How the Titanic's gym forever changed fitness

RIGHT AFTER MIDNIGHT, as the Titanic creaked and groaned and began its collapse into the sea, hundreds of desperate people swarmed toward the middle of the boat. The ship’s crew tried to load panicked people into lifeboats, about 60 at a time, but a terrible reality set in almost immediately: Only about one-third of the ship’s 2,240 passengers were going to fit.

Women and children were to be taken first, with everybody else milling around, hoping for some kind of miracle or a generous crew member to wave them onto a lifeboat. Many clung to the idea that perhaps a rescue ship would show up before the Titanic took its last breath. There were also plenty of people who stayed put — they still believed that the mighty Titanic was unsinkable.

But as terrifying as this scene looked, the sounds may have been even worse. As captured by James Cameron’s “Titanic,” which turned 26 on Dec. 19, the crunchings and snappings of the boat’s 2½-hour submergence into the Atlantic were so loud and foreboding that it must have sounded like a wounded sea monster to all the people huddled on the deck.

And then the “the low moan” began. Realizing everybody was going to end up in the water, one way or another, hundreds of people put on life vests and either fell or dove into the water as the night stretched on. But the water was 28 degrees on that night, April 15, 1912, and many people instantly suffered a “cold shock,” which causes a body’s limbs to shut down within 60 seconds or so, forcing a rapid paralysis to the extremities including people’s mouths and lungs. Titanic survivors describe a horrific guttural groan from the darkness, countless people dying but unable to scream or even speak as they bobbed in the water. Their last breaths were moans.

Amid all the chaos, there became only one semi-quiet space on the ship, and it just so happened that the room was also the most mysterious spot on the boat: the Titanic gym, which was located right beside the ship’s lifeboats. By that night, the Titanic’s third full day at sea, most passengers had at least a passing knowledge of this curious place and the thick-chested man who managed it. Thomas W. McCawley had become a carnival barker on the boat, explaining to anybody and everybody who would listen that someday physical fitness was going to take the world by storm. Passengers admired his hustle but chuckled at the absurdity.

As the ship sank, the Titanic band famously played on, and so did McCawley. Hundreds of people came in and out of the gym, which held many of the Titanic’s life jackets. It was warm and slightly calmer in there, so mobs of people — mostly first-class passengers — ducked in and prayed for hope amid the disarray.

McCawley was regarded all week for being kind with kids but stern with adults as he professed the necessity of fitness, insisting that someday there would be a gym in every town.

But on this night, McCawley was nothing but soothing. He was 36 years old, a burly 5-foot-5 man from Scotland, with a booming voice that he dialed down on that night. He helped people put on life vests and lifted kids onto various pieces of equipment as the screaming and panic boomed outside the windows of the gym. Kids especially seemed to love the electric horse and camel, which delighted McCawley. He joked with kids and taught them how to ride the two devices even as the reality of the night set in.

As disaster crept closer outside the windows of his gym, McCawley never lost his exuberance for pitching physical fitness. As crew members took people out to get into the lifeboats, others ducked in to stay warm. McCawley greeted them all, waving goodbye to those going to the boats and hello to those coming in from the cold.

At one point late in the night, passengers turned their attention to McCawley. Survivors later indicated that McCawley never appeared to explore getting off the boat himself, no matter how bleak things were looking. He seemed intent on staying in the gym to the very end.

One first-class passenger, William Carter, implored McCawley to at least put on a life jacket. But McCawley insisted he was going to swim his way out at the very last moment.

“I won’t wear one, sir,” McCawley said with a smile. “It’ll just slow me down and impede my stroke.”

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MCCAWLEY DIDN’T INVENT FITNESS, and the Titanic wasn’t the first gym. But it’s impossible to overestimate McCawley and his gym’s impact on launching the modern fitness industrial complex. Big Fitness is now a $30 billion business annually just in the U.S., and many of its roots sprouted up from the deck of the Titanic.

McCawley’s preachings weren’t new, or even his creation. Most historians think that the birth of the fitness movement began in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and that the 1893 World’s Fair is a good official start date for the rise of working out.

German bodybuilder Eugen Sandow brought a crew of European strongmen and strongwomen to “perform” in front of thousands of people in Chicago, with reactions ranging from perplexed to weirded out as Sandow & Co. posed and lifted objects in front of crowds. Back then, muscle-bound people were lumped in with circus sideshows.

Sandow’s notoriety leaped even more the following year when he appeared in three short videos recorded by Thomas Edison’s film studios. They were among the earliest moving images ever recorded, and people devoured the 45-second videos of Sandow’s rippling muscles as he flexed and turned. They were essentially the first bodybuilding poses ever seen by wide audiences. “If you had mentioned Sandow to people on the Titanic, they probably would have known who he was,” says fitness historian Conor Heffernan, a former professor at the University of Texas. “He had incredible fame.”

Over the next two decades, most of the momentum around physical fitness was confined to the upper class. Construction workers, railroad builders and farmers had no time or disposable income for electric horses or exercise bikes. But for the wealthy, gyms started to become a sign of success, like a Rolex or Louis Vuitton handbag would today.

