The Great Titanic Conspiracy Read online

  THE GREAT

  TITANIC

  CONSPIRACY

  Robin Gardiner

  The Great Titanic Conspiracy

  Robin Gardiner

  First published 2010

  ISBN 978 0 7110 3683 3

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, on the internet or elsewhere, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

  ©Robin Gardiner 2010

  Published by Ian Allan Publishing

  an imprint of Ian Allan Publishing Ltd, Hersham, Surrey KT12 4RG.

  Printed in England by Ian Allan Printing Ltd, Hersham, Surrey KT12 4RG.

  Visit the Ian Allan Publishing website at www.ianallanpublishing.com

  Distributed in the United States of America and Canada by BookMasters Distribution Services.

  Copyright

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  Dedicated to Bruce Williams

  Long time ‘Devil’s Advocate’

  Died 2006

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 The search for Titanic

  Chapter 2 Enter John Pierpont Morgan

  Chapter 3 A dual role

  Chapter 4 1911: Agadir and Egypt

  Chapter 5 Preparations for war at sea

  Chapter 6 Olympic and Hawke

  Chapter 7 The switch

  Chapter 8 Finishing ‘Titanic’

  Chapter 9 Belfast to Southampton

  Chapter 10 Carpathia and Californian

  Chapter 11 All aboard

  Chapter 12 Cherbourg and Queenstown

  Chapter 13 ‘Westbound steamers report bergs...’

  Chapter 14 ‘Iceberg right ahead’

  Chapter 15 ‘A slight jar’

  Chapter 16 What had Titanic hit?

  Chapter 17 The view from the Californian

  Chapter 18 The view from the Carpathia

  Chapter 19 Boats away

  Chapter 20 Too many survivors

  Chapter 21 The inquiries

  Chapter 22 Conclusion

  Appendix 1 The shipbuilders’ scale models

  Appendix 2 Titanic’s insurance

  Appendix 3 Tutankhamun’s scroll

  Appendix 4 The Quitzrau affidavit

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to express my gratitude to all those writers and researchers whose works, published or otherwise, provided a mass of valuable information, and most of whom are mentioned in the Bibliography.

  My thanks also to those who provided me with additional information from their own family histories or their own research or expertise, in particular Robert McDougall, for his generosity with his extensive research into Liverpool’s maritime history, Captain Peter Carey, for his expertise and experience in the field of maritime insurance investigation, and Glyn Lancaster Jones, for photographic evidence.

  Thanks again to friends and family for their continued interest and support, particularly my wife Lynn, for putting up with the mass of paperwork spread throughout our home and for her continuous editing of all my manuscripts.

  Introduction

  To understand why they sank the Titanic we first have to know that they didn’t!

  There are a number of good reasons to believe that the vessel that sank on the night of April 14/15 was in fact Titanic’s slightly older, and very similar, sister ship Olympic. What follows is a brief rundown of those reasons, wherever possible in the order in which they occurred.

  Olympic and Titanic were the first two of three sister ships, each intended to be about 850 feet long and weighing between 40,000 and 45,000 gross registered tons apiece. When completed they would turn out to be slightly more than 882¾ feet long and have a gross registered tonnage of 45,324 tons and 46,329 tons respectively. The third sister, Britannic, would be slightly larger at 887ft 9in long and 48,158 gross registered tons. Britannic, which never entered service with the White Star Line, played a very minor part in what happened to her sisters, except to show us the British Government’s continued confidence in these vessels despite the fate of her sister. The ‘Olympic’ class ships were intended by their owners to be the safest, strongest, most opulent and, by a comfortable margin, the largest vessels afloat, although by the time the first of them was launched that margin had been drastically reduced by German ambitions in the same direction.

  The first two White Star vessels of the class, Olympic and Titanic, were constructed side by side at Harland & Wolff’s Belfast yard from a single set of drawings. As launched, the two sisters were identical. Olympic’s keel, Yard No 400, was laid on 16 December 1908, and that of Titanic 15 weeks later on 31 March 1909. Work on the first ship progressed more rapidly than on the second, with the consequence that by the time they were launched the time gap between them had opened to almost 32 weeks. Olympic, with her hull painted white, or light grey, to aid photographers, was launched on 20 October 1910, and Titanic, with her hull painted the more usual black, on 31 May the following year.

  It has been said that Olympic was built with a bow-fronted wheelhouse, as is shown on plans of the ship published in Shipbuilder in mid 1911. However, a photograph taken from the top of the huge steel gantry specially constructed by Harland & Wolff to enable them to build the vessels shows this not to be the case. This photograph, taken immediately after the ship was launched, apparently shows a straight-fronted wheelhouse, exactly as it appeared on earlier drawings of the ship.

  On the very same day that Titanic was launched, Olympic, after two days of trials, and public examination, was handed over to her new owners, the White Star Line. She left Belfast that afternoon for Liverpool, the line’s home port, where she would be opened for public inspection the following day. She then moved on to Southampton, and again the public were allowed aboard before the vessel began to prepare for her maiden voyage, which would begin on 14 June 1911.

