The Great Titanic Conspiracy

by Robin Gardiner

  Greater reduction in speed in fog and ice, as damage, if collision actually occurs, is less. In conclusion, we suggest that an international conference be called to recommend the passage of identical laws providing for the safety of all at sea, and we urge the United States government to take the initiative as soon as possible.’

  The statement was signed by Samuel Goldenberg, chairman, and a committee of 25. (New York Herald, 19 April 1912, p7)

  This statement shifts all blame for the loss of life onto the Board of Trade and its regulations while hardly mentioning the disaster itself, and is a somewhat transparent attempt to clear the owners, officers and crew of Titanic of any charge of negligence. It does, however, reinforce the belief that Carpathia picked up more people than there were Titanic survivors brought into New York.

  Probably to give Titanic’s surviving officers and crew time to get their stories straight, Captain Rostron forbade his wireless operator to give out any details about the disaster except the names of survivors. Even though US President Taft sent out two cruisers to meet Carpathia and collect all possible information, the blackout continued. Rostron ignored the President’s plea for information, even though Taft was primarily interested in what had become of his aide, Major Archibald Butt.

  At about 6.00pm on Thursday 18 April, Carpathia stopped at the entrance to the Ambrose Channel to pick up a New York harbour pilot. She and her cargo of Titanic survivors had finally reached New York and real inquiries could begin. Instead, the cover-up continued.

  Chapter 21

  The Inquiries

  When Carpathia entered New York Harbour she did not immediately proceed to her own berth to unload her own passengers and Titanic’s survivors. Captain Rostron took his ship to the White Star pier and offloaded the 13 lifeboats he had collected from where Titanic had foundered. Only then did Carpathia head for her own berth and disgorge her passengers. There was a huge crowd of spectators on the quayside, including quite a few newspaper reporters, who had come to see the survivors from the sunken liner. However, the New York authorities had anticipated this curiosity on the part of the general population and had taken steps to ensure that only those people they approved of could get anywhere near the survivors. Although the usual Customs formalities had been suspended for the people from Titanic, the police were there in force to control the crowds. No fewer than 150 patrolmen, 12 mounted policemen and 25 detectives were on hand to man the barricades that blocked the streets leading to the quayside. Only close relatives were supposed to be allowed onto the pier to greet survivors, and all applications were vetted by 40 inspectors who had instructions not to let any newspapermen through. Even that was not enough to satisfy the authorities in New York, and the pier itself was roped off for 75 feet on either side of Carpathia’s gangplanks. This blanket ban on newsmen and anyone who was not related to a survivor didn’t apply to Mr Marconi and New York Times reporter Jim Spears, who were not only allowed through the police cordon onto the pier but onto the rescue ship itself. Clearly someone didn’t want the survivors questioned by anybody who did not know what questions were allowed.

  Eventually Titanic’s first- and second-class passengers began to appear. Singly, or in small groups, first and second-class passengers came down the gangways and were greeted by their relatives. Some of them didn’t look like first- or second- class any more because they had lost everything except the clothing they were wearing when they left Titanic and were now dressed in whatever had been donated to them by the passengers on Carpathia. Of the 327 in first class, 198 had survived. From the 258 who had set out in second class, 112 survived. Those that were up to it were taken away by their relatives, while those suffering from the effects of a night in the small boats or other injuries were whisked away to hospital in ambulances. Very few were questioned about their experiences that first night ashore.

  Then, at about 11.00pm, Titanic’s third-class passengers began to appear. Of the 709 who had sailed on the liner, just 175 made it to New York. Most of these had lost everything they owned when the ship sank and were destitute. Private relief funds helped to provide enough cash for some of these people to continue their journeys to friends and relatives in the new world, if they had any. Even the White Star Line helped out. Those families that had lost their breadwinners and had nobody in America prepared to take them in would be sent back to where they came from. One of the more generous organisations prepared to help out the survivors was the Pennsylvania Railroad, which provided a special train that would take any survivor, regardless of class, to Pennsylvania and points west.

  The last of Titanic’s survivors to leave Carpathia were the crew. Of the approximately 884 who had signed aboard, just 182 had survived. Curiously, 11 more crewmen, whose names do not appear on any crew list, also survived the disaster and came ashore at New York with the rest, long after all the other survivors and crowds had departed. These crew members were not allowed to leave the dockyard but were marched down Carpathia’s aft gangway, along the empty pier and down a narrow stairway to where the United States Immigration Service tender George Starr was waiting. The George Starr took them northward for about six city blocks to pier 60, where they were disembarked at the pier’s reception area. All harbour employees had been cleared from the area so there was hardly anyone around to see the crewmen marched across the reception area to pier 61, where they were put on board the IMM (Red Star Line) vessel Lapland. Titanic’s four surviving officers were put into first-class cabins, but all the rest of the crew were assigned berths in the third-class areas of the ship. Somebody had taken quite a lot of trouble to make sure that Titanic’s survivors had not had the chance to tell their stories to anyone, most of all the press.

