The explanation put forward for the addition of the A Deck screens was that Joseph Bruce Ismay thought they would protect promenading first-class passengers from spray. A Deck, by the way, was almost 50 feet above the water, with a raised bulwark along its outside edge to protect promenaders and prevent them from toppling overboard before these alterations were envisaged. One can’t help wondering just what cosseted first-class passengers would be doing on deck in weather that would throw any appreciable amount of spray more than 50 feet in the air. Although Titanic’s supposed sister ship sailed the North Atlantic, known for its violent storms, she was never fitted with these passenger-protecting screens, and she was the flagship of the White Star Line fleet.
Only a few items recovered from the wreck have any sort of identification at all on them. One of these, which in any way indicates that the ship might actually be Titanic, is a helm indicator from the stern, or docking, bridge. This does have Titanic’s build number on it, 401, but could easily have come from any vessel of the class. Another is a slate slab supposedly from the stewards’ lavatory on the port side of E Deck; unfortunately, detailed drawings of Titanic show that no provision for the fitting of any such slate slab was ever made. That Harland & Wolff mixed up parts from one ship with those of another is clearly illustrated by their still pricing items being fitted to Olympic to Titanic’s account years after the sinking.
A section of hull plating recovered from the wreck does show an irregularity in the porthole layout on C Deck that should be peculiar to Titanic. The piece of plating comes from the side of the stewards’ toilets and has one more small porthole than the corresponding section shown in photographs of Olympic. As we know, the builders were trying to make the external appearance of one ship as similar as possible to that of the other. This extra porthole was cut in the white-painted upper part of the hull and was very visible. As the transformation progressed a new porthole would have been cut as a matter of course. The already existing porthole in the real Titanic would have been sealed up, either during the week that the switch actually took place or during the ship’s winter refit at the end of 1912.
Before the ship known as Olympic was broken up shortly before the Second World War many of her fixtures and fittings were sold off, including the panelling from most of her public rooms. The oak panelling from the first-class smoking room is now installed in the conference room of the Swan Hotel in Alnwick, for example. Other panelling from third-class areas of the ship now adorns a private flat in Wirral. This woodwork has the reverse sides clearly marked. On the panels the number 400 is stencilled, but on the frames the number 401 is clearly visible.
The one item recovered that should have been unmistakably marked, the vessel’s crow’s-nest bell, has no name or number on it at all. Normally one would expect to find the ship’s name cast into a bell, and it is the recovery of these that is usually accepted as proof of identity. In this case it would be no more proof than the helm indicator, as such objects could all too easily be moved from ship to ship. Even to the present day the most common maritime insurance frauds involve changing the identities of ships.
Even the builders’ model, which looks like Titanic but which began life as Olympic, and is now on display at Liverpool Maritime Museum, has the build numbers of both ships, 400 for Olympic and 401 for Titanic, on different parts. Until this model, which was actually constructed by Harland & Wolff, was converted into a Titanic lookalike on the museum’s instructions, it had represented Olympic, although fitted with parts obviously intended for a model of her sister. At one time this model was even altered to represent the third sister ship, Britannic.
After the sinking of the ship usually known as Titanic, 13 lifeboats were recovered and taken into New York before being returned to Britain. While these boats were still at New York they had Titanic’s name sanded off and the brass White Star badges and numbers removed, supposedly to deter souvenir hunters. While removing the names and other paraphernalia workers discovered the name Olympic carved into the gunwales. The old name had been filled with putty and painted over. Eventually the boats were returned to Britain and a dozen of them were reused by the White Star Line to help bring the number of boats aboard the second sister ship up to a level acceptable to the travelling public. Boat No 12, considered at the time to be an unlucky 13th, was not reused but lay at Southampton until the end of the First World War. Many local sea scouts had joined the Royal Navy on the outbreak of war, and some at least had given their lives for their country. By way of a thank you, the 13th lifeboat, No 12, was handed over to the sea scouts to use as a cutter. During the eight or nine years the boat had been laid up, its appearance had deteriorated somewhat, so the sea scouts set about tidying it up. They stripped off the old paint and there, cut into the gunwale of the old boat, was the name of Titanic’s sister ship, Olympic. This boat was finally wrecked in a collision with the Gosport ferry at Portsmouth and taken by the Royal Navy to Haslar for demolition. However, for many years afterwards its port and starboard White Star insignia were used as prizes by a local sea scout group. It would appear that when the lifeboats were returned to Britain the badges that had been so carefully removed in New York were returned with them.
