Mr Henry Samuel Etches, 41, was married living at 23A, Gordon Avenue, Southampton. His previous ship was the Olympic. His duties aboard Titanic were on B deck, after end, port side where he was in charge of 8 cabins on B deck and one on A deck, A-36 - Thomas Andrews. After the collision Etches, who was off duty, became curious and walked forward along the E deck, as he entered the third class accommodation he met a passenger whodropped a lump of ice to the floor with the words ‘Will you believe it now?’ Later when the danger was more widely known he helped his first class passengers into their lifebelts. In B-84 he struggled to persuade mining and smelting tycoon Benjamin Guggenheim to wear his lifebelt. He eventually succeeded and gave Guggenheim a thick sweater before directing him to the Boat Deck. Later Guggenheim would remove both and spend his last moments alive dressed in his finest evening wear. Etches was in lifeboat 5 and pulled an oar as Third Officer Pitman guided them back towards the scene to pick up swimmers, one woman implored Etches to persuade Officer Pitman not to return and eventually Pitman decided to stand-by despite the desperate calls of those in the freezing water. Lifeboat 5 was recovered by the Carpathia. After he arrived in New York Etches was called before the U.S. Senate Inquiry into the sinking but little is known about his life after that.
A Henry Etches survived the sinking of another White Star ship, the Britannic. This was built and launched after Titanic and was initially named Gigantic but the name was changed after the tragic loss of her sistership. She was one of the finest and safest ocean liners of her era but never crossed the Atlantic carrying the rich and the poor to the New World. She was converted into a hospital ship and made six voyages to the Mediterranean, evacuating thousands of wounded soldiers from the battlefields of the Eastern Front during World War I. Considered more “unsinkable” than the Titanic due to the modifications of her design, she was lost in only 55 minutes after an explosion caused by a German mine. The Britannic was the largest British ship lost during the conflict and remains the largest sunken ocean liner in the world.