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- [00:02]
Narrator
Craftsman days are here at Lowe's with big savings on the tools you need. Save $100 on the Craftsman V26 Tool Power Tool Combo Kit now at $199. No matter what the project is, Craftsman's high quality, high performance products empower you to build on. Stop by your nearest Lowe's store and check out the full line of Craftsman tools today, valid through 618. Wall supplies last selection varies by location. Its Evening on Friday, April 19, 1912 in New York, the first day of Senator Smith's Titanic inquiry is coming to an end. Meanwhile, 1300 miles away, CS Mackay Bennett is approaching the spot where Titanic sank. In the Mackay Bennett's hold are 100 tons of ice and as much embalming fluid as the crew could get their hands on before they departed from Halifax. The former cable laying vessel has been chartered by the White Star Line. The crew are on double their normal pay because their mission is a grim one. To recover as many of Titanic's dead from the water as possible and bring them back to Canada for burial. It's dark when the so called funeral ship arrives at the scene. Too dark to get started. Captain Frederick Lardner decides their work can wait until morning. He and his crew turn in for the night, surrounded by hundreds of bodies. It's not until sunrise that they get a good look at them. Men, women, children, floating all around the ship. We saw them scattered on the surface, Ladner will later recall. Like a flock of seagulls, they've been dead for the best part of a week. But thanks to the icy conditions, at least some of them are still in a fit state for burial. Others were so mangled during Titanic's violent death throes that they can only be committed to the deep. On Saturday morning, Captain Lardner gives the order to launch the Mackay Bennett's boats and the bleak task begins. One by one, the bodies are hauled in. Heavy in their waterlogged clothes, identification won't be easy. Six days of salt water exposure has aged their skin. Men and women in their early twenties now look twice as old. At least. Back on the Mackay Bennett, the processing starts. Each body is tagged with a numbered label. Height, weight and eye color are carefully noted down. Pockets searched for any identifying materials. By 5pm, 51 of the dead have been brought on board. Almost half of them, 24 corpses, have been disfigured beyond recognition. They are wrapped in canvas shrouds weighted with iron bars and dropped over the side of the ship to sink 4,000 metres to the bottom of the ocean. As Each one flops into the water. A priest repeats the same. Forasmuch as it hath pleased the Lord. We therefore commit this body to the deep. Those in a good enough state to be buried are carefully sorted by the class of ticket they were carrying. On Titanic, first class passengers are placed in coffins, second and third sewn up in canvas bags. Crew members covered by tarpaulin. Because in 1912, all men aren't created equal, even in death. From the Noiser podcast network, this is Titanic Ship of Dreams, Part 12. With the help of a handful of smaller vessels, the Mackay Bennett recovers more than 300 bodies from the water. About two thirds of them are well enough preserved to be embalmed and brought back to Halifax. Dr. Josian Abyssab.
- [05:10]
Dr. Josian Abisab
The second boat that was sent out, called the Minia, left Halifax on April 22 and arrived at the Titanic site on April 25. After eight days of searching, the Minya only found 17 bodies. And one of the recovered victims was number 312, Jair Yos Youssef Abisab, my great grandfather.
- [05:36]
Narrator
A century later, Dr. Abisab will pay her respects to Jairios as part of a massive commemorative festival in Halifax.
- [05:46]
Dr. Josian Abisab
There were people marching and bands and people wearing clothes from the turn of the century. There were different conferences, different Titanic related events. I also had a chance to go visit the Mount Olivet cemetery where my great grandfather's buried. I have chills just speaking about it right now. I flew from New York. It's a two and a half hour flight. And as soon as I got there, I took a taxi and asked him to stop by a florist. I got a big bouquet of flowers and I tried to get flowers that you would find in my great grandfather's native village in Lebanon. And I arrived at the Mount Olivet Catholic cemetery. And I was walking towards the different graves for Titanic victims. And I was very emotional, you know, holding the flowers. And as soon as I got to the row of Titanic victims, I saw that there was a group of tourists actually with a guide. He was showing them the Titanic tombstones. And I arrive with my flowers, I see my grandfather's tombstone, and I kneel, and I started weeping, you know, crying was very emotional. And I could see that the tourists were kind of puzzled, like, who is this person? Is this part of the tour? Is it like a very realistic reenactment of a Titanic descendant? And after I paid my respect, a few of them asked me who I was, and I explained to them and they were fascinated to meet the descendant so it was a very special moment.
- [07:19]
Narrator
Not every Titanic descendant has a gravestone to visit. Around 1200 of the ships dead remain unaccounted for. Susie Miller.
- [07:30]
Susie Miller
Most of them are at the bottom of the ocean. There's a couple of hundred bodies which are buried at Halifax, Nova Scotia across and a lot of them are unknown as well. You know, they had nothing on them which would identify them. For our family, we don't know about Tommy. I would assume that he's at the bottom of the ocean. I've looked at those unidentified ones in Halifax to see if there's anything amongst their possessions which might mean something to us, but not to anybody else. But nothing is jumping out. So I'm pretty sure that he's down there.