While making preparations for the blockbuster movie Titanic, the producer, James Cameron, paid a number of visits to the wreck. On one of those visits a small robot submarine equipped with cameras and powerful lights was sent deeper into the interior of the sunken ship than any other had been. The tiny submersible visited the special suite of staterooms that had been occupied on the fateful voyage by Joseph Bruce Ismay. Film taken by the robot showed the empire-style sitting room to be in a remarkable state of preservation, its cast iron fireplace with its veined marble surround still in place. Veined marble is a naturally occurring metamorphic crystalline limestone and, like snowflakes and finger prints, no two pieces are the same. However, the marble filmed on the wreck exactly matches that shown in a photograph of the corresponding stateroom aboard Olympic, taken in 1911. (Titanic - Breaking New Ground, 1998 TV programme.)
The question should perhaps be, ‘Why did they sink the Olympic?’, and perhaps more importantly, ‘Why did the British and to a lesser extent the American governments help with the cover-up?’ To find the answers - and they are many and varied - we must go back to well before the loss of the ship and look at the political situation in Europe and the quest of a certain American financier and industrialist for ever more gold.
Chapter 1
The search for Titanic
On 9 August 1953 a very interesting article, written by Victor Sims, appeared in the Sunday Chronicle. The headline reads ‘Ship Seeks Titanic Millions’ with the subheading ‘Mystery explosions in Atlantic’.
It appears that the British Admiralty had chartered the 783-ton salvage vessel Help from the world-famous Southampton salvage company of Risdon Beazley in an effort to find the wreck of the Titanic. The wreck, as we now know, lies in more than 12,000 feet of water and is extremely difficult to reach, even with the technology available in the 21st century. Imagine how much greater that difficulty must have been more than 50 years ago. Only the fact that television had reached a point in its evolution whereby a camera could be sent down under the sea to the required depths made the attempt possible at all. Even though there were deep-diving submersibles available, such as the bathyscaphe Trieste, easily capable of reaching the extreme depth of the abyss, these were not employed because the Admiralty preferred to work in secret. Harbour pilots from Falmouth in Cornwall confirmed that the salvage vessel had called there in early August but had supposedly left hurriedly for Southampton, However, the harbour master at Southampton denied all knowledge of the vessel’s movements, saying, ‘She has not arrived, nor is she expected.’
The Help carried a 33-man crew and three civilians believed to be either scientists or Admiralty observers, under the command of Captain R. Bogart; all were sworn to secrecy. All wireless traffic with the Help was transmitted in naval code. Shi
pping officials suspected that the salvage ship was sending out decoy messages to confuse rival salvage companies as to her position. Nevertheless, an Italian salvage ship did head towards the general area where the Help was working, only to be turned away by ships of the Royal Navy. All requests made through Land’s End radio to speak to the master of the Help were ignored. Other vessels in the area where the White Star liner had foundered reported hearing repeated heavy explosions. Then, from St John’s in Newfoundland, came the news that the wreck of the Titanic had been found.
On the evening of 8 August reports began to circulate that the Help would soon begin salvage operations to recover a cargo of gold and other valuables worth something in the region of £8,000,000 - a cargo that in all official records never existed, but the Royal Navy wouldn’t have been there without some very compelling reason.
There is nothing unusual in a salvage company keeping its activities a closely guarded secret. The world of maritime salvage is extremely competitive and it is not unheard of for one company to attempt to hijack a wreck being worked on by another. However, in this instance Risdon Beazley clearly had the full support of the Royal Navy and therefore had nothing to fear from any rival company.
