The Great Titanic Conspiracy

by Robin Gardiner

  For ice to have fallen onto Titanic’s well deck, the berg would have had to have hung over it. In that case, as the ship passed close alongside it, the overhanging ice must have struck the ship’s starboard bridge wing, which protruded a few feet from the superstructure. The iceberg must also have crushed the forward starboard boat, which was kept swung out when the ship was at sea. There is no evidence to suggest that the bridge suffered any damage in the incident, and the forward starboard boat was certainly all right because it was used later that night. By far the most likely source of the ice that found its way onto the well deck is the ship’s own rigging and wireless aerial. The vibration set up by the engines suddenly going full astern could easily have shaken ice from the rigging. It will be remembered that it was an extremely cold night, so ice might well have formed on the wireless antennae. This formation of ice on a ship’s rigging and superstructure has long been a problem for vessels operating in both northern and southern latitudes. Any number of ships have been capsized by the weight of ice that has built up on them in the colder reaches of the North and South seas, and even occasionally in harbour. A similar problem besets aircraft at high altitude, and a number have been lost simply because the accumulated ice became to great a burden for them to carry.

  To return to the curious lack of any noticeable impact when Titanic supposedly struck the iceberg, in the wireless cabin, just behind the bridge, Second Wireless Operator Harold Bride didn’t notice any impact at all and was hardly aware that anything had happened. First-class passenger Jack Thayer said, ‘If I had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled.’ Another first-class passenger, the wife of John Jacob Astor, the wealthiest man aboard, was so unimpressed that she thought there had merely been some sort of accident in the kitchen. Joseph Bruce Ismay thought the ship had lost a propeller blade (something that White Star ships seem to have been prone to). In the first class smoking room on A Deck US presidential advisor Archie Butt, Hokan Bjornston Steffanson, Spencer V. Silverthorne, Lucien P. Smith, Hugh Woolner and Clarence Moore hardly noticed anything. Woolner described ‘...a sort of stopping, a sort of - not exactly shock, but a sort of slowing down. [The ship’s engines had just gone full astern.] Then we sort of felt a rip that gave a sort of slight twist to the whole room.’

  First-class passengers William T. Stead and Father Byles were strolling on deck at the time but didn’t think anything serious had happened. Mrs Dickinson Bishop, in first class, slept through the whole thing. Steward Alfred Crawford, on duty at the forward end of B Deck, where any impact might have been felt, heard a slight ‘crunch’ on the starboard side. Quartermaster George Rowe, right at the rear end of the ship, noticed a ‘slight jar’. He looked towards the starboard side of the ship and saw a large berg, arguing that either the stern of the ship was still in contact with the ice or that only the stern had struck.

  Seamen Brice, Buley and Osman were in the mess on the port side of the forecastle on C Deck. Buley noticed ‘...a slight jar. It seemed as though something was rubbing alongside of her at the time.’ Brice described something that ‘was like a heavy vibration’. Fireman Jack Podesta described the noise of the collision as ‘like tearing a strip of calico, nothing more’. First class passenger Mrs E. D. Appleton used exactly the same words as Podesta to describe her experience of the accident. Able Seaman Joseph Scarrott merely felt a kind of tremor as if the ship’s engines had been put astern, which of course they had. He didn’t think the ship had struck anything. Most of the seamen mentioned were right in the bows of the ship when the accident occurred and should have felt strongly anything that happened; they obviously felt nothing to alarm them. The vast majority of the people aboard who later had anything to say about the event told similar stories. The crash, if they noticed a crash at all, was so slight as to be negligible. All that most of them reported feeling was the vibration caused by the engines going astern.

  However, there were a few people who described something more serious. In the firemen’s quarters in D Deck some of the men were preparing to go on duty at midnight. John Thompson described how he ‘...felt the crash with all its force up there in the eyes of the ship, and my mates and I were all thrown sprawling from our bunks. It was a harsh grinding sound.’

