transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:06] To me, she looked like an enormous glowworm, for she was a light from the rising water line to the stern, electric lights blazing in every cabin on all the decks and at her masked heads. This was how one passenger described the harrowing scene before him as the Titanic heaved out of the freezing water. In 1912, in the early hours of April 15th, a total of 1,496 people died in the sinking of the Titanic. Witnesses later described an ungodly roar as the ship split in two, furniture crashing, engines whining, passengers screaming. Then came an eerie quiet as the unsinkable ship disappeared beneath the waves. Over a hundred years later, why is it that we still can't look away? What really happened when the ship went down? What myths have endured? And what do we know about the people for whom this tragedy was a reality? From the freezing depths of the Atlantic, this is After Dark. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony.

Speaker 2:
[01:48] And I'm Gareth.

Speaker 1:
[01:48] And this week we have had an email from a listener called Ian. And you can get in touch just like Ian did at AfterDark at historyhit.com if you have any questions you want to ask us or any suggestions for episodes. But Ian's email is this. He says, How about the story of the RMS Titanic? Was it the Titanic or its sister ship RMS Olympic that sank? What about the people on the lower deck? What was their story? And did the band play as the ship went down? To help me answer those questions is none other than my guest co-host this month, which is of course Gareth Russell. He is the author of The Ship of Dreams, The Sinking of the Titanic and The End of the Edwardian Era. Gareth, you're going to have to demythify the Titanic for us today.

Speaker 2:
[02:32] Happy to do it.

Speaker 1:
[02:33] Before we get into the actual details, right Ian, pay close attention. Gareth is going to solve all your questions for you. But before we get into some of those questions, I want you to take me to the moment. So often with these histories of Titanic, we build, we build, we build. I want to go right to the moment. It is about 1140ish on the 14th of April, 1912. We hit an iceberg, we're on the Titanic, go.

Speaker 2:
[02:59] Yep. So there's only one public room opened. These are not like modern cruise ships. They shut everything. The first class smoking room is the only room still open. Most people are in bed. Some of them sleep through it. The nudge is that slight. It depends where you are. And the captain continues the ship at a slower pace. They continue on for a little bit. Then eventually they stop. They send Thomas Andrews, who is one of the ship's designers. He is on board as part of something called the guarantee group from the shipyard to check everything's okay. He performs an inspection of the damage and informs the captain that the damage is much larger. They can't see exactly where it is because it's already flooded, but based on the extent of flooding, it looks like about 300 feet has been open to the Atlantic. This might explain why Andrews' initial estimate is wrong. He thinks the ship has about an hour and a half to live. It actually ends up having nearly three. That's because the rip is not total. It's not the full length. It's punctured it along that, roughly, that length. But certainly there is enough that the ship is now in mortal danger. Smith, for some reason, most people think not to cause a panic, does not inform the passengers. And he doesn't inform what we might say is the hospitality part of the crew, the people, the stewards and stewardesses, that the damage is fatal, that this is a full evacuation. And they start lowering the lifeboats. Really, it's about 40 minutes closer to an hour by the time there are regular lowering of the lifeboats. And people are woken up, they are marshalled, but because the captain hasn't given a clear order of, you know, do you need to get them into the boats, the purser doesn't know what's happening, he reopens the first class lounge because it's freezing outside on deck, people start going in and ordering cocoa, they're sitting, the band come up and start playing lighthearted music. In the third class, they congregate in their general room, which is their main recreational space. Second class has a straight up and down staircase, so they really only have one direction, which is up. It's one of the reasons why the statistics are quite interesting about second class survival. But broadly speaking, there is no sense of urgency. The Titanic doesn't start to show serious signs of a forward tilt, close to about an hour and a half after the collision. We have an idea, I certainly, when I was a young kid, obsessed with the Titanic, you thought that it happened at an equal timing, a progressive, a tilt that progressed logically with the time, it didn't. Up until about 2 a.m., the water hasn't even hit the first funnel, and then the bulkheads start to give way. So the end, when it comes, comes very, very quickly. That moment where it passes the first funnel, the second falls in, then it starts to really rise further and further up. Growing up in Belfast, I remember seeing the Titanic Memorial to the Engineers at City Hall, and that was because the Engineers chose to stay below and to keep the electric power going, which certainly saved a lot of lives. And remarkably, the power stays on until about 2.5 minutes before the final plunge. Many people who may have seen the James Cameron movie will remember it, it kind of silhouetted against the sky. It cuts out broadly about the time it's half submerged. And then it snaps in two, maybe even potentially in three. And after that, it's a minute or so before it fully submerges. And people describe in the lifeboats hearing an almost unearthly moan coming from those in the water that rises. Some of them says that what's remarkable, sorry, is there's no suction, the Titanic sinks very smoothly. There's a spot of mist, someone says, like the River Charon in Greek myth. Then the moan of the people in the water. And that doesn't last very long because of how cold it is. Most, many victims are claimed by hypothermia. The water is sub-freezing. And there are 705 survivors. They are picked up a few hours later by a British ship called the Carpathia that was en route to the Mediterranean from New York, picked up the distress call and was close enough to get there in time. It turns around, takes them back to New York. And by the time they arrive, on the 18th of April, this has become one of the biggest stories of the century, and certainly the biggest in the world at that time. And it hasn't shown much sign of shedding its fame since. But with the fame comes a lot of myths and speculation.

Speaker 1:
[07:26] Yeah. And we're going to get into them today. We're going to get into some of those myths and see how historically they stack up. But one thing you mentioned there about, you're from Belfast.

Speaker 2:
[07:35] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[07:36] And it's a great city. I spent some time there doing a play, god, 15 years ago, probably now. And I really loved my time there. But one of the things that you will not escape if you were in Belfast is Titanic.

