Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (42 page)

What the world was now anticipating was the inquiry by the British Board of Trade, which, as so many British papers had repeatedly pointed out during the Senate investigation, was to be a “more satisfactory method” of arriving at the truth of what had caused the Titanic to sink. The inquiry would be conducted in a far more formal manner than the Senate investigation, and be constituted as a court of law under British jurisprudence.

The process began on April 29, when returning Titanic crewmen came down the gangway from the liner Lapland, which had brought them from New York to Plymouth, only to be put in a quarantine which was just short of imprisonment. They were not released until they were met by Board of Trade representatives waiting to take sworn statements from each of them. The Board of Trade then reviewed their statements, decided as to which crewmen would be called on to testify, and issued formal subpoenas to the ones chosen. The process took several days, during which the crewmen were allowed only limited contact with their families. Despite the bitterness this arrangement caused, not to mention its questionable legality, there were no confrontations between crew members and Board of Trade representatives.
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The Board of Trade Court of Inquiry, as constituted by its Royal Warrant, was scheduled to begin sitting in session on May 3, in the London Scottish Drill Hall, near Buckingham Gate, and would consist of a president and five assessors. The assessors were all chosen for their distinguished credentials: Captain A. W Clarke, an elder brother of Trinity House; Rear Admiral the Honorable Sommerset Gough-Calthorpe, RN (Ret.); Commander Fitzhugh Lyon, RNR; J. H. Biles, professor of Naval Architecture, University of Glasgow; and Mr. Edward Chaston, RNR, senior engineer assessor to the Admiralty. Presiding overall, indeed dominating the court as thoroughly as William Alden Smith had dominated the Senate investigation, would be the fearsome Lord Mersey, Commissioner of Wrecks and formerly president of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court. Though Mersey would have the “assistance” of the five assessors, his authority over the Court would be absolute: the areas of investigation, the witnesses called, the admissibility of evidence, and the final findings of the court would all be determined by him.

Lord Mersey—John Charles Bigham, Baron Mersey of Toxteth (Lancastershire)—had first come to prominence as a public figure in Great Britain in 1896 when he headed an inquiry into the notorious Jameson Raid. From the first he exhibited those characteristics which would come to be an inescapable part of any inquest Mersey conducted: he was autocratic, impatient, and not a little testy. Above all, he did not suffer fools gladly, and he was famous for the barbed rebukes he issued from the bench to witnesses or council that he considered were wasting the court’s time. (The transcript of the inquiry records show how at one point Alexander Carlisle related that he and Harold Sanderson of the White Star Line often merely rubber-stamped decisions made at a meeting by Lord Pirrie and Bruce Ismay with the words, “Mr. Sanderson and I were more or less dummies.” Mersey replied dryly, “That has a certain verisimilitude.”) Off the bench, Mersey was a soft-spoken, mild-mannered man of good taste; he was well educated and thoroughly urbane. Politically he was a Liberal, and his company and conversation were much sought after in London social circles. It was to his lasting credit that he did not allow his political views to influence his role as wreck commissioner.
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That this was not expected to be the case was a view widely held among professional seamen in Great Britain. The inquiry was being carried out by the Board of Trade, but the board was held by many to be in part responsible, if not for the accident itself, then certainly for the lack of sufficient lifeboats. The idea of the Board of Trade conducting an investigation of itself caused a number of people to suspect that a whitewash brush would be liberally wielded, the “more satisfactory manner” of a British investigation notwithstanding. Second Officer Lightoller homed in on the inconsistency with unerring accuracy: “The B.O.T. had passed that ship [the Titanic] as in all respects fit for sea, in every sense of the word, with sufficient margin of safety for everyone on board. Now the B.O.T. was holding an inquiry into the loss of that ship—hence the whitewash brush....” What was to surprise many observers, but not those who knew Lord Mersey well, was the surprising objectivity that the court was to display during the next five weeks. Despite the anticipation of many that the findings would be a whitewashing, when the investigation was over, the Board of Trade would not escape Mersey’s keen eye or sharp tongue.