  Curiously, on the deck immediately below the firemen’s quarters 24 coal trimmers had their cabin space. The collision was felt here but nothing like as violently as it appeared to have been on the deck above. The trimmers knew that the ship had struck something but they didn’t know what. Lamp Trimmer Samuel Hemmings did notice a peculiar hissing sound very shortly after the accident. He investigated and discovered the noise was air escaping from the forepeak water tank as it filled from below. The forepeak water tank was situated low down in the bow of the ship and had been seemingly opened to the sea by the collision. This tells us that the ship had struck whatever had been in her way practically head-on and had not caught it a glancing blow at all. The forepeak tank was about 100 feet further forward than the point of impact suggested by Fred Fleet.

  Aft of the trimmers’ quarters the ordinary seamen were housed. Lookout Archie Jewell and Seaman Fred Clench were both awakened by the collision. Clench described his experience, ‘...by the crunching and jarring, as if it was hitting up against something...’ Jewell, it appears, leapt out of bed and rushed up on deck without taking time to even put on his shoes. Once there he saw the ice that had fallen onto the forward well deck, but he did not see an iceberg.

  In cabin 50 on E Deck Mr and Mrs George A. Harder noticed a scraping noise as the ship struck. They also felt the vessel vibrate, but that was probably just the effect of the engines going astern. James R. McGough also heard the scraping noise, and as he already had his porthole open he took a look out; he saw what he took to be an iceberg passing alongside the ship. Luigi Gatti’s secretary, Paul Mauge, slept through the entire event, as did John Edward Hart. In the stewards’ quarters Samuel Rule, a bathroom steward, also slept through the collision but was woken up by the engines stopping. Steward Frederick Dent Ray was woken by the accident but thought something had gone wrong in the engine room. Alfred Pierce, Third Class Pantryman, was standing outside the pantry on F Deck when the ship struck. He thought the collision was nothing to speak of.

  The great majority of the evidence regarding the severity of the collision from those who were present seems to point towards a very minor sort of a bump, certainly not a large ship striking an effectively immovable object such as a massive iceberg. This impression of a minor accident is reinforced by an examination of the ship’s structure in the areas that supposedly came into contact with the ice.

  In spite of the so-called evidence uncovered in recent years, the ‘Olympic’ class ships were quite sturdily constructed. The frames supporting the 1-inch-thick hull plating were made out of 10-inch steel channel. Forward, where the point of impact is assumed to have been, these frames were spaced at regular intervals, only 2 feet apart. The plating was doubled to reinforce the bow so that small ice would simply be pushed aside. Throughout the centre section of the vessel the space between the frames was extended to 3 feet but reduced to 2ft 3in towards the stern. All joints in the framing, including those where the deck beams joined them, were reinforced with steel plates known as ‘knees’. All joints in the hull plating were double, triple or even quadruple riveted, about 3,000,000 rivets (the largest being 1¼ inches in diameter) going into the construction of each vessel; the rivets alone weighed more than 265 tons. The 6-foot-wide hull plates overlapped one another by at least 6 inches along all of the horizontal joints. The ships were immensely strong.

  Fireman John Thompson, who you will remember was sent sprawling from his bunk and heard a harsh grinding sound when the accident occurred, got dressed. Shortly afterwards Leading Fireman William Small came into the cabin and ordered, ‘All hands below.’ Thompson and his colleagues would normally have gone down the forward spiral staircase and through the firemen’s tunnel beneath the forward holds t
o reach the boiler rooms, but that wasn’t possible on this occasion because the bottom of the stairwell and the firemen’s passageway were flooded. It will be recalled that this stairwell and passageway were considered to be vitally important to the safety of the ship by her designers and were therefore fitted with their own watertight doors and pumps. If they were flooding, it is certain that the damage inflicted on the vessel extended inboard to a depth of no less than 15 feet, something we will return to later when we attempt to analyse what we know. Instead of using their stairs and passageway, the firemen went up on to the main deck to use an alternative route to the boiler rooms. No sooner were they there than their Leading Fireman ordered them back to their quarters to collect their life jackets and proceed to the boat deck. Following orders, they eventually arrived on the boat deck where they were stopped by the Chief Officer, Mr Wilde. Wilde asked them ‘What the hell’ they were doing and ordered them below. All of this toing and froing must have taken 10 minutes at least, so these men would not have reached the boiler rooms before about 11.55pm. According to the received version of events aboard the liner, the order to draw (extinguish) the boiler fires was given immediately after the collision, but this, given the obvious confusion aboard, seems unlikely. It is even more unlikely that the order was carried out immediately, as it seems that half the firemen who would have done the job were running about on deck and therefore not at their posts.