Speaker 2:
[07:48] No, that is more recent, though. So, yeah, so the Titanic was not talked about. It would have been talked about in families who maybe had links to the shipyards. There was a great permanent exhibition at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and the Trawl, which is just outside Belfast. But for a very long time, partly because of the troubles in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, there was nothing, sort of infrastructurally, about the Titanic. And it was not fairly obviously talked about at Harland & Wolfe that built it for a long time. It was the 90s where it really took off, and then the early 2000s.

Speaker 1:
[08:23] So with the movie?

Speaker 2:
[08:25] I think it's with the movie. Yeah, I think that the 1997 Cameron movie really is the one that made it fashionable again, and it built to the centenary in 2012. And there was a lot for that in Titanic. So I remember you got tickets to go to the dry dock where they finished it and they were projecting a night to remember the 1958 movie, which is brilliant, up onto the walls of the dry dock. So they did loads for the centenary. But I would say between 1997 and 2012 is the point where I saw the Titanic really becoming a much, much bigger thing in Belfast in terms of the tourism, and the art and the culture of the city, definitely.

Speaker 1:
[09:05] And it's very much implanted there now, certainly. And it forms part of that city landscape, you know, with the iconic cranes, the cranes that are down at the docks. And also we have one of my, I sort of talk about my little nephew, who's seven all the time because he loves the Titanic Museum. And actually Titanic is one of his hyper focuses. He is obsessed with Titanic and with all things Titanic. He's obsessed with good disaster. He loves, at seven years of age, he loves the good disaster. If you're getting stuck in the nutty putty caves, he's also obsessed with that as well. I've never even heard of that. He's the person that told me about that. But with Titanic, there is something, again, we've talked about this before, Gareth, in episodes that we've done together, about elements of storytelling. And when you come to Titanic, it's all there. It is, you know, this city that comes together, you know, I'm simplifying for narrative thrust here, like a city who comes together to build this megalith of a moving iconic part of the future in Belfast. And then all of these different people from different walks of life are there and they're going either just to spend loads of money or to start a brand new life. And then disaster strikes and it lends itself to this everlasting narrative. But take me to what it was like in Belfast at the turn of the 20th century. How important is shipbuilding to these people on an everyday survival level?

Speaker 2:
[10:32] Massive. It is a massive employer in the city. And in fact, Titanic will be one of the last ships, certainly the last big ship that is built at Harland and Wolfe, the main shipyard, before a massive sectarian fallout happens towards the end of 1912, in which hundreds of Catholics are sort of forced out of their job. And also, so are hundreds of trade union Protestants called the Rotten Prods. And it really is kind of a solidifying of a very conservative working class movement that is in favour of staying within Britain, of Ireland staying within Britain, and particularly the North staying within it. So the Titanic gets caught up quite a lot in the discussion about sectarian politics and constitutional politics in Ireland around the Home Rule crisis. And actually, it probably shouldn't, simply because it had been finished by the time that the sectarian tensions erupted in Harland and Wolfe. But where it did play a big role is Belfast is really at this stage, the beating heart of the unionist movement. It is its centre, its capital in all but name. And the unionist movement is the movement that once Ireland has continued to stay part of the United Kingdom. Now today, Belfast's population is much more mixed. But at the time, West Belfast had a predominantly Catholic population, South East and North were all predominantly Protestant. It was, it lent much more towards Protestantism, particularly Presbyterianism. And it was a city that, you know, if a royal visited or there was a unionist rally, they were massive events in Belfast. And central, there were many arguments for unionism, but one of the big ones was economics. And there was an argument put forward in Belfast. And widely believed in Belfast, that the shipbuilding industry was one of the reasons why, if the majority of Ireland wanted to be independent from Britain, to some degree, whether it was a home rule or a fully independent republic, that they would be doing that without the North. And there were, I should say, I'm sure any Irish person knowing this will know, there were multiple different reasons why people supported unionism or dissented from it. But within Belfast, there was a lot of people who said shipbuilding, the linen, tobacco and the rope, the big industries in Belfast, that makes us a predominantly industrialized economy. And in the South, it is predominantly an agrarian economy. And therefore any independent Irish parliament will create legislation that discriminates against industrialized economics in favor of rural, which is by far and away, the least explosive argument made at the time. But the Titanic and the Harlandam of shipyards are cited as part of that and saying, look, at the minute, this is one of, if not the most successful shipyards in the world. It generates a huge amount of money from ships being built by imperial British companies. It's also attracting a lot of commerce from German shipping companies at the time. But the shipyards feature in arguments about the future of Ulster, the future of the North, in a way that will later become very simplified. But it's certainly a big part of the unionist argument in early 1900s Ireland. And not long after it, in fact, there will be, I think, to date, it's still the second largest mass mobilization political campaign in Irish history, which was the Ulster Covenant of 1912, which was a covenant that was signed by men. There was a woman's version as well, that they would not support home rule in any way, shape or form, and that they intended to stay sort of one with Britain. And in fact, some of the early and very prominent people to sign it were the family of Thomas Andrews. So you had people from across the social spectrum who were deeply, deeply invested in this, in the same way as any historian will tell you of many other parts of the North and in the South, people being equally invested in the move towards independence. So it's a question that is dominating pretty much every political conversation in Ireland in 1911, 1912. And the Titanic and her sister ships play a part in shaping that narrative.

Speaker 1:
[14:58] I think it's really interesting that this idea of Titanic and unionism and how actually over the course of the last hundred and, what is it, 15, 20 years, this idea of Titanic and national Irishness has actually become more aligned in some ways, that it is seen, I think it's probably got a class element there too, where it's this idea of working class people being more Irish in a way, which of course is a fallacy. That's not the truth at all. But like it is seen as something that true Irish people got their hands dirty and got in there and built this thing. And it's not their fault that it sunk, of course, that also then goes along with that as well.

