Early in the morning on 15 April 1912, the unthinkable happened – R.M.S. Titanic, the largest and most luxurious liner that had ever sailed the Seven Seas found itself at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. The British liner was said to be unsinkable, one employee even boasted at its launch that ‘not even God himself could sink this ship.’ In the end, it was an iceberg that dealt the fatal blow to the ‘The Queen of the Ocean’ during its maiden voyage. Of the 2,224 souls on-board, over 1,500 would perish.

On 4 June 1940, the unthinkable happened again - 338,000 B.E.F. and Allied soldiers were successfully rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo. Tragedy had been turned into triumph and Prime Minister Winston Churchill described the evacuation as a ‘miracle’.

To have witnessed one of these defining moments of the 20th-century first hand would be significant enough, to have witnessed both would be unthinkable, yet the unthinkable did happen during the eventful and often unbelievable life of Charles Herbert Lightoller.

Born in Lancashire in 1874, Lightoller had already experienced a lifetime’s worth of events by the time he took the position of Second Officer on board the Titanic in 1912. Not wanting to end up in a factory job, at age 13 Lightoller took a four-year seafaring apprenticeship instead. A short while later he found himself stuck in Rio de Janeiro whilst the boat he was on was undergoing repairs after it had sustained damage during a storm in the South Atlantic. At the time Rio was in the midst of two dangerous occurrences – a revolution and a smallpox outbreak.