Over the years between 1966 and 1972 Mr Wooley had turned his attention to the burned-out wreck of the Queen Elizabeth lying in Hong Kong harbour. His intention here seems to have been to raise the Queen Elizabeth as a sort of practice run before making an attempt on the Titanic, although the problems posed by each vessel are in no way similar. As the 1970s wore on, the Admiralty began to openly show a little interest in Mr Wooley’s plans for the Titanic, although it didn’t mention its previous involvement. In 1978 some sort of agreement between Douglas Wooley and the Admiralty seems to have been reached whereby they would join forces to find and survey the liner, in conjunction with Le Fathom Line Limited. This is of particular interest because, as we know, the Admiralty already knew exactly where the ship was. The joint venture appears to have been code-named ‘SOLLIS’.
At about the same time another potential partner for Mr Wooley seems to have entered the picture, Mr Blundell, a South African businessman who offered to put up £6.5 million to partially fund the expedition. For this Mr Blundell was promised 41% of the value of anything salvaged from the wreck, so Douglas Wooley handed over that percentage of shares in his Titanic Salvage Company. According to a report on the venture produced by Mr Robert McDougall, a maritime historian from Blackpool, no sooner did Mr Wooley hand over the shares than Mr Blundell and the £6.5 million evaporated, never to be seen again. Despite the sudden departure of Mr Wooley’s financial backer, the Royal Navy continued with the project, and provided the survey vessel HMS Hecate.
This was no half-hearted contribution from the Navy. HMS Hecate was a deep-ocean survey vessel of the ‘Hecla’ class. She was 260 feet long with a beam of 49 feet and displaced 2,800 tons. She carried a crew of 121 including 13 officers and six scientists. The ship was capable of 14 knots with her three Paxman Ventura diesel engines and had a range of 12,000 miles at a cruising speed of 11 knots. Two small survey craft, a launch, a Westland Wasp helicopter and a Land Rover were among her standard equipment, together with two 20mm Oerlikon guns. She had joined the fleet, with two sister ships, Hecla and Hydra, in the mid-1960s, and would remain in service until 1990.
In 1977 the Royal Navy had carried out a series of experiments with a new deep-water sonar system intended to detect Russian nuclear submarines that habitually hid themselves in the deep waters of the North Atlantic in the same general area where the Titanic had foundered. The easiest way to test any underwater search equipment is to look for something of which you already know the exact location. The test was successful inasmuch as the sonar detected the two large sections of Titanic’s hull on the ocean floor. Understandably, because the Royal Navy didn’t want the Russians to know that they could find and therefore destroy submarines hiding in deep water, they classified the whole operation. Only the Americans were made privy to any of the information gathered.
In 1978 everything appeared to be going swimmingly for Mr Wooley, right up to the time he was ready to join the expedition. At the last moment, even though he had provided detailed plans and had been otherwise instrumental in bringing the project to fruition, Douglas Wooley was excluded and the Hecate sailed without him. From what information is available, almost 30 years after the event, the only person on the expedition with any real connection with Wooley was Commander John Grattan of Le Fathom Line Limited.
In 1978/9, shortly before the joint venture to find the Titanic began, Now magazine published an article describing Commander Grattan as the Royal Navy’s senior diver, and explained how he, Seawise and Titanic Salvage, a company formed by Wooley and others to undertake the project, expected make the search during that summer. Interestingly, the article also stated that Grattan had revealed the exact location of the wreck to the publishers, although they were going to keep it secret until after the expedition had taken place, which confirms that the Navy already knew its precise position. According to the magazine, Dave Berwin, the world’s leading expert in underwater photography, had been engaged to help and to raise the necessary finance. A feasibility study had supposedly been carried out by Commander Grattan’s Le Fathom Line, which operated as a diving consultancy. Grattan had started out in the Fleet Air Arm (the Royal Navy’s air force) but had been grounded after he broke his spine in an inter-service skiing contest. He qualified as a diver in 1956 and enjoyed it so much that he went on to become a specialist in the science. By the time he became involved in the Sollis Project, Grattan was earning his living as a diving consultant for various oil companies, but his great love was wreck diving, especially if there was a profit to be made. There was certainly the prospect of a healthy return for whoever managed to salvage artefacts or gold from the Titanic.