Some people have suggested that the findings of the Senate investigation had some bearing on how Lord Mersey decided to conduct the Court of Inquiry, but that doesn’t seem likely. The court began hearing testimony two weeks before Senator Smith released his committee’s findings; furthermore, the emphasis of the two investigations were quite different, though complementary. The Senate subcommittee had emphasized asking how the disaster happened; the Mersey Commission asked why. Some twenty-one passengers were called to testify before the Senate investigation; Lord Mersey would call only three. The majority of witnesses appearing before the court would be officers and crewmen from the
Titanic
,
Carpathia,
and
Californian;
various experts in the field of ship construction; and representatives of Harland and Wolff and the White Star Line. In fact, of the three passengers who would testify, none of them would be as material witnesses.
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The court sat for a total of thirty-six days over the next eight weeks, called ninety-six witnesses, and asked more than 25,600 questions, the longest and most detailed Court of Inquiry ever held in Great Britain. The transcript was more than a thousand pages, supplemented by exhibits and depositions, and the Report of the Commissioner added another forty-five pages. The entire cost of the inquiry came to nearly £20,000.
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Undoubtedly one of the highlights of the inquiry was the intense interrogation on May 14 of Captain Lord and the officers of the
Californian.
The story that had broken in the American papers and been so doggedly pursued by Senator Smith had created an equally huge sensation in Great Britain. The attorney general, Sir Rufus Isaacs, was relentless in his questioning of Lord, pressing over and over again on points in his testimony that Isaacs found unsatisfactory. Lord tried to explain that he had only been told of a single rocket being fired, that he had not seen any of the rockets himself, that he was never informed by his officers that they thought the rocket—or rockets—might be a signal of a ship in distress, and that he had only the vaguest recollection of the night of April 14-15 as he had been asleep in the chartroom at the time. This satisfied neither Sir Rufus nor Lord Mersey, especially when Lord’s officers later contradicted him on nearly every important point in their testimony, most significantly about the number of times Lord had been told about the rockets and how many there were. Mersey drew attention to the same discrepancies in Captain Lord’s defense that Senator Smith had, notably the suspicious lack of any entries about rockets in the
Californian’s
log and the disappearance of the relevant pages of the scrap log.
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An additional factor in the drama came out not in the courtroom but outside it, when the
Californian’s
officers, reproached by the wife of one of the
Titanic’s
officers, openly admitted that they had seen distress signals that night, but had not been able to rouse Captain Lord to take any action. More importantly, it became readily apparent that they tried none too hard, for fear of their captain’s temper. The truth finally came out: Captain Lord was a virtual tyrant, sharp-tongued and quick with disparaging remarks, and his officers were utterly cowed by him, to the point that they were bereft of any initiative, leaving all decisions to the captain. The image created in the mind of the public ever since has been of the Californian’s officers standing idly on the bridge, so thoroughly intimidated by their captain that they would rather watch another ship sink than run the risk of facing his wrath.
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Another of the highlights of the inquiry, for the British public at least, came on May 20, when Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon were called to testify. Vicious rumors had started after the survivors had been rescued by the Carpathia that the £5 Sir Cosmo had promised the crewmen in Boat 1 to start a new kit for each of them had in fact been a bribe to keep them from rowing back to the wreck to pick up survivors. The situation was not helped by the ill-conceived idea to have the men from Boat 1 pose for a group picture, complete with lifebelts, for the Duff Gordons on the Boat Deck of the
Carpathia.
Lady Duff Gordon had only wanted the photograph as a memento, but to many of the survivors, still stunned and reeling from the disaster, it appeared as if the Duff Gordons were treating those crewmen like their personal rowing team.

