Titanic Pages

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A collection of all my Titanic essays and research, which started in the mid 1990s and has been on-going and updated ever since...

• Pre-Disaster
• What happened to the Titanic launch film?
• The Delivery Trip.
• The ice warnings received by the Titanic.
• The Disaster
• "Iceberg, Dead Ahead Sir!" - what did the lookouts actually see?
• An essay describing the survivor's experience of the actual collision itself: this is graphics intensive and works best on a desktop or laptop computer with Firefox or Chrome.
• Below Decks - while passengers and crew were preparing for the evacuation, what was going on inside the ship?
• First class stewarding and the loss of Ann Isham.
• A complete record of wireless messages, and the timing of the first wirless and last Marconi messages, and Titanic's final plunge.
• If there were enough lifeboats, could everyone have been saved?
• Ismay's Escape - the chairman of the White Star Line leaves the sinking Titanic in its final moments. But did he jump or was he pushed?
• The Suicide Letters - what can we glean from the "Officer Suicide" stories of Eugene Daly and George Rheims?
• The Sinking of the Titanic - what happened, and what did people see? This needs Java to run.
• The Wreck
• Who really found the Titanic?- was it the French-American team in 1985, or did the Royal Navy unearth the wreck in the 1970s? Or was it another team entirely?
• What happened to the Titanic's crow's nest? Please be patient while the javascript loads the images.
• Is the wreck really disintegrating or is this a ploy to justify salvage?
• What happened to the THS plaque?
• Captain Lord, the Californian and other ships
• Who watched the Titanic go down? - was it just the SS Californian, or were there others in the area, unknown to this day?
• The Titanic and the Californian part 1
• The Titanic and the Californian part 2 - my attempt at a possible solution
• What did Herbert Stone of the Californian see?
• Some unknown aspects of Captain Lord's life...
• An essay that I wrote on the mystery of times, rockets, the first lifeboat launching and the lies of Senan Molony.
• The SS Birma's PV resurfaces at last - what can it say about the Californian?
• An analysis of some of the vessels sharing the North Atlantic at the time of the disaster.
• Miscellaneous Items
• The Olympic-Titanic switch - fact or fallacy?
• A collection of ice warnings, and reports of wreckage and bodies from 1912.
• The Titanic, The White Star Line and The Bank of England.
• The BBC interview with Titanic Survivors from 1956.
• The antics of Daniel Allen Butler
• The Britannic - the third in the Olympic class of vessels. Was she really to have originally been called the Gigantic?
• The sad end of lookout Frederick Fleet

Essays and research compiled and written by friends who have allowed inclusion on this site:

• Thanks to the generosity of Spanish Titanic researcher José Martinez, a 1959 interview with survivor Doña Fermina Oliva y Ocaña
• Thanks to the courtesy of Brian Hill, an essay that destroys the provenance of the iceberg allegedly seen from the Prinz Adalbert. This article first appeared in the British Titanic Society newsletter, "The Atlantic Daily Bulletin."
• Again, thanks to the courtesy of Brian Hill, an essay that discusses Captain Smith's experience with ice, and the ice conditions of 1912.. This article also first appeared in the British Titanic Society newsletter, "The Atlantic Daily Bulletin."

• A frequently updated compilation of memorials and other locations relevant to the Titanic that you can visit (and a few, like wrecks, that you can't, sadly).
  Click here

• Some photographs of the Olympic, the Titanic and the Britannic.
• Shipping line's funnels and flags from the 1930s.
• Photos of ships from various encyclopedias.
• The White Star Line Pamphlet distributed to 1st class passengers of the Titanic.
• In March 1912, Bruce Ismay wrote to Director Bellin of the Hamburg-American Packet Company pondering on the issue of dry-docking a huge vessel in the event of an accident
• Page 1
• Page 2
• Page 3
• Material gathered during my trip to Southampton, April 2014:
  • "The White Star Magazine" - photos of the Olympic.
  • Southampton Council interview with Edith Haisman, 1985
  • Southampton Council interview with Eva Hart, c.1987
  • Southampton Council interview with Sydney Daniels, 1982
  • Miscellaneous Southampton Council interviews with relatives of survivors
  • Photographs used in the book "Titanic Voices."
  • Titanic related buildings and memorials in Southampton.
• Photos of Lightoller's yacht Sundowner and the Ramsgate Maritime Museum.
• The Musician's Memorial in Soho, London
• A newspaper interview with Jack Podesta from 1968, printed posthumously.
• Titanic and Olympic related pages from the Illustrated London News of 1911 and 1912.
• British and Cambridge University Library research trip data.
• Adverts of suppliers to the Olympic class vessels.
• Clippings from the British Newspaper Archive.
• Titanic and White Star Line artefacts from the Merseyside Maritime Museum.
• Artefacts from the Honour and Glory exhibition at the Time and Tide museum in Great Yarmouth.
• Harland and Wolff weren't happy with the lack of publicity for Hingley's anchors: page 1 and page 2

• The mistakes of "A Night To Remember" (1958)
• The mistakes of "Raise The Titanic" (1980)
• The mistakes of the 1996 miniseries
• The mistakes of James Cameron's version (1997)
• The mistakes of Julian Fellowes's "Titanic" (2012)
• The 2016 Honor and Glory movie