The results of the trip by HMS Hecate in the search for the wreck of the Titanic have never been released by the Royal Navy. However, we do know that the Navy did find the wreck again, and this time they managed to take some photographs, two of which have somehow become public. One of these pictures shows a ship’s cranes and could hardly be described as conclusively from the White Star liner. The other shows a section of the forecastle deck with the massive anchor chains still in place. This second picture is definitely of an ‘Olympic’-class ship and is fairly conclusive evidence that the expedition did indeed reach the wreck of the ship we know as the Titanic.
In fact the Navy has denied that the expedition ever took place, but then it has denied a lot of things over the years that we now know happened. For example, according to the Royal Navy it had no surface vessels or submarines operating in the North Atlantic in 1978 or 1985. Despite this denial we know that the Royal Navy was deeply involved in the NATO exercise ‘Ocean Safari’, which was seen from the Wood’s Hole expedition vessel Knorr on 1 September 1985, the day after the wreck of the Titanic was officially discovered.
To finally substantiate the fact that the Royal Navy already knew the exact location of the wreck of the Titanic, we need only look at the London edition of the Sunday Observer for 31 August 1985. One day before Dr Robert Ballard actually discovered the wreck, the newspaper ran an article by Alan Road proclaiming that the ship had been found. Mr Road, acting on information received from a Mr John Pierce, had contacted the Admiralty, which had confirmed the discovery before the article had been written. Dr Ballard later said that he had no explanation for the Royal Navy’s knowledge that the ship had been found a day before it actually had been, unless the Royal Navy was using psychics. Once more the Royal Navy was not telling the whole truth, or even telling outright lies, something it had a habit of doing whenever the subject concerned events surrounding the loss of the Titanic.
There was no need whatsoever for the Royal Navy to employ supernatural means to be relatively sure of when and where Dr Ballard would find the Titanic. It was watching every move he made and already knew the position of the wreck, as did Dr Ballard in all probability. The American and British navies had been collaborating with one another in policing the Atlantic Ocean ever since the Great War. Since the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War that collaboration had been fairly close. There can be little doubt that the information gained during the HMS Hecate expedition in the search for the Titanic was passed to the US Navy. The wreck of a large vessel, especially one in deep water, was extremely useful to nuclear navies such as those of America, Britain and Russia because it provided an ideal hiding place for a submarine. The mass of metal that made up the wreck threw off detection apparatus, making it practically impossible to tell the wreck from a submarine or a submarine from the ocean floor.
Dr Ballard was, and may still be, a US Navy reserve officer who would have been made aware of the findings from the 1977 and 1978/79 expeditions. His interest in the Titanic was well known within informed circles at the time, and in October 1977 he had persuaded the Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute, part of the United States Navy, to put up some funding for an expedition to find the ship. The expedition failed through lack of adequate funding and because the equipment available to the US Navy was simply not up to the task
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One other party seems to have been made privy to the information gathered in the 1977/78/79 expeditions, ‘Cadillac’ Jack Grimm. Jack Grimm was a multi-millionaire Texas oilman who happened to collect Cadillac motor cars, hence the nickname, and he was also something of an eccentric. Over the years he backed a number of unusual projects such as looking for the Loch Ness monster, searching for Noah’s Ark in Turkey, searching for a hole at the North Pole and seeking the Abominable Snowman. In his own way Grimm wanted to leave his mark on the world, to be remembered in the history books. Like all extremely wealthy men he was also interested in making more money. In the summer of 1980 he mounted his first expedition to find the wreck of the Titanic. Despite being given rather dubious advice as to what equipment he would require for the search by the experts he employed, Grimm still managed to survey about 500 square miles of the ocean floor in the same area as that visited by the Royal Navy in 1953 and 1978/79. Fourteen possible targets were identified by sonar, several of which could have been the wreck. Unfortunately, faulty equipment and foul weather forced him to abandon the expedition before any definitive identifications could be made.