Speaker 2:
[15:36] Yeah, built by an Irishman, sunk by an Englishman. See, that's a thing.

Speaker 1:
[15:40] There you go. But it's this, the myths, and there's some myths there that we're even talking about. But the kind of very popular myths around Titanic is also one of the reasons why it endures, right? I talked about the narrative elements before, but when we look at the mythic elements, it also explains why we've arrived at this today. And I'm going to give you some myths, Gareth. And then you can tell me whether or not there's any truth in them whatsoever. Some of them I'm a little bit more familiar with. I don't know what this 33 thing is yet, but I'm intrigued by that. I'll come back to that at the end. But the first myth I have for you is that, I think I know the answer to this one, but that third-class passengers were deliberately locked below deck. You can tell me the real thing in a minute. I'm going to say, I'm going to call bullshit on that.

Speaker 2:
[16:25] You're right. Yeah, you're right. So we can actually pinpoint where that myth begins. So it is from a Norwegian third-class survivor called Olaas Jørgensen Abelseth. And he is given a speaking gig when he reaches America to go around some of the popular, spliced together, newsreel movies about the Titanic and then talk to audiences afterwards. As the talks go on, Abelseth starts to change details. So he was traveling as a single male, and his sister Karen was traveling as a single female. And White Star made a big deal in how it marketed, particularly to women, traveling as emigrants to America, that they would be kept safe from sexual harassment. It would euphemistically have been referred to as being, no one will bother, no man will bother you. But bear in mind, as I'm sure many people who have followed the history of emigration to the US will know, often it was men that went out and then the families would follow. So it was a concern for women that they might be harassed if they traveled without a meal protector or if they were traveling as single women, as some of them were. So on the Titanic, all the third class cabins for single meal passengers were in the front and the bow of the ship. They were connected to the back where the smoking room, general room, dining room and family and female cabins were. And at night, a locked gate was put down the corridor. And Abelsith talks about, because he was so close to the impact site, his cabin steward flung the door open and said, get dressed and get up on deck. And rather than do that, Abelsith obviously wants to grab his sister. So he goes down the corridor, finds the gate locked, as it has been at every point in the voyage. He asks a steward to open it, and they do. But he then starts to elaborate that into all the gates were locked and we weren't able to get up. Now, where, so it is completely untrue that they were locked below, that they weren't allowed up. Partly because no one had told the stewards and stewardesses, this is a full evacuation. There was no need to lock them down. Even if you would believe that someone would give that order, which is a heinously evil order to give. So, how do you account for the higher death toll in third class, which does exist? So, it's always important when you're talking about the mythology of tragedy. If you are providing context, what people don't want to hear is anything that implies that it was less of a tragedy. The motivation is different, the tragedy is the same. One thing that often surprises people is that class was not the dominant factor in whether you lived or survived in the Titanic. Gender was. If you were a man in any class or in the crew, you stood a greater chance of dying than living. The worst hit demographic were men in second class, 92% of whom died. And yeah, they were the worst. So there are three, two other factors that impact gender. One is class. It does skew it. So there is double the chance of a first-class man surviving than a third-class.

Speaker 1:
[19:45] Well, let me get that made. There is, yes.

Speaker 2:
[19:47] So there's 16% of third-class men live, 33% of third-class men live. So that obviously does impact it. The other thing that seems to impact it is marital status. So most of the men traveling in second class were married and they seem to have prioritized getting their families into the lifeboats and then stepping back. So there's multiple things at play here. So it's not clearly just a class-based reason for dying. The most impactful issue for third-class survival rates are language and the lack of urgency imparted by the crew and also the architecture of the Titanic. So a few years before there had been a cholera epidemic in Hamburg and as a result the United States immigration authorities had introduced very stringent rules about fraternisation between the classes at sea. So that's why on the Titanic first and second classes, promenade spaces are so close to each other and third class is different. If there is prolonged contact between the lowest class of accommodation and anyone else they all have to be processed through Ellis Island and a lot of people are paying for second-class tickets because they want to avoid that. So the way the ships are designed are first and second class run down beside each other and third class is kept separate. So there's nothing in the architecture of the Titanic that makes it easy to move a lot of third class people in the case of an emergency. Even when it becomes clear it's an emergency and that's a big when because Captain Smith doesn't tell anyone that it's an emergency. So you have third class passengers in the general room, their main socializing space at the far stern of the ship. So the last bit that feels a tilt, no one is told that there's a sense of urgency. When a sense of urgency does develop, it's a long route up to the lifeboats on the first and second class deck. And then you have language. So in first class, nine out of 10 of the passengers had English as their first or only language. In second class, it's eight out of 10, and in third class, it's two out of five. So you have a ship that only has signs in English, a crew that almost universally can only speak English. And when they are trying to tell them move or passengers are asking for instructions about what to do, there are breakdowns in communication. So whilst the worst hit demographic is second class men and the least hit is actually second class children who have a 100% survival rate, we can see it's not just class. Whilst the third class are not locked below, everything in how the ship is built, how the ship is structured, how the crew are structured, mitigates against them being given the information or the opportunity that they will need to move quickly in a time of emergency. And changes that are made to the Titanic Sister Britannic are that they will put lifeboats much closer to the third class socializing spaces up on deck in the future. So no, it's not true at all that any order was given to hold them down. It's just that not enough care was ever taken to consider that you might need to move most of third class in an emergency. So it's still, I think, a reprehensible reflection on the complacency of Edwardian society and the classism within it. But it's not a case that anyone ever said, do not let them up until the first and second class go, that just did not happen.