In hopes of quashing the rumors, Sir Cosmo and his wife petitioned Lord Mersey to be allowed to give evidence before the court. Lord Mersey agreed, and everyone who had been in Boat 1 appeared at the Inquiry, where Lord Mersey, Sir Rufus Isaacs, and Henry Duke, K.C., M.P., the Duff Gordons’ defense counsel, and other attorneys present subjected them to an intense cross-examination. When Lady Duff Gordon and Sir Cosmo were questioned first by Thomas Scanlan, who represented the National Sailors’ and Firemens’ Union, then by W D. Harbinson, who was representing the Third Class passengers, an overt sense of class antagonism crept into their questions. At one point Harbinson’s manner grew so antagonistic toward Sir Cosmo that Lord Mersey interrupted the questioning to remind him, “Your duty is to assist me to arrive at the truth, not to try and make out a case for this class against that class.”

Harbinson relented, but the feeling was still there, and a short while later he asked Sir Cosmo, “Would I accurately state your position if I summed it up in this way, that you considered that when you were safe yourselves that all the others might perish?” It was an outrageous question under any circumstances, even actionable if it had been asked outside of a courtroom, and Mersey brought Harbinson up short again, asking “Do you think a question of that kind is fair to this witness? I do not! The witness’ position is bad enough!” Harbinson, cowed by Mersey’s outburst and sensing he was doing his clients no good by antagonizing the wreck commissioner, sat down, and Sir Cosmo was dismissed.
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The findings of the wreck commission were delivered by Lord Mersey on June 30. He concluded that the loss of the Titanic was due solely to the damage caused by the collision with the iceberg and not to any inherent design flaw in the ship, and that collision was the direct result of the ship steaming into an area known to be hazardous with ice at an excessively high speed. There was an insufficient lookout kept, given the danger of the sea conditions, and that an overall sense of complacency among the ship’s officers had contributed to this oversight.

The
Titanic’s
lifeboats, though fulfilling the Board of Trade requirements, were insufficient in number, and a change in the regulations was necessary. The boats themselves had been properly lowered but not properly filled, and had been insufficiently manned with trained seamen. As for the Duff Gordons, they were exonerated of any wrongdoing, although Lord Mersey made it clear that he believed that they could have acted more responsibly, or at least conducted themselves a little less tactlessly.

On the subject of Captain Lord and the Californian, Lord Mersey was merciless. The evidence, he said, made it abundantly clear to him that the ship the
Californian’s
officers saw from their bridge, and watched as she fired rocket after rocket, was the Titanic. Captain Lord’s excuse that he was sound asleep in the chartroom and couldn’t recall having been told about the rockets didn’t wash with Lord Mersey, and he believed that Captain Lord had acted most improperly in failing to ascertain what was the matter with that ship and go to the stricken liner’s aid. The language of his conclusion was unequivocable:

Mersey was not alone in his judgement of Captain Lord’s culpability: even among professional seamen there were serious questions raised about the master of the Californian. At one point, after the proceedings were closed but before Lord Mersey drew up his report, Capt. A. H. F. Young, the professional member of the marine department for the Board of Trade, went so far as to press Lord Mersey for a formal inquiry into Lord’s “competency to continue as Master of a British ship.” Apparently Mersey considered the request, but a legal technicality barred him from taking any action.
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Finally, the Board of Trade received a fair amount criticism, despite earlier misgivings in some quarters. In addition to condemning the outdated lifeboat regulations, the court found the board’s required “boat drill” procedures laughable: usually one or two boats filled with picked crewmen who would go through the motions of rigging and lowering a lifeboat while the ship was in port. Despite his reputation as the “best cursed B.O.T. representative in Southern England,” Captain Clarke received some sharp words for permitting such a lax drill to suffice. Nothing had been done to acquaint the passengers with their boat assignments or any of the lifesaving equipment on board. That too would have to change.
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There would be, over the years, observers and writers, mostly Americans, unfamiliar with the usage of British officialdom in the days before World War I, who would conclude that, because Lord Mersey did not explicitly condemn Captain Lord, the White Star Line, or the Board of Trade as resoundingly as Senator Smith did, the whitewash brush had been applied. To do so is to completely misunderstand the quiet, understated language with which Great Britain’s senior civil servants expressed themselves. Mersey’s report was every bit as damning as Senator Smith’s—it was simply less overt.