- [07:58]
Narrator
For Susie too, the Titanic centenary was an opportunity to honor her great grandfather.
- [08:05]
Susie Miller
For me, the big thing was to be involved in the Titanic memorial cruise which was recreating Titanic's journey day by day on a similar sized ship with obviously the happier outcome of being able to make it to New York City. It was an amazing experience. It really was something unforgettable. To be above the wreck exactly 100 years later and to pay tribute to those who had been lost was extremely moving. And you know, for me the big thing was to complete the journey, to actually sail into New York harbor and get off on the island of Manhattan and just mentally say, there you go Tommy. There's that journey finished for you 100 years later.
- [08:55]
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- [09:30]
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- [10:00]
Narrator
On the morning of April 30, 1912, the Mackay Bennett docks in Halifax, ready to unload its precious cargo. Church bells toll. Every flag in the city is flying at half mast. A naval honor guard stands to attention at the dock. But even before the ship arrives, another delivery is already being made. The editor of the Halifax Chronicle, Jim Hickey, has come to an arrangement with the priest on board the Mackay Bennett, Reverend Hind. As the funeral ship approaches the harbor, the journalist waits in a tugboat. From the deck of the ship, Hind chucks down a glass bottle. Inside are the names of the dead who've already been identified, thanks to their clothing and personal effects. The Chronicle goes to press immediately, before the information has even reached the coroner. Meanwhile, the bodies are taken to a temporary mortuary at the local curling rink. It's been divided up by canvas screens to give relatives a bit of privacy as they come to formally identify their loved ones. A nurse stands by with a bottle of smelling salts. Professor Stephanie Bachevsky.
- [11:28]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
The bodies that were collected were either in some cases returned to the families or in the cases of families who did not want them returned or could not afford to have them return, which would have been mostly the case. They were buried in the cemetery in Halifax.
- [11:42]
Susie Miller
If you were rich and famous, like John Jacob Astor, for example, you had the money to be able to repatriate a body. But for the ordinary folk, there was no way they could make that happen. So they are buried in Halifax.
- [12:00]
Narrator
Among those buried in Halifax's Fairview Cemetery is Swedish emigrant Alma Paulsen, 29 years old. Alma was traveling to Chicago with her four children. Her husband, Niels, has been in the states for almost two years, working as a tram conductor. By April 1912, he'd finally saved enough money to bring the rest of the family over to join him. But neither Alma nor the children survived the sinking of the Titanic. Klaus, you're in Vetterholm.
- [12:37]
Klaus Vetterholm
It took her too long time to dress the children. When she came up on deck, all boats were gone. They found her body. The children were gone. In a pocket, they found a mouth organ. She brought a mouth organ to play for the children, to keep them happy while trying to get up on deck. I remember when I came across this piece of information. I could not go on doing any research then because it was too powerful. It's too much because the whole scene becomes too vivid. Her husband lost the whole family Everything was gone. How can you continue to live?
- [13:26]
Narrator
Five days after the arrival of the Mackay Bennett, the Titanic funerals begin spread across three Halifax cemeteries.
- [13:36]
Dr. Josian Abisab
The biggest cemetery is a non denominational cemetery called Fairview, where the majority of the victims were buried. And then there was a Mount Olivet Catholic cemetery where my great grandfather is buried. And then there's also a Jewish cemetery where about, I think, less than 10 people were buried. The coroner in Halifax did an amazing job at really documenting, you know, everything about each victim. What they look like, their height, their age, what they found in their pockets. And then they sent, you know, different telegrams to the families once they were identified. And that's how I heard that my family received a telegram a month after the tragedy announcing that they had found the body of my great grandfather. My father told me that when my great grandmother found out, she was actually seated on a prayer kneeler, you know, those kneelers that you pray on, those wooden kneelers. And she apparently fell over and broke her finger, which remained deformed for the rest of her life.
- [14:45]
Narrator
All over the world, relatives are receiving the worst possible news about their loved ones. Susie Miller's grandfather is only five years old when he learns that his dad won't be coming home.
- [14:58]
Susie Miller
He used to spend a lot of time down on the beach at Bonny before the little village where he was sent to live. And he used to sail his own little paper boats. You know, he'd make a boat out of a piece of paper and sail it down the stream and launch it into Belfast Loch in the same way that his father had been doing up in Belfast. And that's what he was doing one day when his cousin Ella came to find him because she had heard the news and she'd been wondering how she was going to tell him. So she started to tell him what had happened to Titanic. And just as she got to the important bit, his little paper boat hit a rock in the stream and it sank. And that gave her the ability to be able to tell him, you know, she said, look. Oh, your wee boat has sunk. Do you remember the big ship that your dad sailed away on? Well, the same thing happened to it. It hit an iceberg and a lot of people drowned. And your dad was drowned too. So even at that, he didn't really understand. He asked if his dad was coming home, and Ella, his cousin, said, no, no, he'll never be home again. And it was over. I suppose the few days after that that he started to take it in and realize what had happened.