Speaker 1:
[23:34] I've heard so many things over the years about Titanic. I've listened to an incredible podcast series recently. If you haven't listened to it, go. It's by Noiser, and I don't know if I'm allowed to plug other podcast networks, but it's so, so good. But what you just described there, Gareth, is actually that real idea of where the working class passengers are, what they're doing, what their demographic in terms of linguistic makeup is. I wasn't aware that it's two out of five. That does skew things. I knew they hadn't been locked in, but I did not know that there was a gate between the men and women in their class. I see where that's then coming from. It's interesting to see how these myths propagate themselves. It's also fascinating to think about, this guy is on a talking tour in the aftermath, and it's becoming a little bit more dramatic every time. But that's not, that's going to happen.

Speaker 2:
[24:27] That happens with most of the survivor memoirs, if they give a testimony closer to the time and one later, you can start to see that they almost started to pick up the memories of other people they've spoken with, which is very, very common with survivors of trauma. It can be difficult in sort of instances of mass fear not to start picking up details as you go along. So it's fascinating to see how some of it shifts. But I think with Abbasoth, it was a conscious choice. And the reason why we know that he knows that is that he sent a letter to his father that I read three days after the sinking and he says exactly what happened and he talks about, oh yeah, they opened the gate. I had to get Karen and then we went up on deck. It's very clear. He knew he remembered what happened.

Speaker 1:
[25:09] Did Karen survive?

Speaker 2:
[25:10] Karen did survive. Yes, we did. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[25:12] Right. Second myth. Yeah, this is tricky. This one. Okay. Maybe just say it, Anthony, so everyone at home can actually understand what's going on. If Titanic had more lifeboats, more lives would have been saved.

Speaker 2:
[25:27] What do you think?

Speaker 1:
[25:29] I think, okay, I'm limited in some aspects about what I know about lifeboats in the Edwardian era, but I will say this. I know that there was a problem, even if they had a significant many more lifeboats, there was a problem deploying them because of the tilt of the ship anyway. So they wouldn't have been able to...

Speaker 2:
[25:50] It was timing as well. They were actually floating some of the collapsibles off. So they had 16, which was the legal requirement, the kind of the white wooden ones you see in the movie. And then on the roof of the officers quarters next to some of the forward funnels, they had four collapsibles that are basically like, pop them up and go. And they were trying to float them off when the final plunge happened. So in that sense, no, it wouldn't have made any difference because they didn't even have time to get rid of the ones that they had. But the counterargument to that is, had there been more regular lifeboats in the Davits, they wouldn't have had to take time to go up onto the roof of the quarters and start trying to maneuver them. So it's possible that had there been more lifeboats that you could have seen maybe another 100, 150 lives saved. So not everyone, they wouldn't have had time. I'm on over this because I can understand the timing argument. And in fact, afterwards, there's a great article that came out, I think in 1913 from an admiral who said, You are making a mistake. The Titanic sank in such an unusual and slow way that it's one of the very few disasters at sea where there was anything like the amount of time you need to load that many lifeboats. And in fact, if you double stack them, which then became standard and the ship doesn't sink forward, it sinks on its side, you're going to kill more people than you save. And he has proved right with the Lusitania. So when the Lusitania is being evacuated after being torpedoed in 1915, it's a much quicker sinking. And there are cases of the top lifeboat swinging out, collapsing and crashing into the ones below that were filled. So it's not a perfect answer. I think had they had more, they could have saved a few more lives. But ultimately it was tilt and timing that really did the damage.

Speaker 1:
[27:34] It feels like had they had they started that process, I mean, we can all say this in hindsight, right? But like had they started that process more expediently, then maybe we'd be having a different conversation.

Speaker 2:
[27:44] This is, when I look back on the Ship of Dreams, I think it's kind of awful sometimes when you look back on your own books, because you always think I could have done this, I could have done that. But the big judgment call that I think I was too soft on was Captain Smith.

Speaker 1:
[27:56] Right. So that's developed with you over time.

Speaker 2:
[27:59] The more I talk about it, I'm like, actually, these were terrible decisions. And he was the captain. And I think I can understand from a position of shock that he did seem, when you see survivor testimonies of people who saw him in those final two hours, he was in shock. He clearly was. But without sounding on Julie Harsh, you're the captain.

Speaker 1:
[28:19] He had a job to do.

Speaker 2:
[28:20] Yeah. You were trusted to not be the person in shock. And you look at people like Captain Turner with the Lusitania, or many other captains who have had to crush that sense of panic and shock and get your job done. And I think people going to him and asking, what are we supposed to be doing? So I do think that the failure to even tell the purser, don't open the first class lounge, get them on deck, that I think added to the death toll. Because you do have first class passengers really interestingly, like they're in the lounge, which is, it opens on to deck, but it's not the lifeboat deck. So they're wondering, are we going here? He at one point gets confused about the layout, he's telling them, yeah, it's from this deck and it's not. It just, I think the question of had they started filling them maybe half an hour earlier, once they were sure that Andries was correct, then I'm thinking you're talking a lot more.

Speaker 1:
[29:12] Because that was very possible.

Speaker 2:
[29:14] Yeah, very much so.

Speaker 1:
[29:15] Because at the end of the night or at the beginning of the next morning when some lifeboats are sailing away from the sink site, we have lots of empty seats and that's one of the things that people talk about. And then, you know, you're talking about this confusion, the lack of coherent communication on board coming, let's say, from Smith initially. So, this idea of Women and Children First was interpreted by some as Women and Children Only.

Speaker 2:
[29:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[29:45] And even at that, there is confusion. Talk to me about why there's confusion around that.

