A key to a locker is accidentally taken off a ship

The sorry tale of the Titanic’s maiden voyage has become the best-known shipwreck story of modern times and an abject lesson in the dangers of hubris. Heading for New York from Southampton, the 46,000-tonne cruise liner struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11.40P.M. on 14 April 1912. Although supposedly unsinkable, she slipped beneath the waves at 2.20A.M., just two hours and forty minutes later. Of the roughly 2,220 passengers and crew on board, only 705 survived.

Official inquiries in the UK and the US were held into what went wrong that night. An ocean of ink has been since expended pointing the finger of blame at the various actors in the tragedy. These included Thomas Andrews, a key member of the Titanic’s design team, who had failed to make the bulkheads (the walls between the ship’s compartments) high enough to prevent seawater from flooding the vessel. J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line, had cut costs by supplying only enough lifeboats for 1,178 people, and had exacerbated matters by not devising an evacuation plan, having assumed it would be not be necessary. Captain Edward Smith had ignored half a dozen reports of ice and had recklessly cruised through dangerous waters at night without reducing speed. Andrews went down with the ship. Smith either did likewise or was drowned soon afterwards. Ismay, controversially, took one of the places in the lifeboats and was saved.

However, if it were not for one small detail – a mistake over a key to a locker – none of the above might have occurred.

At the last minute, the White Star Line transferred Henry Tingle Wilde from the Olympic to the Titanic, her sister ship, on the grounds that his experience as an officer would come in useful on a maiden voyage on which there might be teething troubles. Wilde took the post of chief officer, which meant that the Titanic’s principal officers were all reduced in rank. The former chief officer became the first officer; the first officer became the second officer; and the second officer, David Blair, rather than becoming third officer, was removed from the ship’s roster altogether.

Blair left the ship on being told he was surplus to requirements. Unfortunately, he forgot to leave the key for the crow’s-nest locker that contained a pair of binoculars. Although these were not intended specifically for those on lookout duty to use, had they had the key they would certainly have had access to them. On the voyage, lookout George Symons went to the officers’ mess to request a pair (there were five others on board for the use of various officers) but was told there were none spare.

Frederick Fleet, one of the lookouts on duty at the time of the collision, later found himself questioned at the inquiry organised by the US Congress. Asked whether he or fellow lookout Reginald Lee might have spotted the iceberg earlier had binoculars been available, he responded that he would have seen it ‘a bit sooner’. When asked how much sooner, he replied, ‘Well, enough to get out of the way.’

There were arguments put forward at the time (and since) that binoculars were neither a necessary nor even a desirable piece of equipment for those on lookout to possess. The reasoning is that there is a danger that those on duty might stop taking in the general view around them and instead concentrate on the much smaller area that can be seen at any one time through binoculars. They might also become fascinated by the inspection of something they have seen and thus delay their reporting of it (which was done by ringing a bell). However, another Titanic lookout, George Hogg, reported that he had used them while working on the Adriatic, another White Star Line ship, and Fleet testified that there had been binoculars supplied during all four years of his duty on board the same company’s Oceanic. Although binoculars were more often used to confirm a possible sighting of an object, a light or a ship once it had been picked up by the naked eye – and both Hogg and Symons testified that they would only use binoculars in this manner – Fleet claimed that he would have employed them ‘constantly… to pick out things on the horizon’ on the night the Titanic sank.

The scale of the disaster might still have been much reduced had it not been for another unfortunate occurrence. Between five and ten miles from the Titanic, a 6,000-tonne cargo vessel called the Californian had come to a halt. Unlike Captain Smith, the Californian’s skipper, Stanley Lord, had taken heed of the ice warnings and had stopped his ship’s engines to wait until the dawn brought a chance to see where he was going.

The wireless operator on duty on the Californian that night was the inexperienced Cyril Evans. To be fair to him, most wireless operators were inexperienced in 1912, since the technology was still a novelty and its performance frustratingly erratic. At some time just after 11P.M. on the fateful night he had sent an inappropriately jocular message to the Titanic: ‘Say old man we are surrounded by ice and stopped’. Evans had been sharply berated by John Phillips, the on-duty wireless operator of the Titanic, who was busy sending other signals and who replied telling him to ‘shut up’.

