The little-known story of the only black man on board Titanic has been revealed in a new documentary, which uncovers the tragic twist of fate that led to a 25-year-old engineer from Haiti and his family sailing on the doomed voyage.
Channel 4’s, Titanic in Colour, has shed light on some of the lesser-known personal stories, including that of a mixed race family who were on their way to build a new life and escape racial prejudice – only to be cruelly torn apart by the tragedy.
In the first episode, which features newly colourised photos of the ship and its passengers, historians detailed the heartbreaking fate of Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche, believed to have been the only black man on board the Titanic.
He was on his way home to his native Haiti from France with his pregnant wife and two daughters, after swapping their tickets from another vessel, which had a policy of separating children from their parents on board.
Joseph and his wife were the kind of parents who wanted the family to be together, and were reluctant to be apart from their ‘sickly’ younger daughter Louise.
Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche, the only black man who was the Titanic pictured right alongside his family, Juliette, and their two young daughters
Joseph was born in 1886 to a wealthy family in the Caribbean nation – previously a French colony – and was the nephew of the country’s president, Cincinnatus Leconte.
When he was 15 years old, he moved to France to study engineering in Beauvais – since there was no school for engineering in Haiti – accompanied by a teacher, Monseigneur Kersuzan, the Lord Bishop of Haiti.
During a visit to Villejuif with the Monseigneur, he was introduced to French wine seller Monsieur Lafargue, and struck up a friendship with his only daughter, Juliette.
Keeping in touch by letter, they fell in love and their wedding was held at the family home in 1908.
The pairing was particular significant because Juliette had come from an upper-middle class background and an interracial marriage was extremely rare at the time.
The couple went on to have two children and were expecting a third when they boarded the fateful ship.
The family had planned to move out of his wife’s native France because he’d ‘had enough of the discrimination he faced in Paris’.
Joseph had expected to find a decent job, given his education, but employers who did take him on paid him badly, claiming it was due to his youth and inexperience.
Pictured: Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche was 25-years-old when he died onboard the Titanic
Poster advertising the maiden voyage which left Southampton 10 April 1912 only to sink two days later
A year after marrying, the young couple welcomed their first daughter Simonne, followed by Louise a year later.
She was born prematurely and was a frail child, and wanting to be able to provide a better standard of living for his family, in 1911, Joseph decided he was going to move back to his native country where they were looking for young engineers.
The father-of-two was then offered a new job by his uncle to work as a mathematician in Haiti, and he hoped that their quality of life would be improved.
Historian Lola Jaye said: ‘He’d be well paid there, he’d probably have a home at the presidential palace so it was a good deal for him and his family.’
Joseph was initially unsure whether his wife, Juliette, would be willing to make the journey to live in a country that was half way across the world, but she agreed and the two made plans to travel the following years.
The family had planned to make the onward journey to Haiti after travelling 3,000 miles from Southampton to New York.
When Juliette discovered she was pregnant in 1912, the couple decided they would hasten their journey to that the baby could be born in Haiti and they could avoid travelling with a newborn.
Joseph and his family were originally supposed to sail to their native Haiti on a ship called La France, but decided to change their plans due the ship’s policy of separating parents and children.
Instead, they swapped their first-class tickets on La France for second-class tickets on the RMS Titanic, in order to stay with their young daughters, Louise and Simonne.
‘Joseph’s mother sent them first class tickets but the line that they had booked on, did not allow children to dine with their parents,’ Lola explained.
‘The type of family they are, they wanted to be together,’ she said, adding the the younger of the couple’s children, Louise, was ‘quite sickly’ and they did not want to be separated from her.
Historian, Lola Jaye, explained that the mixed race couple would have been subject to ‘curiosity’ from other passengers onboard the ship
New colourised footage has shown what life was really like onboard the RMS Titanic – as revealed in a new Channel 4 documentary
Imagining what the experience onboard would have been like for Joseph and his family, Lola said: ‘I think a mixed race family would have been treated with curiosity because it wasn’t the norm to see a black man and a white lady together in this society.’
While the ship completed the first leg of its journey from Southampton to Queenstown, Juliette posted a letter for her father
‘I’m writing to you from the reading room, and an orchestra is playing next to me, one violin and two cellos and one piano. If only you could see how big the ship is,’ she said.
‘One can hardly find his or her cabin in a succession of hallways. People are very nice onboard.
‘Yesterday, the girls were running after a gentleman who had given them chocolates.’
When disaster struck in the early hours of April 15 1912, Juliette was quick to react, and was fortunately able to get onboard a life boat with the couple’s two young children.
Simonne was just three-years-old when she was rescued from the sinking vessel, but claimed she retained vivid memories of the rescue throughout her life.
Lola said: ‘Simonne talks about getting onboard the Carpathia being hoisted in sacks and she remembers that, perhaps not about the Titanic itself.
Pictures of a man standing next to the Titanic reveal the huge scale of the ship
What caused the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic’s maiden voyage to end in diaster and why were there not enough lifeboats?
On April 14 1912, Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean at around 23:40 local time, generating six narrow openings in the vessel’s starboard hull, believed to have occurred as a result of the rivets in the hull snapping.
The ship sank two hours and 40 minutes later, in the early hours of April 15. An estimated 1,517 people died.
The judge who led the British inquiry into the Titanic disaster, John Charles Bigham, 1st Viscount Mersey, wrote in his journal that the ship was travelling at ‘excessive speed’ and there was ‘no reduction of speed’ in the icy environment.
Photograph of Titanic leaving Southampton at the start of her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912. Five days after this photo was taken the ship was on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean
The ‘unsinkable’ liner was going at around 22.5 knots or 25 miles per hour, just 0.5 knots below its top speed of 23 knots.