Speaker 2:
[29:50] So there were a lot more men on the Titanic than there were Women and Children, and two senior officers, William Murdoch, who was the first officer, and Charles Lighthuller, who the second, were given different decks to oversee the filling of the lifeboats. And Women and Children first means Women and Children first. But you had cases of Lighthuller just refusing male passengers entry, and in some cases it was carried to pretty horrific extremes. So he wouldn't let a 16-year-old on. At one point he wanted to stop a 14-year-old boy getting it.

Speaker 1:
[30:23] Guns were drawn, pistols were drawn, right?

Speaker 2:
[30:25] Pistols, yeah. We're not sure if they were fired. There's enough, I think, it's up in the air a bit. But certainly they were handed out. And there's a decent amount of eyewitness testimonies that means you cannot rule it out. But it could have been another sound, given what was happening around them. Very interestingly, the women and children first element of the Titanic was very quickly incorporated into a noble aspect of it. And there are some really moving testimonies from women about watching the husband stand back and looking up and it's heartbreaking stuff. After the inquiry, there was a spat, a public exchange of letters between George Bernard Shaw and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle over this. And George Bernard Shaw said, We are pretending that this rule was a good one to disguise the fact that lifeboats were lowered half empty. And that in some cases you were having, you know, women left alone, young women, children being left to row lifeboats and men should have been put in to try to even them up. And he has a point. Arthur Conan Doyle comes back, I think pretty fairly and says, look, whether or not you think it was the right call, it was done for noble reasons. And a lot of the men who stood back were very, very brave. It does also though, plague the lives of a lot of men who left in the lifeboats on Murdoch's side and were told they could go in. And the number of men who are accused of dressing up as women, and the only instance we have that would even come close to it was a young Irish farmer called Daniel Buckley. I think he was from Bally Desmond, but he was in third class, he came up on deck, he was sort of young and he got in, but it was by this point when they're really tightening the rules up and a woman throws her shawl over him just when they're lowering the lifeboats. That's it, there's nothing else at all. And Buckley didn't shove anyone out of the way to get in, it was just people were getting a bit nervous. There's no suggestion or proof at all that people were dressing as women to get out. But there is a case to be made for when you have, you know, 97% of women in first class lived and 65, 66% of men died in first class and then on the same deck you have vastly different survival rates like 84% of second class women live and 92% of second class men die. Even leaving aside the tragedy of third class and obviously it's very different for how they embark the crew, there clearly have to have been moments where they were not filling the lifeboats because Light Hauler was sticking to the rule about being women and children and the only men allowed in were some of the crew to oversee the actual lowering of it. So it remains a very difficult one because a lot of passengers really held on understandably to the sacrifice that a lot of the men had made. There's some wonderful heartbreaking stories. There was a man called Joseph Laroche who was traveling in second class. His uncle was the president of Haiti and they'd been coming home from France. And he makes sure he gets his pregnant wife and their two girls in the lifeboat. He steps back. Benjamin Hart also in second class actually puts his hand up at one point, by which point the pistols are out. And he says, for God's sake, don't shoot. I'm just getting my... He puts his wife and daughter in and he steps back and says, please look after them. Like it's really, you don't want to kick at something where so many people behave with such bravery. But there is a valid debate to be had about, could more lives have been saved, particularly towards the end, if they started opening up, how they would fill them.

Speaker 1:
[34:07] Yeah, it's one of those great what ifs, isn't it? And there's so many of them that exist around the Titanic and lifeboats are always one of those. And it is true to say that they had their safety measure for that moment in time, right?

Speaker 2:
[34:22] Yeah, they were over it. They were over it by four boats, yes. But again, it was a case of, as we're seeing today with technology, is the legislation about safety so far behind the leads in technology?

Speaker 1:
[34:34] Sure. So, myth number three, this has endured as well, just as long as the lifeboat idea has. We have Bruce Ismay, who is the MD of the White Star Line, and he is on board, and he apparently is telling Captain Smith, break that speed record, get us to New York faster than anything has gotten there before. I've heard to and from this, I've heard people argue both. I don't... Titanic's not built to be the fastest.

Speaker 2:
[35:06] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[35:07] Is that what it boils down to?

Speaker 2:
[35:08] Well, there's... Yeah, so it is steaming bullshit. So... And you actually have Joseph Goebbels to thank for it. So...

Speaker 1:
[35:17] Sorry.

Speaker 2:
[35:17] In a plot twist no one saw coming. So, Ismay does survive, and he is absolutely pillory in the press, particularly the William Randolph Hearst press, because he hates him. And they call him... They rename him Brute Ismay for surviving, and he does suffer a nervous breakdown, and it's... He... Anyway, that's sort of neither here nor there as behaviour on the ship. So, Ismay's life is essentially destroyed by having survived, but it's because he survived. There are very few insinuations in the 1920s or 1930s that he was ordering Smith to go faster. There's certainly an implication that he didn't tell him to slow down and that maybe Smith might have been trying to impress his boss or whatever it was. But it is not until 1943, when the Reichsministery for Propaganda in Nazi Germany makes a lavish film called Titanic and they make Ismay the Villain. So Goebbels have been producing a series of extremely expensive anti-British lavish costume dramas. There's one of Mary Queen of Scots. You can guess who the villain in that one is. There's one about the Irish struggle for independence. There's one about the Boer War. But then America enters the war, so he needs something that can stick it to America and Britain, and he lands on the Titanic. So in it, Ismay becomes the maligned figure of Anglo-American capitalism. And you have sort of sledgehammer scenes in which they stand, for god's sake, the king in the dining saloon on the Titanic, and then the captain's boasting of speed, and all the American financiers are scuttling off to speculate on the stock market. Obviously, there's a lone German officer who didn't exist in real life, goes into the flooding corridors to see if children are abandoned by their decadent parents, that sort of thing. But in it, it explicitly has Ismay offering checks to Smith, go faster, go faster. And the movie is never released because when Hitler sees it, he thinks that the scenes of the evacuation are too like the panic being seen during the Allied bombing raids. Quite interestingly, the ship they filmed on is later sunk during the war with a lot of concentration camp victims on it, and it ends up being one of the earlier ships to exceed the Titanic's death toll, which is bone chilling. But for whatever reason, the version of Ismay that is pushed in the 1943 movie starts to creep in more and more. Now, it doesn't show up in the 1958 British movie A Night to Remember, but it seems to start getting legs. It is, the movie is eventually later released, years, years later. And it's not sort of filled with very obvious Nazi takes in history in the way some of the other movies had been. But it's lavish to look at when you know what you're looking for. It's very definitely there. And the Titanic becomes the avatar for British arrogance and American greed. That's the point in this movie. And Ismay is the caricature of both. And you see in the 1970s and 1980s and the 1990s, a kind of oscillation between a villainous Ismay and a ridiculous Ismay. And the 1997 Cameron movie lands much more on the villainous one and re-articulates this idea. I do know that there was a Titanic historian who was asked to check the script and he did circle the bits where Ismay's urging Smith to go faster and he says that didn't happen. And he was told well the public expects that. So it has by this point taken the much closer contemporary damnation of Ismay's character surviving in what was seen to be a cowardly way and the much later anti-British caricature of him pushing for the sake of hubris and greed. To the point of we know that he wouldn't have been doing that. On the first day of every voyage, the captains were always handed a letter from White Star Line saying do not ever attempt to break a speed record if safety is compromised. And also the Titanic was not competing for the award to cross the Atlantic in the fastest time, which is the Blue Ribbon.

