Joseph Boxhall
Fourth Officer of Titanic (1884–1967)
Commander Joseph Groves Boxhall (23 March 1884 – 25 April 1967) was a British merchant seaman and naval officer who was the fourth officer on the RMS Titanic. When the ship struck the iceberg, Boxhall was on watch and subsequently became the only on-watch officer that night to survive the sinking.
During the sinking, Boxhall was in charge of firing distress rockets in an attempt to signal a nearby ship, now known to be the SS Californian, and also made a second calculation of the Titanic's final position. He was ordered into Emergency Cutter No. 2 and, after the ship sank, was responsible for lighting green flares which helped attract the RMS Carpathia to the wrecksite, subsequently leading to a successful rescue of all the lifeboats. He subsequently took part in both the U.S. and U.K. inquiries.
Boxhall went on to serve in World War I with the Royal Naval Reserve. He rose to senior officer in the Merchant Navy, retiring from seafaring in 1940. Though he seldom spoke about Titanic, in retirement, he was persuaded to help out with the production of the film, A Night to Remember. He later gave an interview on the BBC on the 50th anniversary of the sinking.
“Joseph Boxhall” enters the record as fourth Officer of Titanic (1884–1967). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Joseph, Boxhall and Fourth can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph Boxhall” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.