  Even then the people trying so hard to suppress information about what had really happened to the Titanic must have known that they couldn’t keep a lid on it for ever. The press, both local and national, throughout the western world was clamouring for information and inevitably reporters would reach survivors who were prepared to talk. When they did, some of the stories they were told hardly fitted in with the version of events the White Star Line, and the British and American Governments, were trying to pass off as the truth. These stories told of chaos aboard the sinking ship, passengers and crew panicking, passengers being shot by trigger-happy officers and the inefficiency of the crew when it came to getting the lifeboats away. Some of these eye-witnesses had some equally horrific tales to tell of events aboard the rescue ship where, according to them, babies were left unattended and unclothed in freezing cold rooms and even such essentials as soap and toiletries were denied them unless they were prepared to pay exorbitant amounts of money for them.

  Meanwhile, at New York, the liner’s surviving lifeboats were being attended to. All identification marks such as numbers and Titanic’s name were removed, supposedly to deter souvenir hunters. During this exercise a dockyard employee noticed that Olympic’s name was cut into the boats, not Titanic’s. He also noted that some trouble was taken to obliterate these incised names, which were quickly filled with putty and painted over. Within a couple of days the boats were taken out of the water and hauled up into a convenient loft where they remained for some time. Then they were taken to Lane’s Brooklyn boatyard for evaluation, so that their value could be deducted from any insurance payout. Eventually most of the boats were taken back to Britain and were put aboard Olympic to comply with a new company and BoT policy, that there should be enough lifeboats on every ship to accommodate everyone aboard.

  Curiously, even though there was a great shortage of available lifeboats at that time because of the new policy, which meant that all of the shipping lines were grabbing whatever boats they could get their hands on, one of Titanic’s lifeboats was not placed aboard any other vessel. This lifeboat, Titanic’s No 14, was left to rot at Southampton, where it remained for six years. Only after the Great War was anything done with No 14, when it was presented to a group of local sea scouts as a gesture of appreciation for the sacrifi
ces made by former members during the recent conflict. By this time the lifeboat’s paint had faded and was starting to peel, so the scouts decided to freshen it up a little. They stripped the existing paint away prior to refinishing the boat ready for use as a cutter. As they removed what remained of the old paint they found the word ‘Olympic’ or ‘Olympus’ carved into the gunwale. At that time Olympic was still in service (and would remain so for almost another 20 years), her decks cluttered with dozens of lifeboats. Clearly this particular specimen did not come from her. To further confuse the issue, the scouts’ boat came with her cast identification plates showing that it was indeed from Titanic and it still carried White Star Line badges. These cast metal badges were carefully preserved by the sea scouts and for many years were used as trophies, being presented to either port or starboard teams on winning some in-house event such as rowing. (In recent years these badges seem to have disappeared, which, as they are of considerable monetary value, is not surprising.) The boat itself served the sea scouts for many years before eventually being badly damaged in a collision with the Portsmouth to Gosport ferry. After that it was taken by the Royal Navy to Haslar to be broken up. It remained there for years before finally vanishing completely. The story of this boat, with the incriminating name cut into its gunwale, was recorded by a Royal Naval admiral in a privately published account of Hampshire scouting. The book is extremely rare but not completely unobtainable.

  Within days of Titanic’s survivors reaching New York a Senate Inquiry into the disaster was begun. ‘Inquiry’ is not perhaps the right word to describe what was in fact a carefully choreographed cover-up carried out by the United States Government. Senator William Alden Smith headed this American farce and conducted a great part of the questioning. Throughout the proceedings he hardly asked a single pertinent question and studiously ignored any answers that did not tie in with the findings he had obviously predetermined to come up with. Smith did his job remarkably well inasmuch as he obscured the relevant facts and at the same time used the whole show as a publicity vehicle to further his own political ambitions. He also, by accepting as fact the demonstrably untrue statement of Californian’s donkeyman Gill, provided a convenient scapegoat that diverted attention away from what had really occurred. As we have already seen in Chapter 17, Californian was much too far away from the sinking liner for any signals or lights to have been seen from her, and for anyone on Californian to have claimed to have actually seen Titanic is ridiculous. Nevertheless, that is exactly what Gill made out, that he had seen Titanic, and Senator Smith appears to have believed him. According to Smith the mystery ship visible from Titanic as she was sinking could be none other than Californian, and Captain Lord and his officers had committed possibly the worst crime any seaman could commit, in that they had seen distress signals and had failed to respond to them.

  Senator Smith apparently believed that, had Lord gone to the rescue, many more, perhaps all of those lost with the liner, might have been saved. In one respect Smith was right. If Californian had been close enough and had seen the signals from Titanic early enough, there was no captain at sea who could have made a better job of taking off the liner’s people. Unfortunately Californian wasn’t close enough and her officers did not see distress signals, so she did not go to the rescue until it was too late. Captain Lord himself said that he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by rescuing the people from Titanic, so it seems hardly likely that he would have failed to go to the rescue if he had known there was a ship in trouble close by. As it was Lord became something of a pariah as a result of Senator Smith’s single-minded determination to find him guilty of a crime for which he was never officially accused. Smith’s pursuit of Lord also effectively diverted the attention of the American Inquiry away from the disaster and its causes and focused it on Californian, which, I suspect, was exactly what Senator Smith intended. Smith’s election campaign had to a large degree been financed by J. P. Morgan, as had that of US President Taft, so it is hardly surprising that the American Inquiry didn’t delve too deeply into what had really happened. The gold shipment was never mentioned at all and Titanic’s route to disaster was glossed over.