- [16:08]
Narrator
Two and a Half thousand miles away in Halifax, the funerals continue, including that of an unidentified boy from third class. His entry in the Mackay Bennett ledger is sparse. Number four male, estimated two. Hair, fair clothing, gray coat with fur on collar and cuffs, brown serge frock, brown petticoat flannel garment, pink woolen singlet, brown shoes and stockings. No marks whatever. The men who pulled this tiny body out of the water won't soon forget it. One of them, 24 year old Clifford Crease, later tells his father it was the worst moment of his life. The boy's funeral is paid for by a group of Mackay Bennett crewmen. The small granite tombstone they buy him reads, erected to the memory of an unknown child whose remains were discovered after the disaster to the Titanic. Inside the small white coffin, the men place a copper pendant engraved with the words our Babe. Hundreds of local people attend the funeral. The church overflows with brightly colored flowers. But despite the outpouring of public grief, the boy's identity remains a mystery. A number of fair haired toddlers are known to have died when Titanic went down. There's the Swedish Joster Paulsson, the Irish Eugene Rice, the Finnish Aino Pannulla. It won't be until 2007, 95 years after his death, that DNA testing identifies the child as Sidney Goodwin, a 19 month old English boy whose mother, father and five siblings also perished in the disaster. But Sidney isn't the only infant whose identity will come into question. Another mystery surrounds the very first body recovered from the water by the Mackay Bennett. Originally identified as a nine year old American boy, Walter Van Billiard, but later believed to be a 13 year old from Sweden, Philip Asplund.
- [18:35]
Klaus Vetterholm
According to the bodily list, this boy had handkerchiefs with the letter A sewn in and he had Danish coins in his pockets and so on. We can't say more than we believe that this Svan Billiard is actually Asplund boy who was 13 years old. But there was a family in Philadelphia, Van Billiard, who wanted him and decided that this is not anything but our son, so they took him. No one questioned this back in 1912 in Halifax. Their bodies were taken in and the mother, Selma Asplum, was never given the opportunity to identify him. If they asked her, of course she could have traveled up to Halifax and say yes, it's my son. But this was never done. This just the story of how tragic it was back in 1912 when the family so desperately wanted have somebody to bury and then they took him.
- [19:35]
Narrator
Meanwhile, there's an even stranger identity parade playing out in the mid Atlantic, the search for the iceberg that sank the Titanic. TIM Martin People said they saw it.
- [19:48]
Shopify Advertiser
Because it had a red mark on the side of it and that's possible because Titanic had a red plimsoll line. So it is possible that patent from that could have been on the berg. It's equally possible. There was a lot of sealing and wailing going on at that time and that could have been a bug that had a lot of blood on it from an expedition to get oil from whales or to go sealing to get.
- [20:10]
Narrator
Skins from the seals.
- [20:11]
Shopify Advertiser
So we don't know exactly but a number of people did think they saw the iceberg that Titanic had crashed into. One of them had a bit a chunk sort of cut off it and some scraping and so it was believed that that was in fact the actual berg that the Titanic hit. We'll never know for sure and it would have melted away within a week or two.
- [20:34]
Narrator
One thing that's not in doubt is the identity of Titanic's collapsible A. It's discovered a full month after the disaster. 200 miles from the wreck site, the little boat is spotted by passengers on Titanic's sister ship Olympic. Inside it are the remains of three men. One first class passenger wearing full evening dress and two crew members. Their hair has been bleached white by exposure to the sun and the salt air. The three corpses are stitched into canvas sacks, weighed down with steel bars and buried at sea. The last of Titanic's dead whose bodies will ever be found. For the survivors, meanwhile, life goes on. 7 year old Eva Hart and her mother Esther don't stay in New York for long. They take the first available ship home to England, RMS Celtic, a modest white star steamer. This time it's little Eva who spends the whole voyage gripped with terror.
- [21:46]
Eva Hart
We came back. My mother's greatest thought was to get back to England and I was the one that was in trouble coming back. I was terrified. She wasn't at all nervous coming back. She had a back covered and she went to bed and she behaved well it sadly but quite normally. She had no more fear. I was the one that was in trouble coming back. I wouldn't, oh, she has a job to get me onto the deck to get some air. I was terrified.
- [22:14]
Narrator
Eva's phobia of sea travel will stay with her for decades. She and her mother will never speak about what they went through on Titanic.