Speaker 1:
[39:17] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[39:18] And that was held by the Mauritania, which was before the Titanic and her sister came along, the largest ship in the world and the fastest. So the Mauritania could do it in four and a half, five days. But there were problems for quite a few of those ships with vibration and much higher fuel costs. So what White Star Line decided to do was lean in to not competing. Our ships will get you there a day slower, but you'll be much more comfortable. There'll be much more space. And interestingly, we do have testimonies from second class survivors saying someone who'd been on the Lusitania and Mauritania and was on the Titanic said this is a much more comfortable trip. So they wouldn't have been competing for the speed record. Having taken care of all the dittier dinty, Ismay doesn't deserve a full rehabilitation. So sometimes I think when we prove someone wasn't terrible, we decide they're saintly. It's not quite that. Ismay is a deeply awkward man and socially quite obtuse at times. We know that people found him a little bit overbearing, but he does seem to have always deferred to the captain and made it clear that his position was commercial and financial and social rather than navigational. He was shown a couple of the ice warnings, but he listened to Smith. And there's interviews with Smith about 10 years before the Titanic, saying dramatic shipwrecks are a thing of the past because of technology. So, Ismay certainly not putting pressure on Smith. To the contemporary concern, was Ismay trying to prove his medal with the best crossing time possible for the Titanic? Because Ismay was on board. Maybe. The thing that Smith really did not do that shocked a lot of people was he didn't slow down, even when the ice warnings were coming through. And people will say, you know, there were a couple that he didn't get. And you think, yeah, but he got enough. What were they going to do that the other ones he had ignored hadn't managed to do? So I think he's someone who is testing the engines to see what the Titanic can do. He also adheres to this, in hindsight, baffling contemporary belief that you only slowed a big ship for fog. And that if ice was there, you tried to get through the ice field as quickly as possible. So no, Ismay was not pushing him to break the speed record. Whether or not the fact he was on board meant Smith wanted to get a good time in for the crossing. That is something that unfortunately only Smith would have been able to answer.

Speaker 1:
[41:43] Yeah, it's one of those things, isn't it, where it's almost afterwards, we expect so much of the Titanic because of its prowess and its luxury. And now the mythology that surrounds it, that we almost just assume it was also trying to be the fastest, when actually it wasn't. That wasn't the remit of that. And luxury and comfort, as you say, depending on what class you're in, that was the selling point there.

Speaker 2:
[42:10] Correct. Even with third class, they have this brilliant marketing gimmick. So what they do in third class is they have your menu printed down one side and a nice picture of the ship as well. And on the back, it's a free postcard that they will post for you. So you write home to your family with essentially advertising for the ship.

Speaker 1:
[42:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[42:29] They really position themselves as safety and stability. Yeah. So there, you know, there's even things like if you're in third class and any crew member is rude to you, here's who you contact. They have done everything they can to position themselves as the comfortable choice, not the fast one.

Speaker 1:
[42:45] Listen, I'd be taking it. The comfortable choice every single time. I would have been doomed, but there you go. Myth number four. Okay. Okay. Was the Titanic swapped with Olympic and sunk deliberately as part of an insurance scam? Okay. This deserves a little bit of an explanation before I hand over to you. So this theory originates apparently in a book called The Riddle of Titanic from 1995. In September 1911, the Titanic sistership Olympic is involved in a collision with HMS Hawke in the Solet near Southampton. Olympic's commander was Edward Smith, Captain Titanic. Hawke's bow damaged the Olympic side, forced it to return to the dockyard in Belfast for repairs. The theory goes that the accident to the Olympic was more serious than it was reported and that the Titanic and Olympic were swapped in the dockyard so that the Olympic could be deliberately crashed into an iceberg. That was the most convoluted piece of shit I've ever read.

Speaker 2:
[43:45] Yeah, no it is. Listen, I am sorry for the plummeting in your IQ that that will have inflicted. It is, there are very few, I hate it.

Speaker 1:
[43:54] Yeah, that's ridiculous. Was that person being serious in 1999?

Speaker 2:
[43:57] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he was. And he later wrote a book called Titanic, The Ship That Never Sank, because apparently, yeah, apparently ice isn't as strong as steel.