  We do have an eye-witness to at least some of the damage done to the ship during the collision. Down in No 6 boiler room (the most forward), Fireman Fred Barrett had been working. He had just stopped for a break and a chat to Second Engineer James Hesketh when all at once the alarm bell rang and the red warning light came on, he later testified. This evidence must give pause for thought as there was no alarm bell fitted in the boiler room. Hesketh and Barrett supposedly both shouted ‘Shut the doors!’, meaning the doors on the furnaces. Then came the crash and a jet of water burst in through the side of the ship about 2 feet above the boiler room floor. As already mentioned, Fred Barrett’s evidence needs to be treated with caution. His version of events so far was contradicted by another witness, Fireman George Beauchamp. Beauchamp testified that water did not enter the stokehold through the side of the ship but came in through the coal bunker door, meaning that the bunker was flooding and the stokehold was otherwise intact. Beauchamp’s exact words were, ‘Water entered No 10 stokehold through the bunker door.’ This leaves us with a minor problem, as No 10 stokehold was at the after end of the forward boiler room - No 11 stokehold was closer to the bow. The half-inch slit in the side of the ship obviously was not there.

  As the watertight doors began to close Barrett and Hesketh did the sensible thing and rushed through into the next boiler room aft, No 5. According to Barrett, the damage he saw extended the full length of the forward boiler room and about 2 feet into the bunker at the forward end of boiler room No 5. In reality it would appear that the hull plating of the ship was breached somewhere about the junction of the two forward boiler rooms, a single hole at that point. Already we see evidence that the damage to the liner was not a long slit or a seam between hull plates forced open by continuous contact with the ice but a series of punctures. In any event, Barrett didn’t hang about to find out but hurried up the emergency escape ladder to the deck above. He then, he said, went to the hatch above No 6 boiler room and looked down to see how much water was in there. He estimated there to be about 8 feet of water in the forward boiler room by this time. He said, ‘I went to No 5 fire room when the lights went out. I was sent to find lamps, as the lights were out, and when we got the lamps we looked at the boilers and there was no water in them. [Boilers that run out of water while the furnaces are still alight explode.] I ran to the engineer and he told me to get some firemen down to draw the fires. I got 15 men down below.’ As usual there is evidence to contradict what Barrett had to say. Coal Trimmer George Cavell, who was working in the starboard bunker in No 4 boiler room, testified that the lights went out almost immediately after the collision.

  Again according to Fred Barrett, the forward bunker in No 5 boiler room contained the water coming in through the ship’s side for some while. Eventually the bunker, which had never been intended to hold water in the first place, gave way. Barrett ‘saw a wave of green foam come tearing through the boilers.’ True to form, Barrett quickly made his escape up the emergency ladder. By this time more than an hour had elapsed since the collision. Again Barrett’s evidence needs to be treated with caution. It appears that water had been coming into No 5 boiler room for some time and that Junior Second Engineers Jonathan Shepherd and Herbert Harvey had managed to start the pumps there. The engineers had already ordered most of the firemen out of the boiler room as, once the fires were drawn, there was nothing further they could do. They were keeping pace with the incoming water and the boiler room was relatively dry up until the time the bunker collapsed. Shepherd had broken a leg and was laid in a pump house at the after end of the boiler room. Barrett said that Harvey ordered him out of the boiler room when the bunker failed, although we only have his word for that - but he can hardly be blamed for having a well-developed instinct for self-preservation. Unlike some of the so-called heroes of the Titanic, Fred Barrett never made himself out to be a hero at the expense of those who really were. He told how Harvey, as soon as the water came pouring into the boiler room, made straight for the fallen Shepherd in a valiant attempt to save him. He failed and both engineers died. Had Barrett stayed to help then it is all but certain that he would have merely added his own name to those of the lost.