- [22:22]
Eva Hart
She would have talked to me but I wouldn't talk to her. I was the one who had it all bottled up inside and it was after she died. I'd had lots and lots of nasty nightmares and things. It was after she died that I realized that I got to go to sea. I'd got to do it. So I did. I went to sea, and I never had nightmares after. It was the right thing to do, obviously.
- [22:49]
Narrator
In her later years, Eva will go on to become a big traveler, visiting Singapore, Australia, Canada and the United States, as well as countries all over Europe. Everywhere she goes, audiences flock to hear her memories of Titanic.
- [23:06]
Eva Hart
I couldn't talk about it.
- [23:08]
Narrator
Not for a long time.
- [23:09]
Eva Hart
I have no choice now. I have to talk about it, everybody.
- [23:22]
Narrator
On the morning of April 28, 1912, three days after Eva and her mother arrive home on the Celtic, the majority of Titanic's surviving crew members are back in Britain as well, among them my great uncle Jimmy McGann. He's been traveling on the SS Lapland, along with 166 of his former colleagues. But of the 250 black gangers from Titanic's engine room, only 44 firemen and 19 trimmers have survived. That's just one in four. Jimmy arrives back in England to find his story has made it home before him, thanks to an interview he gave to a journalist on the pier in New York, which has already been syndicated on both sides of the Atlantic, appearing in papers as diverse as the New York Tribune, the Elmira Star Gazette, the Shepton Mallet Journal and the Yorkshire Post. Jimmy, it seems, may have been the last person to see Captain Smith alive. I was on the bridge deck, he remembers helping to get off a collapsible boat. The last one was launched when the water began to break over the bridge on which Captain Smith stood. I was standing beside him. He gave one look all around, his face firm and his lips hard set. He looked as if he might be trying to keep back the tears as he thought of the doomed ship. I felt mightily like crying myself when I looked at him, my brother Stephen.
- [25:01]
Jimmy McGann
He describes in his account how it made him feel. These are emotions, you know, he's saying how he's thinking and feeling.
- [25:13]
Narrator
Jimmy describes how he and the captain tried to save the lives of a pair of children. He took one of the two little children who were on the bridge beside him. They were both crying. He held the child, I think it was a little girl, under his right arm and jumped into the sea. I jumped right after the captain, but I grabbed the remaining child before I did so. But when Jimmy hits the icy water, the impact on his body is overpowering. The cold was so Great. I had to let go of the little kitty, he recalls bleakly. The same thing apparently happened to Captain Smith. I don't think he wanted to live after seeing how things were, says Jimmy. Dead bodies were all around floating in the water when he jumped. And I think it broke his heart. I wasn't keen on living myself to.
- [26:17]
Jimmy McGann
Hear an ancestor living such a hard bitten life saying I didn't want to live much myself, actually describing compassion, describing in the worst 11th hour, describing, you know, vestiges of real thought and altruism and courage. It was so moving, so desperately moving because it's a journalistic interview, not just in a cold public record.
- [26:43]
Narrator
In Plymouth, Titanic's former crew members are sequestered while the Board of Trade takes their depositions.
- [26:52]
Jimmy McGann
They got back, but they didn't dock the ship straight away because the White Star Line and the Board of Trade wouldn't let them land because they wanted to control as would happen with a modern disaster. All their lawyers were there, so they wanted to get their story straight. They kept them prisoners, too strong a word, but they kept them locked on the ship. They wouldn't let them out until the White Star Line people had had a chance to say, look, there's your account. You won't get paid if you don't tell them this and that. They were locked in the dock for hours. They weren't allowed to be released and they all had to stay there and give all their accounts. Then eventually they were put on a train to took them back from Plymouth to Southampton. And that's where his Titanic story ends.
- [27:42]
Narrator
At 10:15pm on Sunday, April 28, Jimmy and his former colleagues arrive at Southampton west station. More than 3,000 people have gathered there to greet them. Many of the women are wearing black mourning clothes, hoping that the news of their husband's deaths might turn out to be wrong. For one of them, at least, there's reason to hope. Agnes Barrett has received two official telegrams. The first saying her husband Fred had survived and the second that he died when the ship went down. She's left two babies at home, a boy and a girl born just six weeks earlier. The twins don't even have names yet. Agnes has been waiting for Fred to return from sea, but she'll have to make the decision on her own. Now at the station, she learns the reason for the muddled messages. There were two Fred Barretts working in the boiler rooms on Titanic. Only one of them survived and it wasn't her husband. Agnes collapses with grief and has to be carried away. Elsewhere. There are Scenes of joy as families are reunited. One journalist writes, Strong, broad shouldered men wept like little children as they embraced their womenfolk, clasping hands tightly and leaning to each other's shoulders. But amidst the excitement, it's clear the Titanic survivors have been through a lot. The Morning leader reports on a young sailor who looked as gaunt and sallow as if raised from the dead. The young man apparently hasn't slept properly since the disaster. Whenever he closes his eyes, he sees the Titanic sinking.