Speaker 1:
[44:06] Well, there you go.

Speaker 2:
[44:07] And, I mean, I barely scraped a pass in GCSE science, and even I know that that is questionable.

Speaker 1:
[44:13] So, oh, God, that was that was that was painful.

Speaker 2:
[44:17] It's it's it's it's listen. I mean, I suppose we have to we have to be respectful of every viewpoint.

Speaker 1:
[44:22] I know we don't.

Speaker 2:
[44:23] We have to be respectful of every person with the view. We don't have to be respectful of the point. So there are almost no words in the English language to describe how deeply and profoundly incorrect that is. It is up there with the suggestion that Elizabeth the first was secretly a unicorn who lived in Jupiter.

Speaker 1:
[44:40] That I believe.

Speaker 2:
[44:40] Listen, prove it didn't happen. Prove it didn't happen. Show me the receipt, Gareth. Okay, where to start? So firstly, the idea that if you want to commit insurance fraud and maximize your insurance check that you stuff it full of people, sail it into the North Atlantic, find an iceberg to smash it into, then hope that enough people get into the lifeboats, sink it, then have to pay out the insurance for all the stuff that they have lost, rather than knocking over a can of oil when it's empty and flicking a match, I mean like oopsie poopsie, it happened all the time. Fire at Dock was a regular hazard. It happened to many famous ocean liners. They could easily have done that.

Speaker 1:
[45:26] Just gone that way.

Speaker 2:
[45:27] Yeah. And by the way, they didn't turn a profit on the sinking of the Titanic. They lost money because the amount of insurance they had to pay out. The countess of Rother's alone was like, listen, I know you're going through a hard time, but those were expensive rubies, and I'm going to need a check, guys.

Speaker 1:
[45:44] Do you know what? Let's not even entertain it anymore.

Speaker 2:
[45:47] The one thing I will say is there are some people who think that it was deliberately sung to kind of assassinate some prominent Americans. And you think, again, guns. And secondly, what if they got in the lifeboat?

Speaker 1:
[45:57] Yeah, which is quite likely.

Speaker 2:
[45:59] Yeah. And also the other, the crucial argument for it is sorry, that the Olympic and Titanic were identical, and all you needed to do was change the prominent deck's glass. Not true. So, the reception room was bigger. There's about 38 or 39 quite significant changes within the ships, about the sizes of various rooms. We all, and we've seen from dives to the Titanic, that the Titanic's deck plan is the one that's there. The only time they were next to each other was in Belfast for six days, when this switch allegedly happened. No one in Belfast talked about it, which by the way, is impossible.

Speaker 1:
[46:36] I was going to say, you wouldn't be able to...

Speaker 2:
[46:37] Listen!

Speaker 1:
[46:38] Everyone in that company...

Speaker 2:
[46:39] Guess what I was doing? Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[46:41] Can you imagine that?

Speaker 2:
[46:42] I switched that big old box.

Speaker 1:
[46:43] Hundreds of people.

Speaker 2:
[46:44] Hundreds. I love my people, and the reason I love them is I know no one would have kept that secret.

Speaker 1:
[46:50] No, they wouldn't.

Speaker 2:
[46:51] So it's the other thing that they just... So the ships had yard numbers. 401 for Olympic and 40... No, 400 for Olympic and 401. I'm getting... One's 401. When the Olympic was scrapped in 19... The Olympic was scrapped in 1935. They lifted all the wood off, sold it. You can see the Olympics number on it. So unless in those six days they managed to change the internal layout, add in a new deck of cabins, change the restaurant size, change the light of the Turkish bath, rearrange where the officer's quarters were, move the balustrade and then rip out all the first class wood and replant it for an auction that might happen in 25 years, I just find it, call me cynical, a little bit tricky.

Speaker 1:
[47:34] So what you're saying is that maybe...

Speaker 2:
[47:36] It's a strong maybe, Anthony. It's a strong maybe.

Speaker 1:
[47:40] What I'm picking up here is there's a possibility.

Speaker 2:
[47:42] There's room for doubt, I think.

Speaker 1:
[48:02] Right, we are working our way through these myths. We are now on to myth number five, the final myth in the package. Was Titanic's hull weakened by a previous coal fire in boiler room five?

Speaker 2:
[48:14] So I don't think so, but there are some good historians who disagree.

Speaker 1:
[48:18] There was a fire though, right?

Speaker 2:
[48:20] Yes. So there was a fire in one of the bunkers, fairly an occupational hazard with that much coal. More of a nuisance than an emergency. They realize that it's happening in Belfast. What they do is they work quite hard to empty that coal bunker into the boilers quicker than all the others, just to deal with it. It's one of the reasons, along with cost and also how dirty the deck gets, that so many shipping lines are really keen to convert them to oil after the First World War. It's a massive quick changeover. So yes, there is a self-contained fire. We do know that it has been put out by the time it gets anywhere near the iceberg. It has done nothing more visibly serious than sort of damaging some of the paint. And there's a little bit of buckling internally, I should say, not in the hull. The coal bunker fire theory is one that I, as I say, I'm not convinced by at all. But it is one of those myths that deserves to be treated seriously because there's some good writing behind it. So there's a couple of slightly frillier, more nonsensical versions of it. There's grainy footage of the Titanic being fitted out in Belfast and there's a patch of discoloured hull. And some supporters of it have circled and said, look, that's where it was. Actually, where that is, is quite a bit higher than the boiler rooms. It was closer to the mail room, the mail sorting room in G deck. And it's probably that it's such old film that it's started to fray at certain points. But take that away from it. It's sort of unprovable because the key area where it would have impacted is now buried in, it's where the Titanic plowed into the seabed. I don't think it's necessary. I think to me the damage inflicted by the iceberg was substantial and serious enough that even if the hull had been weakened, I think the hull would have been breached anyway. And I don't think the fire seems to have been something that anyone at the time was really concerned about. And that may be that that's because people who worked in that industry were more familiar with some of the risks than we would be. That sounds worse to us than it would have done to them. So I would say it is a myth that I personally dissent from, but I think it's one that's a valid discussion to have. I know there are other Titanic experts who think it's complete nonsense, simply because you disagree with something. If it's backed up reasonably and it's well expressed, it's a discussion worth having.