  On schedule, under the command of Captain Edward John Smith, the White Star line’s senior captain, Olympic set off on her first voyage to New York and back, via Cherbourg in France and Queenstown (now Cobh) in southern Ireland. She arrived in New York after a passage lasting 5 days, 16 hours and 42 minutes, having made an average speed of just over 21 knots. After an uneventful and otherwise successful maiden voyage, as she was docking her stern collided with the tug O. L. Halenbeck, smashing the smaller vessel’s stern frame and rudder. It was not an auspicious beginning.

  As Olympic was leaving Southampton water on 20 September 1911, at the start of her fifth voyage to New York and back, still under the command of Captain Smith but with Trinity House Pilot George William Bowyer effectively in control, she was rammed in the starboard quarter by the Royal Navy’s old 7,350-ton armoured cruiser HMS Hawke. Both vessels were badly damaged in the collision. It would require a full two months’ work back at the builders’ Belfast yard to patch up the damaged liner well enough for her to resume service. During those repairs various spare parts were required that could only be obtained by cannibalising the second ‘Olympic’ class vessel still under construction. We will look at the collision between Olympic and HMS Hawke and the repairs required by the liner in detail in Chapter 6.

  In November 1911 the Olympic,
with Titanic’s starboard main propeller and shaft, left Belfast to resume her career, though not for long. As we now know, these ships were the largest and most opulent vessels built up to that time, but because of faulty workmanship they were anything but the strongest and safest. The hulls of all three vessels were of riveted construction, and for the most part a new technique, hydraulic riveting, was employed. This new technique, which took the place of the older system of hand-riveting with red-hot rivets, should have resulted in much stronger and more reliable joints. Unfortunately the workers at Harland & Wolff saw the coming of the new technology not as a labour-saving advantage but as a threat to their jobs (which in the long term it certainly would be). When building Olympic the workers adopted a somewhat Luddite attitude; instead of taking the care needed to position the new riveting machines exactly where they should be to do their work effectively, they didn’t bother. Consequently many rivets were not put in straight or tight, and in some cases the holes drilled for them were stretched out of shape. To make bad matters worse some of the plating of the ship’s hulls had been drilled before the plates were bent to shape. This had also badly distorted some of the rivet holes, particularly where the plates had been bent around the curve of the ship’s bilges. Add to this the enormous stresses imposed on the hull by the Hawke collision and it is hardly surprising that large sections of this riveting failed within weeks of Olympic’s return to service, and the Board of Trade required the ship to be dry-docked in February 1912 for repairs.

  Many rivets were drilled out and replaced, and steel strips were riveted over the joints to reinforce them. When the vessel returned to the yard in March 1912, ostensibly to have yet another propeller blade replaced, it was found that many more rivets had failed and much more reinforcement was carried out. (BoT reports at PRO.)

  Even while repair work was under way on Olympic, conversion of Titanic into a reasonable twin of her sister must also have begun. After Olympic’s maiden voyage, J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, suggested certain improvements for incorporation in Titanic. These included the fitting of extra cabins on B Deck; this had been a promenade deck on Olympic, but would be completely turned over to cabins and public rooms on her sister. These alterations had been begun before the Hawke incident took place, at least as far as altering the window layout on B Deck and probably constructing the cabins there as well. Fortunately, these cabins were built of lightweight steel plates and it would not be at all difficult for Harland & Wolff to remove them again, which seems to be what happened. The open promenade areas at the rear end of B Deck on both ships were planned to be considerably longer on Olympic than on Titanic; so this too required conversion. The B Deck window layout, regularly spaced windows on Olympic and irregularly spaced ones on Titanic, and the length of the aft promenade area on B Deck, long on Olympic and short on Titanic, are important recognition features.

  A Harland & Wolff photograph of Olympic, taken when the vessel was in the Thompson Graving Dock in 1911, clearly shows a vertical joint in her hull plating immediately forward of the port-side anchor hawse pipe. Photographs of Titanic, while still on the stocks and while fitting out in 1911, show that there was no similar joint in her hull plating just ahead of her portside anchor. However, a picture of Olympic, taken during her 1912/13 refit following the Titanic disaster, shows this vessel not to have the telltale plating joint, proving quite conclusively that the hull pictured is that of Titanic, although the name Olympic is clearly visible on both sides of the bow.

  Photographs taken of Titanic at Southampton shortly before her maiden voyage show a large area of discoloured plating, as if it had been newly painted with paint that did not quite match the original, in the same location as Olympic’s hull was damaged by HMS Hawke.

  As previously mentioned, to make life easier for photographers Olympic’s hull was painted white, or very light grey, for her launch. Titanic’s hull was never painted light grey because, as the second vessel of the class, she was nothing like as newsworthy when it was her turn to enter the water. Curiously, where rust and marine life have flaked the top layers of paint from the hull of the wreck discovered by Dr Ballard in 1985, patches of what appear to be white paint are exposed. This white or light grey paint beneath the black topcoat of the hull means that, whatever ship the wreck is, it is definitely not Titanic.