- [29:43]
Dr. Josian Abisab
There was a lot of emotional trauma, but at the time they didn't call it that way, emotional trauma. They didn't have the name for ptsd, Post Traumatic stress disorder that we commonly use nowadays. And many of the survivors didn't like speaking about the incident, completely brush it away, didn't like to discuss it or share it with their family members.
- [30:07]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
Our modern sense of something that, you know, we would now call PTSD, which in a World War I context would have been called shell shock. It really arises beginning with the First World War, right? That's the first time that the idea that human beings can be so traumatized by something that it has these psychological effects. And this isn't weakness, right? It's not character flaw, that this is just the inevitable consequence of being exposed to that kind of trauma. But you know, that's not even in operation yet at the time that Titanic sink. So, you know, I, I have great sympathy for these survivors who probably did have ptsd. I mean, how could they not have, right?
- [30:38]
Dr. Josian Abisab
You know, it was very hard for them. I know that Shanine, when she took Titanic, her hair was dark and a year later her hair had turned completely gray.
- [30:49]
Shopify Advertiser
There's a story that Lightol has a cold bath on a hot day in his house years after the Titanic and his wife wonders where on earth he is and goes up and he just has a look of horror on his face and he's just catatonic in the bath because the PTSD of that night just kicked in, you know, years later because of the cold water, just that association.
- [31:17]
Narrator
Lightoller isn't the only one whose memories of the sinking will come back to haunt him. Frankie Goldsmith from Kent is only nine years old when he and his mother survived the Titanic, losing Frankie's father in the process. Mrs. Goldsmith decides they'll settle in Detroit rather than returning to England. Frankie grows up a stone's throw from Naven Field, home to the Detroit Tigers. But despite spending the rest of his life in America, he never attends a baseball game, even from a distance. The roar of the crowd in the stadium sounds too much like the screams of Titanic's passengers dying in the water. As for Uncle Jimmy, we don't know how he deals with his trauma. Most likely he does his best to forget what he experienced.
- [32:12]
Jimmy McGann
And I'm not saying this is some sort of stiff upper lip pride, just simply as an almost psychological medical fact is that what they do, repress their trauma, you want simply got on with it.
- [32:27]
Narrator
Like many of Titanic's crew members, Jimmy has no choice but to get back in the saddle. Before long, he's back at sea, plying the slightly warmer waters of the Pacific.
- [32:40]
Jimmy McGann
That was their livelihood. What are you going to do, go and play golf? You got to go back with no money. You got to go back and sea.
- [32:46]
Shopify Advertiser
One of the strange things about the crew of the Titanic is that their pay stopped at the moment that the ship disappeared beneath the waves. This is extraordinary for us to think about now, but of course, 1912 was the beginning of trade unions. It was the beginning of workers rights. And really workers didn't have anything like the rights that we would expect them to have today. And so what you find is stoker's actually quite quickly trying to get the first passage they can out on another ship because it's a very hand to.
- [33:16]
Narrator
Mouth existence looked at charitably. This may be what Bruce Ismay was worrying about on Carpathia when he tried to get the Titanic crew sent home from New York early on May 11, two weeks after the Lapland docks in Plymouth, Ismay's ship, the Adriatic arrives in Liverpool. Senator Smith has finally allowed him to return home. But Ismay still has to testify at the British inquiry to two more sessions of gruelling cross examination. And this for a man whose mental health remains precarious. By now, accounts of Ismay's behavior on Carpathia have made it into the British press, including reports that he stayed in his cabin for the entire four day journey, that he refused to eat solid food and survived on nothing more than water.
- [34:10]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
I think the best example we have of how it affected somebody would probably be Bruce Ismay, right, who almost becomes a recluse afterwards. Now part of that is because the public criticism of him is so strong, right, that he shouldn't have gotten in a lifeboat, that he behaved in this kind of cowardly, unmanly way. But I think part of it as well is just, you know, the experience that he had on board that ship. And so he's the most visible exemplar we have of the kind of, you know, massive psychological impact that this must have had on people afterwards.
- [34:42]
Narrator
Interestingly, Ismay's behavior on Carpathia seems to echo how some of his colleagues reacted when Titanic was sinking. In particular, designer Thomas Andrews, last seen staring vacantly at a painting in the smoking room. And perhaps even Captain Smith himself, we.