  From what we already know it is apparent that, whatever the vessel had struck, there was no continuous damage along her side and that what damage there was extended at least 15 feet into the interior of the ship, and that most of the people aboard were practically unaware that the liner had struck anything at all. Are we looking at iceberg damage? It doesn’t seem so. We will look at the discrepancies in the next chapter and perhaps come up with an explanation that comes closer to fitting in with what the eyewitnesses reported.

  Chapter 16

  What had Titanic hit?

  From what we already know it is apparent that whatever the liner had run into she had first struck it with the knife edge of the bow, or somewhere very close to it, or the forepeak tank could not have been damaged. The 10-inch-thick frames of the ship at the very front of the vessel were set just 2 feet apart and covered with 1-inch steel plating, much of it doubled in thickness. The detailed description of the ship appearing in the Report produced by the official British Inquiry into the disaster states quite clearly that the framing and plating at the forward part of the ship was specially reinforced to prevent damage when meeting thin ice. The watertight bulkheads were also specially stiffened and strengthened to stop them buckling in the event of a collision, thus reinforcing the side frames and plating of the ship. It would obviously have taken a considerable impact, a great deal of force, to have breached the hull anywhere close to the bow. There seems to be little or nothing in the eye-witness accounts to suggest that any such impact ever took place.

  If we move slightly further aft to where the lookouts thought that the ship might have gently bumped the iceberg, we find that something penetrated the hull to a depth of at least 15 feet and breached the vitally important firemen’s passageway beneath the two forward holds. This, it will be recalled, was flooded and impassable very shortly after the collision took place. While an iceberg might be quite tough, it is nothing like as hard as steel. An iceberg is essentially a ‘blunt instrument’, a club rather than a knife. These floating mountains of ice do have projecting spurs and ledges, but any one of these coming into contact with a liner’s heavy steel hull plating and massive frames would be quickly snapped or ground away. Only a solid piece of ice could have penetrated so deeply into the interior of Titanic. At its very best such a solid projection on the berg could not have had a cutting edge of anything less than 90 degrees, a right-angle, or it si
mply would not have been strong enough to survive the initial impact. If anything even remotely that shape had in fact penetrated the hull to a depth of 15 feet or more, it must have quickly torn a hole at least 30 feet across in the hull plating and destroyed no fewer than ten of the ship’s massive steel frames. Obviously anything smashing its way through about 250 square feet of hull plating, at least ten of the frames and tearing aside at least 900 square feet of steel deck, would have been quite noticeable. Once again we have little or no evidence to support any sort of collision that could have caused this kind of extensive structural damage.

  We move further aft, to the forward boiler room where Fred Barrett said he saw a ‘jet’ of water enter the ship about 2 feet above the floor. He did not describe a wall of water suddenly flooding the boiler room, which is what we would expect had the steel plating and the frames along the side of the ship been crushed by a huge piece of ice. The reverse appears to have been the case, as Barrett and the junior engineer he was talking to at the time, Hesketh, had time to escape from the boiler room through the door in the watertight bulkhead. Nor did Barrett mention any pulverised ice entering the vessel, which must have happened as pieces broke away from the iceberg and were carried inside the ship by the inrushing water. The only indication we have of any great amount of water entering the forward boiler rooms was when the bunker between boiler rooms Nos 5 and 6 collapsed, when engineers Shepherd and Harvey were engulfed. The engineers had managed to start the pumps in that boiler room and were keeping ahead of the incoming water until the bunker collapsed, which tells us that the boiler room itself was almost undamaged, and that some considerable time had elapsed before the bunker failed. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the bunker itself was not extensively damaged in the collision. Had a large hole been torn in it to admit the sea, it would have filled and collapsed quite quickly. If it had filled with water without failing straight away there is no apparent reason why it should fail later. No 5 boiler room is supposedly as far aft as the damage extended. At no point in our brief examination of the eyewitness reports have we seen any indication of the catastrophic damage we would expect had the vessel collided with a large iceberg.