The death of Walter Lord in 2002 deprived the Titanic community of its greatest, and possibly its best loved author. In over five decades he had amassed an enormous resource of interviews, letters, newspapers, paraphernalia, many of them rare and unique. Fortunately, Lord had bequeathed his collection to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and it now encompasses other Titanic related items of his friend, Bill Macquitty, who had seen the ship launched, and then, as Arthur C. Clarke once said "sank her again a second time" for the 1958 film adaptation of his friend's book, "A Night To Remember." Now, these files and items which helped to generate "A Night To Remember" and "The Night Lives On" are indexed and open for perusal in their museum's Caird Library ... at least for those of us for whom a trip to Greenwich is no problem. But what about the rest of us? Very few seem to have seen his private files, and it is the opinion of this author that the priceless information should be available to everyone, free. Hence, the purpose of this section: a transcription of Lord's, and Macquitty's, notes and letters. Although fasincating, the usual caveat should apply, viz. that the information given contemporaneously in 1912 should be regarded as more accurate than tainted or faded recollections more than 40 years after the event. Still, this does not necessarily mean that the information contained in these documents should be dismissed! They also show how some survivors were less than candid and open in their recollections, and, in a few cases, how Lord himself missed golden opportunities to further his knowledge (see his correspondence with Sylvia Lightoller and Eleanor Cassebeer as examples), and how Lord was taken in by opportunistic hoaxers (eg Walter Belford and Charles Reginald Burgess, who had a very similar name to a real survivor).

• Crew
• Walter Hurst, Fireman
• Charles Joughin, Chief Baker
• George Kemish, Fireman
• Harold Lowe, 5th Officer
• Herbert Pitman, 3rd Officer
• Richard Proffer, 2nd class waiter
• Alfred Pugh, Steward
• George Thomas Rowe, Quartermaster
• Mary/May Sloane, Stewardess
• Maude Slocombe, Turkish Bath Stewardess
• Jim Witter, 2nd Class Smoke Room Steward
• Leo James Hyland, 3rd class steward
• First class Saloon Steward Fred Dent Ray.
• Passengers
• 1st class
• Alice Cleaver
• Hedwig Margaritha Frölicher
• Helen Ostby
• Emma Schabert
• Laura Francatelli
• Eleanor Cassebeer
• The Countess of Rothes
• Irene Harris
• May Futrelle
• Mary Lines
• Edith Russell
• 2nd class
• Lillian Bentham
• Sylvia Caldwell
• Albert Caldwell
• Mary Hewlett
• Jessie Leitch
• Lilli/Lyyli Silven
• Edwina Troutt
• Bertha Watt
• Elizabeth Nye
• Madeleine Mellinger
• 3rd class
• Gus Cohen
• Katherine Gilnagh
• Anna Sjoblom
• Selini/Celiney Yazbeck
• Miscellaneous
• This'n'that
• Sylvia Lightoller
• Sidney H.V.Abbott, a shipmate of Murdoch and Wilde
• Miss E.N.Blair, the daughter of the original 2nd Officer, David Blair.
• Colin Farquhar MacDonald, Marine Engineer
• Miss E.M.German, whose brother knew 5th Officer Lowe
• A.Brian Mainwaring, Seaman
• Augusta Ogden, Carpathia Passenger
• The photographic archives of the Lord-MacQuitty collection
• Anne Harper, Henry Sleeper Harper's Second Wife
• Harry Giles, Fireman_NB: Giles would seem to be a hoaxer._
• George Harris, Cook_NB: While there was a 2nd class survivor with this name on the Titanic, George Harris, the cook, would seem to be an imposter.

More accounts to come soon....

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1. The Titanic-Californian debate gets quite heated, and often results in insults and personal attacks being tossed back and forth (witness Senan Molony's postings on the Encyclopedia-Titanica message board). Their tactics are obvious - avoid discussions of the case, describe dissenters and their work as "trash" with no justification, besmirch their reputation (and what has that got to do with the quality of their research or conclusions?), refuse to admit when they are wrong, or launch legal action to get skeptic's works suppressed. Heres a good example, courtesy of Mr.Rob Kamps from the Netherlands.
2. Bill Wormstedt's excellent Titanic pages including George Behe's pages
3. Mark Chirnside's pages
4. All At Sea With Dave Gittins (His pages seem to be down at the moment, please use this archived copy.)
5. Dave Billnitzer's pages on the Titanic-Californian controversy. Well worth reading. (His page seems to be down at the moment; please click here to see an archived version)
6. Sam Halpern's excellent Titanicology
7. The late Roy Mengot's Titanic Wreck and modelling pages
8. Parks Stephenson's pages on the Titanic.
9. The invaluable Titanic Inquiry Project
10. The Titanic News Channel
11. The Titanic Research And Modelling Assocation - the site seems to be down at the moment; please click here to see the latest archived version)
12. Dan Parkes' William Murdoch website.
13. Gunter Babler's and Susanne Stormer's Titanic Files page.
14. Dan Parkes' Titanic Switch Page.
15. Art Braunschweiger's fantastic Titanic model.
16. Bob Read's Titanic CAD plans and research Page.
17. On Facebook, the best resources are Titanic Passengers and Crew, Encyclopedia Titanica, Titanic Enthusiasts and The White Star Liners: Olympic, Titanic and Britannic.
18. The site of David Dyer (of "The Middle Watch" fame) and his excellent demolition of the arguments of the Lordites including Senan Molony.

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