That coincided perfectly with the rise of the massive cruise ship in the early 1900s. Cruise ships were a worldwide phenomenon at the time, and nothing came close to the mystique of the Titanic. As Cameron shows in the movie, newspapers and magazines had a voracious appetite for anything related to the ship — the same way that Gannett recently hired a Taylor Swift beat reporter, many publications had devoted significant coverage to all things Titanic.

Coverage of the Titanic often served as a sales pitch for the boat and the societal ideal. Want to live like kings and queens? The Titanic rate booklet, a guide to all the amenities offered on the boat, was a good place to start: top-notch food, Turkish baths, smoking rooms, a dog kennel, electric heaters and yes, a gym. “The Titanic was like having Don King promote gyms,” Heffernan says. “It was very, very instrumental in the rise of fitness.”

On the boat, the gym was built in the first-class area, creating a buzz of wonderment for the 991 second- and third-class passengers who were able to wander around but not enter. The boat was about three football fields long, which wasn’t quite big enough to tamp down the aspirations of those in second and third class.

All those Jacks could wander just close enough on the deck to feel like the Roses were right there. They could peer through glass windows into the first-class common areas, see the top hats, gowns and gold-plated dishware, and think that could be them someday. The smoking rooms full of people lighting up cigarettes and pipes reeked more of a possibility than tobacco, and the fine dining rooms had them licking their lips in a way that had nothing really to do with the food itself.

Even though the ship boarded in England, many of the passengers were Americans returning from Europe with a very American brand of fantastical ambition running through their heads. The Titanic was a perfect place to wander around and daydream about being one lucky break away from the finer things in life.

Most passengers, even in first class, had no idea what a gym even was, or why someone would want to do any of the odd contraptions inside. At the time, the concept of personal fitness seemed silly and unnecessary to the people at the bottom of the boat and sweating and lifting weights felt beneath the 1-percenters at the top of the ship.

That didn’t deter McCawley. The Titanic gym wasn’t a job for McCawley, and even calling it his life’s passion might not be enough. This was in his soul, and he evangelized to the first class, the third class, the crew, you name it. He had become one of the early pioneers in a trend that continues to this day — The Health Guru, the fitness expert with a brand-new (and easier than ever!) way to get healthy. Sandow, Jack LaLanne, Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons, Suzanne Somers, Billy Blanks, Tony Little — McCawley belongs in that conversation.

He was good at building the hype. McCawley encouraged women to sit on the electric horse and camel. He told men to try out the squash courts but then come work the rowing machines or ride the exercise bikes. He even carved out a 2-hour window every day, from 1 to 3 p.m., for kids to come in and work out. He’d show them a map on the wall where he’d been keeping track of the boat’s progress in the Atlantic Ocean. It sure seems like McCawley knew the people who were going to buy into the fitness movement someday were the kids of the Titanic, not their parents.

McCawley himself is a huge mystery. He pops up in many accounts from survivors and historians, but usually only in passing mentions. Nobody seems to have truly known the man. He traveled alone and is believed to have been unmarried, with the gym as the center of his life. McCawley supposedly had a memorable British accent, though he listed himself as Scottish. He seems to have been a product of physical education that had begun in Europe over the previous two decades.

There are no records of how he rose high enough in the fitness community to become the lead preacher for the industry. But luxury ships were the ultimate place to be sermonizing during that era, and McCawley ended up on two of them: the Oceanic and the most sensational ship ever constructed, the Titanic.

That meant that by the afternoon of April 10, as people boarded the boat from London headed for New York, McCawley may have been the unofficial president of fitness. This meant that he was about to introduce to the world one of the most important gyms ever constructed — and almost every survivor of the biggest ocean disaster in history was going to spend time in it.

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IN “TITANIC,” Cameron devoted a lot of time and effort to recreating a gym that historians say is remarkably accurate. The gym appears once in the movie, in the classic scene where Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack pulls Kate Winslet’s Rose inside and tries to convince her she can’t stay on the path her mom and fiancée are trying to push her down. “That fire that I love so much about you, Rose, that fire’s going to burn out,” he says with the electric horse and camel lurking behind.

Cameron also shot a deleted scene that included a 40-second visit to the gym. Actor Brian McDermott portrays McCawley as he shows Rose and her mom various pieces of equipment. He asks Rose’s mom if she’d like to try the rowing machine, and she responds, “Don’t be absurd. I can’t think of a skill I should likely need less.” As Rose exits the gym, she winds up and throws a solid right hand at the primitive speed bag hanging in the middle of the gym.

Historians say that while McDermott was about twice as old (72) and much heavier, the actor did nail McCawley’s enthusiasm for the gym and all of its equipment. McCawley had become one of the ship’s most amusing characters. Even the people who thought he was aggressive seemed to chuckle and appreciate his hustle.

McCawley wore the same outfit every day, so much so that one survivor simply referred to him as “White Flannels” in her autobiography. Other passengers remarked how his energy never wavered — personal fitness was his mission.