It has been suggested that White Star Line chairman Bruce Ismay wanted to beat a record set by Titanic’s sister ship, the RMS Olympic, on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York the year before.
However, Royal Museums Greenwich claims stories of the captain trying to make a speed record are ‘without substance’, despite the testimony from Mrs Lines.
Another theory posited in 2004 by a US engineer was that a smouldering coal fire in the depths of Titanic meant the ship had to get to New York faster than originally planned.
According to Robert Essenhigh at Ohio State University, Titanic’s records show there was a fire one of Titanic’s coal bunkers, forward bunker #6.
More than 1,500 people – around 70 per cent of the passengers onboard – tragically perished after the Titanic hit an iceberg 112 years ago
Passengers who survived the tragedy told of a beautiful, cloudless night, with some even claiming they spent their final moments on deck before boarding a lifeboat discussing the brightness of the stars – so, how was it missed?
One theory suggests that a freak weather event created the phenomenon, which possibly both obscured the iceberg until it was too late and hindered communication with a nearby ship.
Historian and broadcaster Tim Maltin claims the Titanic’s crew fell victim to a thermal inversion, which is caused by a band of cold air forcing itself underneath a band of warmer air, the Times reports.
He believes that the cold current in the North Atlantic Ocean called Labrador pushed this cold air beneath the warm Gulf Stream, creating a mirage.
The light rays are bent downwards, which creates the illusion that the horizon is higher than it actually is.
The scattered light also creates a haze lingering over the water, which Maltin believes likely hid the iceberg behind it in the moonless night.
Those on the vantage point, the crow’s nest of the ship, likely will have only seen the gap between true horizon and the refracted one as a haze.
This ‘haze’ was later described by surviving crew members as well as other ships in the area at the time.
The survivor and rescuer reports clearly indicate a thermal inversion being present that night, according to Maltin, author of Titanic: A Very Deceiving Night.
Lookouts later said the iceberg had looked dark as the haze blurred its lines and made it difficult to set apart from the sea.
‘The reason why the berg appeared to be dark was because they were seeing it against a lighter haze,’ Maltin told the Times.
James Moody was on night watch when the collision happened and took the call from the watchman, asking him ‘What do you see?’ The man responded: ‘Iceberg, dead ahead.’
By 2.20am, with hundreds of people still on board, the ship plunged beneath the waves, taking more than 1,500, including Moody, with it.
Among the nearby ships which might have been able to help save some of the 2,240 passengers and crew was the SS Californian, which failed to communicate with the Titanic and spot that it was sinking because of the haze.
It wasn’t carrying any passengers and would have had plenty of space for the people on Titanic.
Due to the false horizon, crewmembers on the SS Californian thought they were looking at a much smaller ship that was closer to them, Maltin theorised.
They thought as a small vessel, the other ship would not be equipped with a wireless operator, and therefore concluded the best way to communicate with the Titanic would be via a powerful morse lamp.
This was briefly spotted by those on the Titanic, as Colonel Archibald Gracie, who survived the tragedy, later said.
He told how he pointed out a ‘bright white light’ to other passengers, which he believed to come from a ship ‘about five miles off’.
‘But instead of growing brighter [when I leaned over the rail of the ship], we men saw the light fade and then pass altogether,’ Colonel Gracie was quoted as saying in the book ‘Titanic: A Survivor’s Story by Colonel Archibald Gracie’ by Deborah Collcutt.
The morse code sent from the SS Californian to the Titanic and back was distorted by the haze and therefore they couldn’t effectively communicate, Maltin argues.
Famously, Titanic did not have enough lifeboats to hold the 2,224 souls on board. If it had, many more hundreds – if not all – of the lives that were lost that night could have been saved.
Titanic had a total of 20 lifeboats, which all together could accommodate 1,178 people, just over half of the total (although two of these boats weren’t launched when the ship went down).
There are several suggestions as to why there weren’t more. Firstly, it was said that Titanic’s designers felt too many lifeboats would clutter the deck and obscure views of the sea for first class passengers.
Looking at a plan of Titanic, the lifeboats were mostly kept on the officers’ promenade towards the front and the second class promenade towards the back.
The first class promenade, meanwhile, was almost completely free of lifeboats, meaning the first class passengers could stroll and admire clear views of the Atlantic on either side.
Although it seems unthinkable now, Titanic’s selling point was clearly its grandeur and luxury, not its safety.
Additionally, it wasn’t anticipated that Titanic would need its lifeboats to hold all passengers at the same time.
‘That bit must have been the most traumatic for her as well as being hoisted and being away from her mother and the trauma of that.’
Joseph hurried to get his family onboard the rescuing vessel, wrapping his wife in a blanket and assuring her that they would see each other again soon.
The last words Joseph uttered to his loving wife were: ‘Here, take this, you are going to need it. I’ll get another boat. God be with you. I’ll see you in New York.’
The body of the 25-year-old engineer was sadly never recovered.
Simonne, her sister and mother were among 712 people who survived the sinking of the ship, which claimed 1,500 lives.
The three were taken to New York onboard the HMS Carpathia.
Juliette was left widowed and without a word of English, but fortunately managed to find her way back to France with her two daughters in the weeks that followed, before giving birth to a son who she called Joseph.
Along with her beloved husband, all the family’s finances had gone down with the ‘unsinkable’ vessel.
The couple’s daughter, Louise Laroche (2 July 1910 – 28 January 1998) was the last French survivor on the Titanic.
Her sister, Simonne, who never married, died at the age of 64 in 1973, seven years before her mother, Juliette passed in 1980 aged 91.
Juliette’s grave read: ‘Juliette Laroche 1889-1980, wife of Joseph Laroche, lost at sea on RMS Titanic, April 15th 1912.’