Since that newspaper report was published a smattering of further information has come to light, even though official records are still closed. In those days before the sophisticated sonar equipment of the present time was available, images of the deep-sea floor were generated by dropping explosive charges and measuring the shock waves that bounced back off the bottom. While this system may have lacked the finesse of the modern side-scan sonar, it did work and was accurate enough to have revealed a wreck the size of Titanic, even if it was 12,500 feet below the surface. Instead of dropping their explosive charges over the last reported position of the liner, 41°46’N, 50°14’W, the Help supposedly began her search some miles away. Of course we now know that the wreck does indeed lie some miles from that last reported position, which begs the question, ‘How did the Royal Navy know that in 1953?’ Only later did the Help change her position and begin dropping explosives over the coordinates given in Titanic’s distress calls. These later explosions were most likely intended to throw any observer off the scent, just as the maritime officials suspected.
In the 1950s deep-water salvage was a primitive affair, although Risdon Beazley was probably the best in the world at it. The company did hold the record for bringing up large pieces of salvage from deeper wrecks than anyone else. First a wreck would be located, then a camera would be lowered. Then, with the aid of a mechanical grab, explosive charges would be placed in order to blast open the remains of the ship. Once enough charges had been exploded to open up a route down through the sunken vessel to wherever the materials to be salvaged might be, the grab would be lowered in. A mechanical grab was not the most sensitive or selective of tools, so it was pot luck as to what would actually be recovered, if anything. Modern photographs of the bow section of the wreck show a hole in the hull alongside a forward hold. The plating surrounding the hole is bent outwards, indicating an internal explosion. Various fanciful explanations have been put forward to account for this hole, such as water trapped in the hold becoming pressurised when the ship struck the bottom. This might have been believable if only the pressure had not had a much easier escape route through the hold’s hatch cover than through the inch-thick steel plating of the hull. The hatch cover is missing and may well have been blown off when the Titanic reached the sea floor. Interestingly, French experts who surveyed the wreck in the years following its rediscovery by Dr Robert Ballard’s 1985 expedition concluded that the hole had been caused by an internal explosion. Could this be a result of the 1953 salvage attempt?
The stern section of the wreck is so badly smashed that it is barely recognisable as part of a ship at all, while the bow is relatively intact. Once again various whimsical explanations for this phenomenon have been put forward. One particular theory, which flies in the face of the laws of physics, seems to have gained fairly wide acceptance among those who should know better, perhaps because the alternative is embarrassing for them. According to this theory the ship broke into two main parts while still on the surface and the bow section planed away at an angle. This at least makes partial sense, as anything moving through water, or even air, takes the line of least resistance. The sharpest, smoothest part tends to lead, and with the bow section that would be the knife-edged stem of the ship. Provided that the torn section where the vessel had snapped in two was not a great deal heavier than the stem, this planing effect is precisely what one would expect. As the ship was sinking the rounded bottom of the hull would also tend to act as a leading edge, which is why most vessels that sink in deep water finish up sitting upright on the bottom regardless of their attitude when they left the surface. Exactly the same principles are employed in archery and darts: the smooth, heavy point leads and the lighter, rougher flights follow along behind. In the case of the Titanic the knife-edged stem provides the heavy point and the torn steel around the break acts as the flights. The application of physical laws does seem to have governed the bow section’s journey to the bottom of the sea. However, if the generally accepted theory as to why the stern section is so badly smashed is to be believed, we also have to believe that those same physical laws were suspended for its last journey.