The gym had some impressive equipment. The rowing machines did the same basic thing that they do now, and the exercise bikes had a timer on them and looked similar to what we have now. “It’s a nicely designed gym,” Heffernan says. “And it has equipment that captures the essence of all physical movements.”

But like so much about the fitness industry that was about to boom, the Titanic was selling some snake oil. The electric horse and camel machines were the most popular devices in the gym, and there was a strong belief 100 years ago that horseback riding was good for optimal health. Calvin Coolidge was such a believer that he had an electric horse installed in the White House when he was in office.

Don’t expect to see Anytime Fitness adding electric horse and camel machines, though. They were essentially the shake weights of 1912… and might have been actively bad for your health. “They led to significant hip and back issues for those who used them,” Heffernan says.

One bizarre hurdle that McCawley and other gym enthusiasts faced early on was the mere concept of sweating. In her book “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession,” author Natalia Mehlman Petrzela titled the first section “When Sweating Was Strange” because there was such an aversion from society’s upper class about working hard enough to overheat. “Sweating was believed to be gross and for lower class people,” says Mehlman Petrzela, a professor of history at The New School in New York City. “It was brutish for men and unfeminine for women.”

McCawley seemed to understand that sweating was an uphill battle. His message was very much in line with what fitness has always espoused. He routinely emphasized to passengers that minimal effort was needed to create great gains.

In her book, Mehlman Petrzela chronicles the long list of fast and easy products over the past century. Her favorite might be Stauffer’s Magic Couch, which was a preposterous sofa that vibrated to produce “figure control” — a motorized engine would shake the pounds loose, allegedly, in the 1950s. “We’ve always wanted something for nothing — the hot, new product that requires the least amount of work for the most benefit,” Mehlman Petrzela says.

McCawley also seemed to get the lure of fitness as a lifestyle rather than an occasional activity. He encouraged gym goers to lift some weights, followed by a dip in the Titanic’s swimming pool, followed by some squash. “Then come back to the gym and try the bikes,” he’d say. Multi-pronged physical activity was good… but everything came back to his gym.

Over the first four days of the trip, McCawley seemed to have gotten to damn near everyone on the boat. There are no records of exactly how many people worked out, and who used what pieces of equipment. But he left an impression and so did his equipment. McCawley probably was headed for a lucrative future as a fitness founding father the minute the ship docked in New York City.

But just before midnight on April 14, the night watch of the Titanic sounded the alarm bells three times that an iceberg was up ahead. It was too late — the post-wreck inquiry estimated that the giant ship had only about 40 seconds between the alarms and when it struck the iceberg.

By around 2:30 a.m., the last lifeboat had hit the water and every other person on the ship was in the water. Most of the 1,500 who died probably survived less than five minutes, according to Parks Stephenson, a former Navy aerospace engineer and technical adviser to Cameron in the movie.

The story of the Titanic’s sinking became a series of conflicting, complex smaller stories that make the truth of what happened difficult to know to this day. For instance, the British inquiry after the wreck concluded that the Titanic had sunk in one piece to the bottom of the ocean. That contradicted a slew of survivor accounts saying they watched the boat split into two. But the idea that the Titanic sat on the ocean floor in one piece persisted for 73 years.

It wasn’t until Robert Ballard discovered the wreck in 1985 that we found out the survivor accounts had been right. Ballard first found the front of the ship, then the rear 600 meters away to the west. “Most of what we know about the Titanic is wrong,” says Stephenson, who has been to the Titanic twice on expeditions. “The reason I concentrate on the wreck is that the wreck is the last surviving witness of the disaster. It’s like a big crime scene on the ocean floor, and piecing it together is something that is still ongoing.”

Stephenson admits he is not well-liked among the Titanic community. He has a bunch of semi-controversial takes, including that even the iceberg narrative might be wrong. He believes the design of the front of the ship was strong enough to absorb a collision with an iceberg. Instead, he thinks the ship ran up and over the giant iceberg, causing it to ground and crumple from the bottom up.

The reality is, we probably will never know the true extent of what happened. The Titanic eventually submerged completely and sank to about 2.5 miles (3,900 meters) beneath the surface. Ballard’s book, “The Discovery of the Titanic,” provided haunting images of the ship, but even those photos were from 70-plus years after the disaster. Cameron’s documentation of the wreck has been instrumental in recent years, though recent imagery shows just how rapidly the ship is crumbling.

The gym is one of the hardest-hit areas of the wreck. Ballard included a photo of the gym, which appears to have had one of the four ship smokestacks collapse on top of it. Some of the equipment is even visible from the outside. But 40 years later, Cameron’s visuals show the entire thing has been smushed. “The gym is deteriorating rapidly,” says Don Lynch, who served as Cameron’s chief historical adviser on Titanic. “It was in mostly good shape when Ballard first found it. But it’s gotten a lot worse. It’s sad to see.”

It all adds up to an unsatisfying final act of T.W. McCawley. Nobody knows for sure what happened to him, just that he didn’t survive. His body was never found, and no survivors mentioned him after that scene with Carter. It’s possible that the smokestack crushed him. Or that he put a life jacket on and tried to swim for it.

But it’s also possible that he went down with the ship, and that he died as he lived: with his gym.