Lisa Wilkinson

However, even though a lot of the crew weren't being told the truth...

Evelyn and her skills at reading Morse code mean she knows exactly what's going on.

She knows that they don't have long, and so from the moment she gets up on deck, she is just tirelessly helping women and children secure their life belts and helping them over the gunwales and into the lifeboats, calming them, but all the while seeing families repeatedly struggling

just torn apart because she knows how important it is to get as many people as possible into those lifeboats as quickly as she can.

Well, she had made peace with the fact that with only 1,176 spots, when there were just over 2,200 people on that ship, she had made peace that she would never get a spot and she would never see her William again.

But as a

met that understanding with a level of calm because she knew she could do something really worthwhile on that night.

And there were only a couple of lifeboats left and she was helping women and children into Lifeboat 16 when a gentleman came up to her and ordered her into the lifeboat.

And she thanked him but said, you know, I'm crew, I'm doing my job.

And he announces himself as J Bruce Ismay.

And he tells her that he owns the Titanic and he is ordering her into that lifeboat.

And I am absolutely convinced, now knowing Evelyn as well as I do, that the only way she could have made peace with taking one of those spots is she would have looked at the oars on that lifeboat and she would have known she could row better, faster and for longer than anyone else who was going to man those oars.

Because when they... They were all told, those who were in the lifeboats, once you hit the North Atlantic, and hit they did because all of these ropes were really dodgy and unfamiliar with that process.

So once you get to the North Atlantic, you have to row as far away from this 52,000-tonne vessel as you can because when she goes down, and she wasn't far away from going down...

everything in the vicinity will be sucked down with her.

And so Evelyn rode like she'd never rode before.

There was a lot of screaming and it was described by one of the survivors like hearing a swarm of locusts screeching in the harsh summer.

they could hear people crying out because some people were jumping into the North Atlantic.

Tragically, quite a lot of the people

who ended up in the North Atlantic never made it into the half-empty lifeboats because a lot of the people in the lifeboats, particularly, I'm sad to say, those in first class who had made it into lifeboats, didn't want to go back and save people because they were worried that there would be a mad scramble and that that would sink those lifeboats that had made it safely away.