On 28 June 1981 Grimm’s second expedition left Wood’s Hole, that same US Government establishment, for another stab at finding the liner. Thirteen of the previously discovered targets were examined, none of which could be positively identified as Titanic, although Jack Grimm believed he had found the wreck and publicly said so. Newspapers all over the world carried the story that the most famous liner in the world had been found. Unhappily for Grimm, the pictures taken of the wreck were of too poor a quality to confirm his claim. Since at least one of Grimm’s sonar targets was within 200 yards of where the ship lies, it is only fair to accept that the Texas oilman did find the ship, but as he couldn’t prove it he would have to try again.
In 1983 he returned to the site of the sinking but could accomplish nothing because the weather was too bad and the expedition had to be abandoned. Despite being the first to publicly announce the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic, Jack Grimm sadly failed to win his place in the history books.
So what is it about the wreck of the Titanic that has repeatedly caused the most powerful governments in the western world to expend vast sums of money on trying to reach it? What do they believe the sunken ship contains that is worth so much effort? Can it be as simple as £8,000,000-worth of gold and other treasure, now probably worth more than a billion pounds? It is a good reason, but is it good enough? After all, everything that went to the bottom of the North Atlantic with the ship belongs to somebody, and he or she might well appreciate its return.
There is evidence to suggest that at least one other item might have been meant to go down with the ship - an item that perhaps the then leaders of the western world would prefer remained lost, and which they certainly would not want to fall into the hands of any private individual who might make it public. Is it possible that something was placed aboard Titanic in 1912 with the intention that it spend eternity on the bottom of the sea? At the time, before the Great War, the mere idea that something could ever be recovered from 2½miles beneath the Atlantic Ocean would have seemed preposterous. If we carry this line of questioning a step further, we must ask whether there might be something aboard the ship that is missing. Once the ship had gone, who would ever know?
If either of the last two questions is valid, then the sinking of the Titanic was not an accident at all.
Chapter 2
Enter John Pierpont Morgan
By 1901 many shipping lines were struggling to make ends meet. Waiting in the wings for just this situation was the American financier, banker and captain of industry John Pierpont Morgan. Morgan already owned most of America’s steel industry and all of the railway rolling stock on that country’s eastern seaboard. It seemed a logical step to both control a major outlet for his steel production and to extend the routes available to fare-paying travellers at the same time. Isambard Kingdom Brunel had done much the same thing in Britain half a century earlier when his Great Western Railway Company had built the first Atlantic passenger steamship. It should have been obvious that Morgan would do something along the same lines, but the European ship-owners were caught napping. J. P. Morgan began by buying up the American Line, then the Red Star, Dominion, Atlantic Transport and Leyland lines, and forming the combine International Mercantile Marine. The ships of the IMM lines continued to sail under their own house and national flags because under American law only ships actually built in America could fly the ‘Stars and Stripes’. Anyway, seamen’s wages aboard ships sailing under the US flag were considerably higher than those of the vessels of other nations. Having swallowed up the small fry, Morgan turned next to the major Atlantic passenger lines, Cunard, White Star, Hamburg Amerika and North German Lloyd. The two German lines managed to fight off Morgan’s takeover bids by coming to an agreement with him to fix fare prices, share routes and profits, and to cooperate in a number of minor ventures. Cunard also avoided being swallowed up, but only with British Government help. The British at the time owned the largest mercantile fleet in the world, as well as the largest and most powerful navy. They were afraid that if Cunard fell into the American’s hands, they would lose control of the North Atlantic shipping routes and perhaps even the ability to transport goods and persons to and from the outposts of the empire. The British Empire, the largest the world has ever seen and upon which the sun never set, stretched all around the globe, so Britain had long known the value of sea power. Until Tudor times the navies of the world had consisted of merchant ships, pressed into service as and when required. This haphazard policy had proven inadequate for the British and they had begun to build ever larger and more powerful dedicated warships. As ever, the problem with any dedicated fighting force is that it costs a fortune to maintain and only actually earns its keep in time of war. In order to obtain value for money from their armed forces the British fought an almost continuous series of colonial wars right up until the end of the 19th century, steadily expanding their empire. Colonising armies could be kept relatively small, and armies of occupation, by treating subjugated people well, could soon win over a civil population so that the majority were truly proud to be a part of the British Empire.