- [35:02]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
Can look at that now and we can say, absolutely right, that all three of those guys were in some state of mental breakdown, but they're all interpreted very differently. So Ismay comes in for massive criticism. He's the only one who survives, right? Captain Smith, we don't know what he's doing. But mostly what Captain Smith gets in kind of popular consciousness is he's invented myths, right? That he did, in fact, behave heroically, that he was swimming around in the water, handing off babies and saying cheery British things. And I think that's because people at the time, they can't even grapple with, like, that much of a failure of leadership, right? So they have to almost invent him as a heroic leader because they need him to be that. Thomas Andrews is also kind of there in a kind of catatonic state of, you know, and we can understand why he is right, that he's been responsible for building this ship. And now, you know, perhaps he's thinking, if I'd made different engineering decisions about this ship, then this wouldn't be happening. So I think we can understand what's happening with him. You know, his conduct at the time, I think, is also basically seen as heroic. He's doing what he's supposed to do. He's just saying, no, I'll go down with a ship. So they're all reacting the same way, but we interpret them in very different ways.
- [36:13]
Narrator
Perhaps it's just that no one wants to speak ill of the dead. Unlike Bruce Ismay, Captain Smith and Thomas Andrews are both very much unavailable for public questioning. And posthumous judgment also looks kindly on Titanic's richest passenger, John Jacob Astor. Not so long ago, Astor was a figure of scandal thanks to his decision to leave his wife of almost two decades for a teenager. Now, in death, he's undergoing a major rebrand.
- [36:46]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
John Jacob Astor probably only narrowly escapes being Bruce Ismay because he's not a popular character either. Now, in fact, he ends up dying on the Titanic. And so his reputation gets sort of resuscitated by that. And it's just a random thing. It's not a decision. They don't make different decisions, really. You know, Astor asks if he can get in the boat, and he's told no, but he presumably would have gotten in the boat if he'd been told, yes. And so his reputation might have been the same as Ismay's, because if anything, Aster is a much less popular character than Ismay is.
- [37:18]
Narrator
For Bruce Ismay, the shadow of Titanic looms large. Within a year, he's quit White Star for good, retreating to a quieter life in rural Ireland.
- [37:31]
J. Clifford Ismay
Clifford Ismay Bruce's retirement actually been arranged about four or five months before Titanic sale. But he had a change of heart. He still wished to retire from the presidency of the imm, but he wished to retain chairmanship of the White Star Line. Unfortunately, his fellow directors had a meeting. The outcome was that they all decided that Bruce shouldn't retain chairmanship of the White Star Line. Now that of course was a deep hurt because at that moment he'd lost control of the very company that his father had built from scratch. Bruce found a lovely cottage on the west coast of Ireland and he managed to pursue some of his lifetime loves like fishing, golf and other things that he used to like doing. It was said that it lived the life of a recluse. After that it actually didn't. He was also a director of the London to Northern Railway Company, so he retained that directorship and put all his efforts into that. He also had directorships of some of the canal companies and insurance companies. So he was very much active in business after his retirement from the International Mercantile Marine. But in terms of international shipping, that was all gone. Now. He never spoke about Titanic, not even with family. It was totally taboo subject and indeed his wife Florence said to any member of the family that ever tried to speak about Titanic that it was a subject that shouldn't be discussed at the dining table.
- [39:13]
Narrator
Before leaving White Star, Bruce Ismay does make a few changes. In October 1912, Titanic's sister ship Olympic is recalled from service.
- [39:23]
J. Clifford Ismay
Bruce issued instructions for Olympic to be brought into dry dock for a major refit, which included the watertight compartments being raised to a slightly higher level and included extra ports on the davit so that more lifeboats could be fitted. And that was the time when really laws were changed about the number of lifeboats that should be on the ship of that size.
- [39:51]
Narrator
Professor Jerome Chertkoff they changed the rules.
- [39:55]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
So you have to have lifeboats for everyone. Also countries, not just Great Britain, but other countries that had transatlantic passenger ships.
- [40:04]
Narrator
Formed an association to monitor ice and inform ships what the ice situation was.
- [40:13]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
In the North Atlantic. And I think that still exists today.
- [40:18]
Shopify Advertiser
Titanic sinking brought in some very sensible rules like 24 hour radio watch. So for example, had there been 24 hour radio watch on the Californian, then she would have got to Titanic before Titanic had sunk.
- [40:31]
Susie Miller
In fact, the safety of life at sea rules that we know so well today all came about as a result of Titanic. It was looking at ways that this could never happen again.
- [40:43]
Narrator
International shipping may be safer as a result of Titanic, but for White Star, it's the beginning of the end. Even jettisoning Bruce Ismay isn't enough to save the company.
- [40:56]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
It doesn't immediately sort of go out of business or something. But White Star certainly never really is able to function as one of the great kind of shipping lines of the world again. It starts a sort of gradual decline. It will limp into the 1920s. It also emerges also with Cunard. Right, so it becomes Cunard White Star for a while. But yeah, I think the Titanic does set in motion or at least accelerate White Star's decline.