According to the received theory on the sinking of the stern section of Titanic, this part of the ship sank vertically and at great speed. Indeed, it was moving so fast that it drew a column of water behind it, like a slipstream. Eventually it crashed into the sea floor, doing a great deal of damage to itself in the process, only to then be crushed out of recognition by the column of fast-moving water that was following it. Sounds quite good at first glance, doesn’t it? What a pity it doesn’t work in reality. The laws of nature are not suspended for anyone, not even the Titanic or those that put forward this theory. Allowing that the ship broke in two on the surface, which I don’t believe for one moment, then the stern section would have behaved very much like the bow. The curved stern, being a great deal smoother and sharper than the torn area around the break, would have led. The weight of the rudder and the propellers with their massive shafts would have ensured that the extreme rear part of the ship was the heaviest, adding to the tendency of anything moving through water to go smoothest, heaviest part first. Any air trapped in the stern would have been expelled before the section passed the 1,000-foot mark, or the water pressure would have crushed it into such a small area that it would not have materially affected the descent. The rudder would have been forced hard over to one side or the other and the whole stern section would have spiralled down to land on the sea floor in an upright attitude. There would have been no column of water to act as a gigantic sledgehammer and to pulverise the stern once it had come to rest. In no other example of a deep-sea wreck do we see any solid evidence of this crushing effect by a column of water following the ship down. Something else smashed the stern of the ship to the extent that it is no longer recognisable, and the most likely candidate has to be the repeated use of explosives to force a passage into the ship in 1953.
Clearly the 1953 expedition to the wreck of the Titanic was unsuccessful as far as recovering the bulk of any treasure was concerned. Nor was it entirely successful in locating the position of the wreck, because the Royal Navy had already known roughly where it was ever since 1912. British warships had been close enough to observe the sinking liner and record its exact position, even if they had declined to answer distress calls or go to her assistance. In November 2000 the Navy finally admitted that one of its vessels, the cruiser HMS Sirius, was in the area on the night Titanic foundered. As we shall see, the Royal Navy was being economical with the truth, and its presence was not the only naval one that night.
Whatever had drawn the Royal Navy to the wreck of the Titanic in 1953 was still there, or so they believed. Eight million pounds is a lot of money, and if that was the value in 1912 when the liner sank, the f
igure would grow dramatically with the passing of time. Such was the attraction that after a lapse of 25 years the Royal Navy would be back to try again.
The Royal Navy was not the only body interested in the ship. In that same year, 1953, Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck starred in the film Titanic, based loosely on the disaster. Until then the ship and those that had been lost with her had been almost forgotten by all except those that knew of the fortune supposedly hidden away within her shattered hull. Most of those who did know about her cargo never expected there to ever be any chance of its recovery. Even Lloyd’s of London, the famous maritime insurer, which officially owned the wreck, attached little or no importance to it. Thus, when in the 1950s Mr Douglas Faulkner-Wooley showed an interest in purchasing the wreck from the insurance company, Lloyd’s was quite happy to let him have it for the princely sum of £1. Mr Wooley’s intention was to raise the sunken vessel and bring it back either to Liverpool, the White Star Line’s home port, or to Southampton, its port of departure on its maiden voyage. Once back in Britain the plan was to restore at least a part of the ship to something like its original condition and open her up as a museum. It is a curious fact that back in 1912 Lloyd’s denied being the underwriters for the vessel and even went so far as to publicly announce that Titanic was not built to its requirements. To the present day, if one makes inquiries at the Guildhall Museum in London, where most of what remains of the official record covering the liner’s insurance resides, one will be informed that the underwriters were not Lloyd’s at all - but we will deal with the insurance question later.
In 1966 Mr Faulkner-Wooley, in association with Mr Philip Stone, formed the ‘Titanic Salvage Company’, whose aim was to raise the wreck of the White Star liner and restore it to its former glory. The major stumbling block seems to have been raising the finance to begin the project, and little progress was made until 1972. Then Douglas Wooley, with Clive Ramsey and Joe Wilkins, formed the ‘Seawise Salvage Company’. ‘Aquatech’ was also set up that same year by Mr Wooley and Mr Tony Wakefield. This time Douglas Wooley put together ‘Monetary Investments Maritime Limited’ to encourage investment in the other companies.
The Great Titanic Conspiracy Page 2