Speaker 1:
[50:49] On less, it's about whether or not it was switched with the Olympic.

Speaker 2:
[50:52] Because every adjective I just used does not apply to that theory.

Speaker 1:
[50:55] Nonetheless. Okay, listen, that's our five myths. But to take us out, Gareth, what is it do you think, as a Belfast man, what is it do you think that keeps us coming back to Titanic and keeps it such an emotive history for so many people, even people who are not from Ireland or who are not going to New York or wherever that they were, the link that they might formulate.

Speaker 2:
[51:21] And it's global, it's so far beyond Ireland and everything, I think, as you say, it touches people all over the world. There are brilliant museums in Missouri that would have no link to the Titanic in terms of its journey. I suppose the reason why is that you could not craft it in fiction and hope for it to be half as believable or dramatic and question provoking. I think that's what the Titanic does. So it's a mortality and a morality play. I think it is the stages of death played out. First of all, I should say, sorry, there's a fantastic community of researchers who are really interested in literally the nuts and bolts of the Titanic. So it's a story that you can invest a lot of intellectual energy in and looking at how the ship functioned and what went wrong. But also for many people who are maybe less interested in the technicalities of it, it provokes moral questions. So you go to bed on the night of the 14th, and you're cosy and warm and your life is progressing. And then something happens out of your control and there is denial. And then there are all the stages of realising that you might be about to die and the Titanic poses the question, what would I have done? Everybody wants to believe that they are the person handing children over to the officers. You hope you're that person, but there's every possibility that you won't be. So I think the Titanic, even the way it sank slowly forward, it creates a story that involves all of us by asking how you would have behaved and asking even bigger questions of that. How do you face death? One of the myths we lightly touched on was the band.

Speaker 1:
[53:08] Oh, yes.

Speaker 2:
[53:08] Yeah, the band. And I actually, I sort of bulldozed through some of the myths, but I actually do think some of the Titanic myths are correct. One of them is, I did come away thinking that they moved through lighthearted music. Then they seem to have moved into British patriotic music in the middle. And then I do think they were playing religious music at the end. Other people disagree. I do think they were playing near, oh my God, do they, maybe not at the end, but certainly close to it. In musical form, that's almost the progression of life from carefree to something a bit more public and serious and finally to spiritual. So I think that's the Titanic. I think it's the great morality tale of the 20th century for many people. And it will continue to be, I think, into the 21st and 22nd. So I can't always take apart why a fairy tale endures. And in some ways the Titanic has become both a fantastic piece of real history and an unsinkable fairy tale. The reason why great stories endure is because they have one unquantifiable element. You can explain a lot of it, but there's one percent at the very end that is the impact of the emotional. And that's what I think it has and why it endures so much.

Speaker 1:
[54:24] And I think it's sitting with and being comfortable in that element of unknowability that actually, we saw more recently, didn't we, on an expedition to get down to view the Titanic, that there was another tragedy involved at the same sink site. And it reminds us, I think, that we will never own this history in the way that we potentially want to, or that we feel the need to go, I have it now, I understand everything about it. I can say with certainty all of these things, because actually, it's beyond us. To really know everything that's happened. It's in the doubt that the longevity comes.

Speaker 2:
[55:03] I think so. I think for me, many of the conspiracy theories or the attempts to find other reasons for the sinking, which are two separate things. I think they are an attempt in some ways to strip away the fear that the Titanic can give you as a story, which is we try to tell ourselves if you do everything right, if the rivets were better, if the steel was better. The steel that by the way is still held in place by those rivets in one of the most inhospitable parts of the Atlantic. The idea, there might have been something wrong there or maybe there was a fire, or maybe there was this, or maybe it was on purpose. I think deep, deep down what we're trying to tell ourselves is they did something wrong and if you do everything right, you're safe. That is one of the oldest stories we tell ourselves. Play by the rules, take all the precautions and ultimately you will be treated fairly by the world. You will be safe. And in fact, what the Titanic, I think, can teach us is this was the best built ship of its era. There was one mistake, serious mistake, with how it was steered, which was its speed. There was nothing in it that preordained what was coming. It did most things right. And nature unfurled its hand and smacked it away. And if Mother Nature decides to do that, whether it's in the dive or in the sinking or at any point, then it can still do that. And sometimes you can do everything right and there will still be a horrible outcome. And that's a very frightening lesson to take from it.

Speaker 1:
[56:32] I think that's a good place to end for today. I can't remember if we've done another episode on the Titanic because Maddie's not here and she's the one that tells me. So Gareth, I'm going to turn to you. Have we done another episode on the Titanic?

Speaker 2:
[56:43] Yes. You have. No, you have.

Speaker 1:
[56:45] And we have. So now we have another episode, at least one more, on the Titanic in the back catalogue. So go and listen to that. That'll be in there too. Thank you for listening to us today, Gareth. It was so enlightening and actually I love this idea of like sitting. I say this all the time about certain histories, but this is one of them about sitting in the mess and just really experiencing the unknowable and being comfortable in that doubt. I think there's so much of that in this history, which is why, as you're saying, it's so compelling. Please leave us a five star of you wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know if you are listening on your podcast platform that we are also on YouTube? So go and find us there. It's After Dark on YouTube. And until next time, happy listening.