- [41:24]
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- [42:23]
Narrator
As the years pass, the Titanic's survivors are left to get on with their lives. But some of them have more time than others. Writer Archibald Gracie doesn't even make it to the first anniversary of the sinking. He dies on December 4, 1912, his health having never fully recovered from his night on Collapsible B. Gracie's book, the Truth About Titanic is published posthumously. Another Collapsible B survivor, Charles Lightoller, remains with the White Star line, though they never promote him to captain.
- [43:06]
Shopify Advertiser
He does complain in his biography that the White Star line never sort of Thanked him, never gave him another command, despite his heroics.
- [43:14]
Narrator
The association with Titanic may be enough to taint Lightoller's career.
- [43:20]
Shopify Advertiser
A lot of wealthy passengers would think we don't want to touch any officers that were involved with it, even though they were extremely promising. And another thing is, I actually think that the White Star blamed him for not saving more on his side of the ship. I think the amount of empty spaces on his side, I think they did blame him for that.
- [43:41]
Narrator
Before Titanic, Lightoller was not just a promising officer, but also a Royal Navy reservist. When the First World War begins two years later, he distinguishes himself as first Officer on White Star's oceanic, now converted into an armed merchant cruiser. Then on Cunard's Campania, which has been turned into an aircraft carrier. In 1915, he's rewarded with his own command, a torpedo boat. After successfully ambushing a zeppelin, he's awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. But three years later, when he sinks an enemy submarine, Lightoller is accused of committing a war crime, firing on unarmed German sailors who were attempting to surrender. His response is that he doesn't accept the hands up in the air business. For sinking the German sub. Lightoller is ultimately honoured again with a bar to his Distinguished Service Cross. After the war, he resigns from White Star, going on to work as an innkeeper, a chicken farmer and finally a property developer. But in his spare time, he remains a keen sailor. In 1929, he buys a motor yacht, Sundowner. When war comes again and British troops are pinned down on the continent, he joins the 850 strong fleet of little ships sent to evacuate them. And this time there were no empty seats in his boat. Lightoller saves 127 Tommies in a vessel licensed to carry just 21 passengers. His story inspires the 2017 movie Dunkirk. Lightoller dies in 1952 of chronic heart disease, exacerbated by the great smog of London. By this time, his former boss, Bruce Ismay, has been dead for 15 years already. Ismay, having fled Titanic in one of the last boats to depart, has spent the final third of his life failing to escape its shadow.
- [46:09]
J. Clifford Ismay
He tried very hard to clear his name, but it was just one of those sad things that it didn't matter what he was to do or say, it was only going to make the situation even worse.
- [46:24]
Narrator
My great uncle Jimmy McGann has a short but happy life after Titanic. In 1914, he marries a woman called Catherine.
- [46:33]
Jimmy McGann
He married, and I like that part of it. He had two Children. He had Joe first and then he had Kate, Queenie, his daughter. Tragically, four years later, he, Jimmy gets pneumonia and Jimmy dies in Liverpool, leaving Kate a widow. But at the end of it, when I think about Jimmy, he died on shore, at least died with his family around him. And so many people that night didn't. And so small mercies being what they are, he got to the end. He had a family. He had those things he would never have had otherwise.
- [47:15]
Narrator
As time goes by, the fascination with the doomed ship story only grows and grows. The sinking is replayed again and again in films such as A Night to Remember and the Unsinkable Molly Brown. Not to mention the 10 minute short filmed just days after Carpathia arrived in New York, starring Titanic survivor Dorothy Gibson. There's even a Nazi propaganda film made in 1943 in which a German officer tries to save the ship from mismanagement by its bumbling British crew. The popularity of Titanic shows no sign of abating. The survivors begin to be treated as celebrities.
- [48:02]
Eva Hart
I had a phone call the other day from someone in Rio de Janeiro. Will you send me your Oscar, please? That comes all the time. I don't think I'm a celebrity, really. If you look at it from other people's point of view, if it was something I was intensely interested in, I would greatly like to go and talk to someone about it. So I take that attitude in the reverse order, so to speak.
- [48:29]
Narrator
No, I don't mind a bit. As the decades pass and the immediacy of the tragedy fades, Titanic becomes not just a ship, but a symbol of old world class divisions, of the limitations of technology, of human arrogance in the face of God or nature. A headline in the satirical newspaper the Onion puts it World's biggest Metaphor hits Iceberg.
- [49:02]
Klaus Vetterholm
In ethnology, we speak about Gesungnes Kulturgut, which is German, means that something has sunken down so much into the knowledge, everybody's public knowledge, social knowledge, that you don't have to refer to it more than you say a name. For example, it's like Titanic and everybody knows. So Titanic has become this metaphor for so much. Here's this note I got many, many years ago in an exhibition in Storkholm. This young man who wrote that he had seen a condom automat in northern England and said something about the condoms, they were according to British standards, and somebody had scribbled beneath and so was the Titanic. I have hundreds and hundreds of examples like this.