  Now we come to the very complicated but absolutely damning evidence contained in the gross registered tonnages of Olympic and Titanic. Olympic was first registered on 29 May 1911 at 45,323.82 gross registered tons (grt) and 20,894.2 net registered tons (nrt). These registered tons are not a measurement of weight at all, but a measurement of volume: 100 cubic feet equals 1 registered ton. The grt represents the total enclosed areas of the ship, including the superstructure, engineering and crew spaces, while the nrt is just the enclosed areas used by fare-paying passengers - cabins, public rooms and so forth. It is the gross registered tonnages that mainly concern us here.

  Titanic was registered on 25 March 1912 at 46,328.57grt, a gross registered tonnage that was 1,004.65 greater than that of Olympic. The extra (roughly 1,000) tons were there because of the extra B Deck cabins, the Café Parisien and enlarged restaurant, while the same areas on Olympic were open-ended promenade deck but with large glass windows protecting passengers from the elements. Gross and net registered tonnages were not calculated at the last moment but from measurements taken by Board of Trade inspectors as the ship was being built. Board of Trade inspector Carruthers visited Titanic almost 2,000 times during construction. As the differences between the B Deck layout of the two ships was already largely in place by early September 1911, Carruthers would have already been well aware that Titanic would eventually finish up with a grt approximately 1,000 tons greater than her sister. Because harbour dues and such like were calculated on a vessel’s grt, it was an offence to understate that tonnage. This presented White Star and Harland & Wolff with a problem. With the grt of Titanic already known to the Board of Trade, they could not pass off the sister ship without bringing her up to something like the same specification, but they simply did not have the time to properly convert the whole of B Deck to the same layout as that of Titanic. Nor could they leave Titanic with all of her cabins on B Deck if they wanted to pass her off as Olympic. Alterations to Titanic in order to make her the same in general layout and appearance as Olympic were not too much of a problem because the ship would remain in the yard from the time the decision to switch them was made in about October 1911 until the exchange actually took place in the first week of March 1912. It was not too much of a job to remove the alterations to Titanic’s B Deck and convert it back to its original form. On the other hand, they would only have about a month to change Olympic’s appearance to that of her sister, from early March 1912 until she was due to leave the yard, as Titanic, to prepare for her maiden voyage, during the first couple of days of April.

  Because of the shortage of time the only alterations to Olympic’s B Deck that could be completed were the two executive stateroom suites, the enlarged restaurant and the Café Parisien. As these alterations noticeably changed the outward appearance of the ship it was essential that they were done in the time available. We know that the rest of the alterations were never carried out because during the sinking a steward walked along B Deck, checking that cabins were empty and locked. As he was carrying out his duties he could see the swung-out lifeboats hanging from their davits two decks above, something he patently could not have done had there been cabins between the passageway he was in and the outside of the ship. To make up this shortfall of something like 700grt, the forward end of A Deck was enclosed. This work was actually carried out during the very last week that the vessel which sailed as Titanic was still at Belfast - after the 25 March registration. Only in this way could Olympic be made to match up with Titanic’s known grt. The A Deck windows could not have been installed on Titanic at the last moment because they would have raised her grt to something over 47,000 tons.
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  To put it in its most basic form, you cannot add 1,000 tons to a 46,000-ton ship and end up with a 46,000-ton ship. The vessel that sailed out of Southampton on 10 April 1912 can only have been a 45,000-ton ship with the last-minute addition of 1,000 tons of grt in her B Deck public rooms and enclosed area on A Deck.

  Titanic’s registration document has an interesting hand-written note included in it, which says:

  ‘Note 2. The undermentioned spaces above the upper deck are not included in the cubical contents forming the ship’s registered tonnage: Open space in front of poop 16 feet long = 65.24 tons. Open space abaft 2nd Class smokeroom, 6 feet long = 15.84 tons. Open space on promenade deck, abreast windows, port side, 198 feet long = 343.27 tons. Open space on promenade deck, abreast windows, starbd side 198 feet long = 377.24 tons.’

  Of course the spaces referred to are not above the upper deck at all but on A Deck. The document is dated 25 March 1912. The man responsible for forwarding this document to the Registrar is Harold Arthur Sanderson (White Star’s manager). The registrar’s signature is unreadable. The question is, why were these spaces not to be included in the grt of the ship? The only believable reason is that they did not actually increase the cubic capacity of the vessel, which in turn would mean that approximately the same cubic capacity had been lost somewhere else on the ship. Clearly this loss of capacity cannot have occurred within the hull of the vessel or it would not have affected the grt but only the nrt - but the removal of cabins on B Deck, turning that area into an open-ended promenade space, would have done so. That these spaces should have been included in the grt is shown by the fact that they appear on the document at all. Had they been truly open spaces such as the after part of A deck, they would not have merited a mention. As all sorts of charges were calculated on the ship’s grt, it is completely unbelievable that the British Government would allow White Star to register a ship (any ship) at less than its true, chargeable, cubic capacity.