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| Robert Hichens was at the wheel of the ship when it sank in April 1912 |
The man at the wheel of the Titanic when it struck a fateful iceberg in 1912 has not been remembered well throughout history.
Quartermaster Robert Hichens was accused of refusing to return to rescue passengers after taking charge of a lifeboat on the sinking ship.
He was later branded a bully and coward.
The events of that night destroyed his promising career as a sailor with the White Star Line and led to him spiralling into depression, drunkenness and losing his family.
He tried to kill himself twice before he was jailed for attempted murder after shooting a man who had given him a loan in the head, Devon Live reports.
Robert, then aged 30, was steering the ship when RMS Titanic sank in the early morning on April 15, 1912, but was quickly ordered to leave the wheel less than an hour after the collision and put in charge of lifeboat six.
The quartermaster, from Torquay, Devon, rowed more than 40 people to safety but his great granddaughter, Sally Nilsson, believes the disaster blighted the rest of his life and "cartwheeled him to a very tragic end".
He was accused of refusing to go back to rescue survivors from the water.
His argument with American socialite Margaret ‘Molly’ Brown – who threatened to throw him overboard – was later depicted in the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
Born in 1882, Robert was one of 10 children, the second son of Philip Hichens and Rebecca Wood, and grew up in St Peter’s Square in Newlyn.
Life was difficult and money and food were scarce. At the turn of the century, with fish stocks depleted, fathers encouraged their sons to find work other than fishing and at 19 Robert was urged by Philip to join the Royal Naval Reserve, which offered a government training programme.
The move served him well; he completed his course and joined the merchant service.
In 1906, he married Florence Mortimore, who he had met in Torquay while serving aboard the yacht Ariano. Then came a move to Southampton; by then Robert was the father of two daughters.
Times were hard, with coal strikes starving sailors of work, but with his unblemished record Robert was able to get a berth on the Titanic, the second member of the deck crew to sign up.
He spent four days aboard so he could get to know her intimately before she sailed.
Robert was at the wheel of the Titanic the very moment the ship fatally struck an iceberg during her maiden voyage on April 15, 1912. The sinking claimed more than 1,500 lives.
Following the disaster, Robert was kept under virtual house arrest while he participated in American and British inquiries: but, supposedly enticed by the offer of a lifelong job and good pay in exchange for his silence, and fearing he might not be able to find other work, he remained a White Star Line employee.
In the immediate aftermath, he was sent to South Africa – as far away from England as possible, and the other side of the world from his family.
He returned to England in 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, and was quartered on HMS Victory in Portsmouth, but invalided out with neurasthenia, a nervous condition similar to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Prone to fatigue, anxiety attacks, headaches and black moods, the condition would have a major effect on his life over the next 20 years. He would wake with nightmares and, although there is no account of his feelings about the Titanic disaster, it’s safe to assume the memory haunted him for the rest of his life.
However, Robert continued his work as a quartermaster, and in the 1920s moved to Torquay with his family where he bought a small pleasure boat, the Queen Mary.
He can hardly have known the purchase would set in train a sequence of events which would leave him homeless, separated from his wife and family and in jail, and also led him to make two attempts to end his own life.
To buy the boat Robert had taken out two loans with a man named Harry Henley who then set about making Robert’s life a misery, constantly threatening him to demand payment.
As he fended off Henley’s demands, the other aspects of Robert’s life were beginning to unravel, all taking their toll on his mental state.
The Great Depression had starved him of customers and therefore the income from his boat.
He turned to drink to ease the pain, but this had a devastating effect on his marriage, and the final straw came when the family was evicted for rent arrears. Florence left him and returned to Southampton with the children, by now six in number.
Homeless, alone, without work and still crippled by neurasthenia, Robert began to tramp the country looking for a job, while his drinking grew progressively worse.
He had hit rock-bottom and, blaming Henley for the mess he was in, purchased a silver revolver and returned to Torquay where he shot him in the head, though the bullet did not strike bone and caused only superficial wounds.
Henley was able to run for the police, and as they arrived Robert tried to shoot himself in the head, but only injured his nose, according to a contemporary newspaper report.
A note was found on him indicating that he intended to kill Henley and then himself; he attempted suicide a second time while in custody by cutting his wrists, but again survived.
Convicted of attempted murder, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, the judge sympathetically handing him a reduced sentence.
While in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight he managed to make up with Florence, moving into the family home on his release: but tragedy struck yet again when she was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Robert nursed her until she was too sick to remain at home and, shortly after entering a nursing home in Southampton, she died.
With the Second World War now in its second year and his wife gone, Robert could not bear to stay in Southampton and took a job as third officer of a cargo ship named the English Trader.
She ferried goods between Africa and Britain, often with no naval escort and under heavy attack from enemy aircraft.
By this time he had heart problems, and confided in a shipmate that he didn’t want to live and would never see England again.
On September 23, 1940, the ship was moored at Aberdeen when Robert died of heart failure in his cabin, in the presence of the captain and the leading steward.
While history is not kind to Mr Hichens, his descendants paint a different picture of the young Cornishman.
In 2008, his niece Barbara Clarke, 83, spoke publicly for the first time.
She said: “He was publicly shamed and humiliated and racked with guilt. It wasn’t fair; he was a kind and gentle man.”
It also prompted his grandaughter Sally to write a book called The Man Who Sank Titanic: The Troubled Life Of Quartermaster Robert Hichens, in an attempt to set the record straight about her great-grandfather.
“Robert was a very misunderstood man,” said Sally, whose grandmother Phyllis-May was known as ‘the Titanic baby’.
“He showed loyalty to his captain during the inquests and cared for his family, which he loved very much.
“The events of that night can never be one hundred per cent clear, none of the lifeboats had compasses and there was no moon.
"Only some of the boats had lamps: merely candles in lanterns, giving a pathetic glow.
“The lights of Titanic had gone and they were thrown into total darkness apart from the stars: plus Robert’s grandfather Phillip had drowned years before, so he was right to feel trepidation.”