- [49:53]
Shopify Advertiser
Titanic is this metaphor for the whole of mankind. She is the best ship the most experienced captain on the North Atlantic is captaining her. She's a handpicked crew. So there you have a microcosm, a model of society with the best that humanity can provide on this voyage. And then of course, what's it all felled by? What's it all destroyed by? Well, the awesome power of the universe. And that comes in the form of this millions of years old gigantic block of ice which makes the Titanic look like a gnat. I think Titanic talks to the smallness of man in the middle of a universe.
- [50:29]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
You know, we are reminded sometimes, right, that there are limits to our powers over nature. I think we were reminded during the pandemic of that. We'd sort of forgotten that these viruses can kind of sweep across the globe and that our powers to do something about them were very limited. You know, human beings have come a long way, right? But there are forces in this world that are a lot more powerful than we are. And I think that's sort of what happened to Titanic on that night in April 1912.
- [50:57]
Klaus Vetterholm
I don't know how many times somebody has said to me, oh, that can't happen. I just say Titanic and look away because it can happen, and it does happen.
- [51:12]
Narrator
And yet, in the years following Titanic sinking, there are those who refused to believe it was an accident. Instead, a variety of lurid conspiracy theories emerged to explain the ship's fate.
- [51:27]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
I think because the Titanic story is so unbelievable, right, you wouldn't believe it if it wasn't true. I mean, how could they build the biggest, most luxurious ship in the world and then smash it into an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sink it, right? I mean, you just can't even get your head around that in some ways that this could actually happen. And so I think that there are various ideas that it wasn't just a tragic accident, right? That it had to be deliberate.
- [51:54]
Narrator
In one version, Titanic was carrying a cursed mummy.
- [51:58]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
There was not a mummy on board, so that's not true.
- [52:03]
Narrator
In another, it was emblazoned with anti papal symbolism.
- [52:07]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
There's a rumor that the whole number of Titanic, if you held it up to a mirror and looked at it backwards, it spelled no pope.
- [52:15]
Narrator
Perhaps Titanic was actually Olympic in disguise, intentionally scuttled by White Star as part of the world's biggest insurance scam.
- [52:24]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
I mean, I don't think that happened.
- [52:26]
Narrator
In a million years. Some even claim that the sinking was ordered by Titanic's owner, J.P. morgan, as a way to murder his business rivals Astor and Guggenheim, and clear the way for the creation of the U.S. federal Reserve.
- [52:43]
Klaus Vetterholm
I love conspiracy theories. I think they are great.
- [52:47]
Narrator
It's surely only a matter of time before someone claims aliens sank the Titanic.
- [52:53]
Shopify Advertiser
With any great disaster, whether it's the shooting of a president or whether it's the Challenger space shuttle disaster or whatever it is, one gets these. These myths developing. What I find is the more I learn, and the more we all learn about the truth of what really happened, the incredible night the Titanic sank, the more we realize that the truth of that night is much stranger than fiction.
- [53:21]
Narrator
Just nine days after the ship sank, Thomas Hardy published a poem called the Convergence of the Twain. In it, he imagines the watery depths where the ship rests. Ornate mirrors now covered in grotesque sea slugs. Glittering jewelry losing its lustre at the bottom of the ocean. Curious fish gazing blankly at this monument to human vanity. But the bulk of Hardy's poem is concerned with a simple conceit that while Bruce Ismay, Thomas Andrews and the rest were busy building their perfect machine, nature was working on a construction project of her own, creating a sinister mate for the White Star vessel. And as the smart ship grew in stature, grace and hue in shadowy silent distance grew the iceberg too. Till the spinner of the years said now and each one hears and consummation comes and jars two hemispheres. Over the next 70 years, almost all the Titanic survivors will pass away. When the ship's former fourth officer, Joseph Boxall, dies in 1967, he leaves instructions for his ashes to be scattered at Titanic's last known position. 41 degrees, 46 minutes north, 50 degrees, 14 minutes west. The same coordinates that Boxall plotted 55 years earlier for Marconi operators Phillips and Bride to include in their distress call. But Boxall's figures will turn out to be wrong. In fact, the wreck of the White Star vessel lies 30 km away. As the world turns, RMS Titanic rests at the bottom of the ocean, waiting to be found. In the next episode, the series finale, a US Navy oceanographer finally locates the Titanic wreck site. As artifacts are brought up from the depth, a fierce legal battle ensues over who they belong to. And in the summer of 1996, filming begins on the biggest motion picture ever made. That's next time. In the final part of Ship of Dreams.
- [56:09]
Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
Sam.
- [56:36]
Narrator
Listen to the final episode of Titanic, Ship of Dreams. Right now, without waiting by subscribing to Noizr plus, just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed or go to noiser.com subscriptions Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.
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Professor Stephanie Bachevsky
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