crash. The man shared how he still found the memory terrifying, many years later.

Prentice was a 23-year-old assistant purser on the ship, responsible for handling money and supplies on the ship, as per the outlet. "There was no impact as such. It was just like jamming your brakes on the car and that was that – she stopped. We had a porthole open and I looked out and the sky was clear, stars were shining, the sea was dead calm and I thought, I couldn't understand it," the then-90-year-old recalled the first moment he had realized something had gone wrong with the ship. He went on the deck to check everything. There was some ice on the water but there was no iceberg to be seen and no sign of damage to the ship above the surface. The women and children on the ship were told to get on lifeboats but there were two reasons why many people were reluctant, claimed Prentice.

It was a 70-foot drop into the water and people were sure that the ship would not sink. "Don't forget we had 16 lifeboats and they each carried 50, and if they'd been filled, we could've saved 800, whereas we only saved 500," he said. Prentice and a few other men were told to get as many biscuits as they could get from the storeroom. But by the time they reached the lifeboats, things were looking bleak and the man couldn't reach the lifeboats. As he put on his life jacket, panic increased as passengers from third class crowded on the decks. Soon enough, the boat had split in two. "All of a sudden, she lifted up quickly and you could hear everything crashing through her," he recalled.

Prentice clung to a board, trying to stay afloat. "I had a lifebelt on and I hit the water with a terrific crack, bodies all over the place. [I] didn't see much chance of living," he recounted. Virginia Estelle Clark, a woman he had helped on the deck while she and her new husband were wearing their life jackets, was beside the man. He convinced Clark to leave her husband behind and get on the lifeboat, saying he would follow her soon enough. She asked him where her husband was and it eventually turned out that he was dead. Prentice was about to freeze when Clark wrapped a cloak around him and saved his life. The RMS Carpathia was 60 miles away when it picked up the Titanic's distress call and took its survivors to New York.

Prentice kept his watch that had frozen in the water and stuck at 2:20 as a keepsake for the rest of his life until he died in 1982. He believed that the watch worked in the water for around 20 minutes. "I shall probably dream about it tonight; have another nightmare. You'd think I'm too old for that, but you'd be amazed. You lie in bed at night and the whole thing comes round again," he shared.