  The carefully selected witnesses failed to mention the chaos aboard the sinking ship, mainly because Senator Smith never asked any questions that might have brought it to light. No serious inquiries into the identities of the mystery ships in the area of the sinking at the relevant time were put in hand. Witness statements that might have pointed to a vastly different conclusion from the one Smith finally reached were ignored. The Inquiry did find that there was no real blame attaching to the owners, officers and crew of the Titanic except inasmuch as the ship was travelling at excessive speed under the prevailing conditions. Joseph Bruce Ismay, like Captain Lord, was singled out for special attention and pilloried for escaping the ship when so many others drowned. It seems that, according to Senator Smith, all of the Americans aboard behaved as heroes and gentlemen while he thought that everybody else, with the exception of the crew who were employed by the American owners of the ship, were nothing but a lot of cowards prepared to sacrifice anyone to save themselves. In short, the findings of the American Inquiry were completely useless in establishing the facts of what happened.

  Once the American Inquiry was over Titanic’s surviving crew members and the other survivors who had been detained in America were allowed to leave for home, where another farcical inquiry awaited them. The British Inquiry conducted by the Board of Trade and organised while the American one was still going on should have been definitive. It was to be chaired by Lord Charles Bigham, Baron Mersey of Toxteth, usually referred to as just ‘Lord Mersey’. Mersey had served the British bench well for many years and it was usually upon him that the Government called when they needed a particular result from an inquiry. Lord Mersey had already been involved in the inquiry into the Jameson Raid, which had triggered the Boer War. As Cecil Rhodes’s lieutenant, Jameson had led an armed raid into Boer territory supposedly to take control of South African gold and diamond resources for Britain. The whole affair appears to have been the brainchild of Rhodes, but the result was inevitable. The Boers took exception to being invaded, and resisted, giving the British the excuse to declare war.

  The British were at the time all-powerful and expected to have no real trouble in overcoming Boer resistance and taking control of their country. However, as we already know the Boers were a much harder nut to crack than expected. The British people’s sympathies were decidedly with the Boers, whom they saw as underdogs, and wanted to know why the mighty British Empire had gone to war with such a small and inoffensive country. There had to be an official inquiry, which, predictably under Mersey’s guidance, eventually found the British Government innocent of any blame for bringing about the war. With the benefit of hindsight it is all too apparent that the so-called ‘innocent’ British Government had engineered the whole thing. Lord Mersey would later go on to chair the British Inquiry into the loss of the Cunard liner Lusitania in 1914, where he would again exonerate his Government of any wrongdoing. The simple fact that the British chose Mersey to head the Lusitania inquiry is reason enough for many people to assume that the findings were a whitewash. The British Inquiry into the loss of the Titanic suffered from the same predetermination to exonerate the Government from all blame as Mersey’s other famous commissions.

  The British Inquiry began on 2 May 1912. The assessors (effectively judges) had a list of 26 questions to which they wanted answers. The first eight related to events before Titanic had any warning that she might be approaching an icefield. The next six were about what ice warnings were received by the ship and what was done about them. Question 15 actually related to the collision itself, while questions 16 to 24 were about what was done to save the vessel and those aboard after she had struck the ice. Question 25 was about the general design and construction of the ship, and question 26 about the rules and regulations governing immigrant ships and whether they needed to be changed. In t
he main the same witnesses would be called as were questioned in America. Unlike the American Inquiry, which called no passengers, the British would call one fare-paying survivor, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon. It will be recalled that Sir Cosmo had effectively hired his own lifeboat and seven crew members to make good his escape from the sinking liner with his wife, one employee and a couple of friends. (Sir Cosmo has, over the years, been accused of taking advantage of his status in saving the lives of himself and his friends. There has never, as far as I am aware, been any suggestion that others were kept out of the Duff Gordon boat by the use of firearms or any other force. Sir Cosmo only did what any other sane man should have done and saved what he could from the wreck. He was organised, which is more than can be said for the rest of the evacuation of the Titanic.)

  Maritime engineers would also be called upon to give evidence together with the survivors, so we would expect to see a fair account of what went on and how perhaps the whole event could have been avoided or the loss of life minimised. Instead, the Mersey inquiry was another whitewash, perhaps more reprehensible than the American one because the British had more time to prepare, and appeared to have had access to more expert witnesses.

  The British Inquiry was a farce. As soon as any witness started to say anything that flew in the face of Mersey’s preconceived ideas they were stopped, or simply ignored. The outcome of the inquiry was never in any doubt. The findings were very much the same as the American fiasco. The British Government in general and the Board of Trade in particular were cleared of any blame. Captain Lord and the Californian were again found guilty of failing to go to the aid of Titanic, even though he had never been formally accused of any such thing. The only real difference between the findings of the American and British Inquiries was that the British gave Joseph Bruce Ismay a glowing testimonial.