This rebuke may well have contributed to Evans’ decision to close down his set at 11.30P.M. A little later, he was visited in his wireless shack by Third Officer Charles Groves, who was always keen to find out what news Evans had received from the outside world. He had even started dabbling with the basics of wireless telegraphy himself and had reached a reasonable proficiency. That night, while Evans read a magazine, Groves slipped the headphones on to have a listen. Unfortunately, according to Walter Lord’s classic account of the sinking, A Night to Remember, ‘The Californian’s set had a magnetic detector that ran by clockwork. Groves didn’t wind it up, and so heard nothing.’ He removed the headphones and wandered off. It was just after 12.15A.M.

Had Groves known enough about the Californian’s wireless set to wind it up, he might well have heard the first distress calls broadcast by the Titanic at around 12.15A.M. That being the case, he might well have been able to persuade his captain to go to the Titanic’s aid. Since the Californian was so close, it’s very likely that all the passengers and crew could have been transferred from the sinking ship and no loss of life would have occurred. As it was, although there was plenty of other evidence that a ship near the Californian was in trouble, Lord was able to interpret it in ways that excused him from navigating his way cautiously through the icebergs to help. After the Californian, the closest ship to the scene was the Carpathia. She was 58 miles away when her captain, Arthur Rostron, learnt of the Titanic’s plight from one of his wireless operators. Despite bravely putting on full steam through the ice-strewn waters, Rostron arrived one hour forty minutes after the sinking had taken place and was therefore only able to save those in the lifeboats.

The sinking of the Titanic is a tragedy to which many myths have attached themselves, limpet-like. The band went down playing Nearer my God to Thee (they didn’t, though they might have played a hymn called Autumn until quite near the end); a man managed to save himself by dressing up as a woman (there is no evidence for this); the ship was carrying a cargo of gold and gems (it wasn’t, though there were one or two valuable items lost, such as an oil painting by the French artist Merry-Joseph Blondel).

We are on much more solid ground when we consider the repercussions of the disaster. Indeed, the only redeeming feature of the sinking of the Titanic is that the death toll was so great that it simply could not be ignored. The most immediate and obvious consequence was that thenceforth ship captains took warnings of ice much more seriously and either slowed down when in a danger area or avoided it altogether. The International Ice Patrol was established – a cooperative venture by the US and UK authorities – and the ‘winter lane’ for shipping in the North Atlantic was moved further south.

The nonsensical formula laid down by the Board of Trade that stipulated the lifeboat provision on ships was scrapped. According to Walter Lord, the regulations stated that, ‘All British vessels over 10,000 tonnes must carry 16 lifeboats with a capacity of 5,500 cubic feet, plus enough rafts and floats for 75 per cent of the capacity of the lifeboats.’ When applied to the Titanic, it meant that she was required to carry lifeboats for just 962 people even though, at full capacity, she would have had over 3,300 passengers and crew on board. A new simple rule was established: there must always be enough room in the lifeboats for everyone. Furthermore, passengers travelling in first class would no longer receive preferential access to the lifeboats. Such a convention had resulted in 58 first-class male passengers being saved from the Titanic while 53 steerage-class minors had perished – so much for ‘women and children first’.

Ship designers took note of the foolhardy behaviour of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipyard charged by the White Star Line to draw up the plans for the Titanic. Aside from their designers’ failure to build the bulkheads high enough, they had assumed that only one would ever be breached in an accident, with the result that no more than two compartments would be flooded. The iceberg that did for the Titanic had smashed into her starboard side, creating huge openings in the hull below the waterline and allowing the sea to enter no fewer than five of the ship’s compartments.

Two years after the accident, and as a direct result of it, the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) was set in place. Over a century later, the protocol remains in force. Among other safety measures, these regulations obliged all ships to maintain a 24-hour radio watch. There would be no more calamities caused by a wireless set being shut down at night. The loss of the Titanic also brought home to stock-market investors the potential value of wireless telegraphy to the safety of shipping. In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, shares in Marconi went stratospheric. It would seem that there is seldom a wind so ill that it blows nobody any good…