As a continuation of this policy the British Government’s offer to Cunard was that if the company would build a series of new super-liners in such a way that they could in the event of war be easily and quickly converted into armed merchant cruisers, the government would subsidise a large part of the cost of building and running them. As an added bonus, the government would throw in a contract to transport the mail from Britain to America, which would guarantee an income of £150,000 a year for Cunard. These not inconsiderable benefits for the Cunard Line would only be made available if the management guaranteed that the line would remain British for at least the next 20 years. Not surprisingly, the people at Cunard agreed to the government’s terms. The new ships, which would not come into service for another five years, were the Lusitania and Mauretania, and they would shortly be followed by a third sister, Aquitania. Even as they were being built, the new Cunard super-liners, and the rest of the Cunard fleet, were probably assessed as insufficient should there be a major war, which seemed more than a faint possibility.
The rapid deployment of ever larger colonial armies had its own problems. Although J. P. Morgan was probably regarded by both the British and American governments as uncontrollable, they would have been well aware that he did have the wherewithal to produce troopships large enough for any foreseeable contingency. If he could be persuaded to build those ships, and if the British Government could obtain some sort of agreement that the ships would be made available should the need arise, then perhaps he should be encouraged to take control of the other major British transatlantic liner fleet. The problem in dealing with anyone as powerful as J. P. Morgan lay in the fact that all of the major powers were aware that his money and influence could prove decisive in a European conflict.
Should either Britain or America try to control him by threat or force, there was nothing to stop him lending his financial assistance (something with which he was familiar) to another rapidly growing military and maritime power - Germany. How then could the financial ogre that Morgan might easily become be kept in line? The short answer, of course, was that he couldn’t. While the governments of Britain and America fondly believed that they were persuading the financier to do what they wanted by letting him have his way with White Star, he was, in fact, only doing what he had planned all along. Consequently, on the understanding that the ships of the White Star fleet would be made available to them in the event of a European war, the British Government did not support the White Star Line in its attempt to fight off the American financier’s takeover bid.
It had always been a policy of Morgan to offer more for a company than it appeared to be worth when he moved to take it over. He offered White Star’s shareholders ten times as much as the line earned in 1900, which had been an exceptionally good year because the British Government had been obliged to charter so many ships in order to transport troops to South Africa to fight the Boer War.
The war, which had officially broken out in 1899 and had been engineered by the British Government with the able assistance of Cecil Rhodes and his lieutenant Dr Jameson, had undoubtedly been a mistake. A few thousand Dutch farmers had defied the might of the British Empire for three long years, and had embarrassed more than a little the supposedly invincible British Army. The British Government of the time, as always greedy to obtain anything and everything belonging to anyone less powerful than itself, had begun the war in order to gain control of the South African gold and diamond resources, but it had not allowed for the immense size of the country, or the resolve of the peoples it was about to subjugate. The Dutch settlers, the Boers, adopting the guerrilla tactics of ‘hit and run’, proved a tougher nut to crack than anticipated. Not until the British had assembled an army of more than two million men were the Boers forced to surrender. However, the British had learned a valuable lesson from the encounter, something that they should have learned from the Crimean War 45 years earlier - that it is vital in times of distant conflict to be able to transport large bodies of troops to wherever they were required, en masse. In that lesson lay at least part of the motivation behind the Titanic disaster.
The Great Titanic Conspiracy Page 3
