Pod Insights Real Survival Stories Introducing: Titanic: Ship of Dreams - Episode 1 About this episode This is a taster episode of a brand-new podcast from the Noiser podcast network. Join host Paul McGann as he explores life and death on the most famous ship in history.
You’ll be right there on board - setting sail from Southampton, chugging across the Atlantic, striking the iceberg and sinking into the icy depths. We’ll hear the harrowing tales of the victims and the testimonies of the lucky survivors. And Paul explores his own family story, following his great uncle Jimmy McGann - a trimmer down in Titanic’s engine room.
Search ‘Titanic: Ship of Dreams’ in your podcast app and hit follow to get new episodes each Tuesday. Or listen at noiser.com
Episode 2 is live now on Titanic: Ship of Dreams.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 John Hopkins? Hi listeners. Today, we wanted to bring you a preview of a brand-new show from the Noiser Podcast Network. It's called Titanic: Ship of Dreams. Join host Paul McGann as he explores life and death on the most famous ship in history. From the opulent dining rooms, Turkish baths, and squash courts of first class, to the raucous parties and Irish hoolies down in steerage. You'll be right there on board, setting sail from Southampton, chugging across the Atlantic, striking the iceberg, and descending into the icy depths. You'll hear the harrowing tales of the victims and the testimonies of the lucky survivors. If you enjoy this taster episode, search Titanic Ship of Dreams in your podcast app and hit follow. You'll find part two waiting for you now.
0:49 Speaker 01 It's May 31, 1911. We're in Belfast, the heart of Britain's shipbuilding industry.
0:59 Speaker 01 To be specific, the north yard of Harland and Wolf's vast 80-acre construction site.
1:05 Speaker 01 And for the tens of thousands of men who work here, it's a red-letter day.
1:12 Speaker 01 Up in the grandstands specially built for the occasion, a 74-year-old man takes his seat. He's an imposing figure, six foot two with broad shoulders, piercing eyes, and a fearsome walrus moustache. Not to mention a bulbous, purple nose, the kind generally attributed to excessive drinking. Not that anyone seated around this gentleman would dare suggest anything of the kind. Because he also happens to be one of the richest men in the world. John Pierpont Morgan, otherwise known as JP. He's come to Belfast specially to get a good look at his latest investment.
1:57 Speaker 01 It's the biggest seagoing vessel ever built. In fact, the biggest movable object in history. And today, it's about to move for the first time.
2:10 Speaker 01 A hundred thousand spectators are lining the banks of the River Lagan.
2:15 Speaker 01 All eyes are on slipway number three, where the magnificent new ship stands bolt upright, perfectly still. Her giant black hull glimmering in the midday sun.
2:28 Speaker 01 To the Harland and Wolf shipwrights, she's known as SS 401. To everyone else, Titanic.
2:41 Speaker 01 Even without her four majestic funnels, those will be winched into place later, the new liner is an overwhelming sight. She towers a hundred feet from top to bottom, and almost nine hundred feet long. Her rudder alone is the size of a cricket pitch. Those who weren't lucky enough to score an official invite have climbed onto the nearby rooftops to get a good view. Others have scaled the masts of the smaller ships bobbing in the lagan, minnows to this hulking leviathan. All of them waiting with bated breath to see the giant ship move.
3:21 Speaker 01 At 12:05 PM, a red flag is flown at Titanic's stern.
3:27 Speaker 01 The ten-minute countdown begins.
3:31 Speaker 01 In Titanic's shadow, a small army of men are hard at work. Ant-like, they scurry back and forth, getting everything ready. The slipway has been coated with 21 tonnes of grease.
3:47 Speaker 01 Now, burly shipwrights are getting ready to knock out the giant timber stays that hold the vessel in place.
3:55 Speaker 01 A rocket fires, signaling five minutes to go. Then another.
4:02 Speaker 01 Sixty seconds left now. This is a precision operation, the Edwardian equivalent of a NASA launch at Cape Canaveral. Finally, the moment of truth.
4:16 Speaker 01 There's no champagne bottle smashing. Titanic's operators White Star don't believe in such archaic superstitions. Only the sound of hydraulic triggers firing.
4:30 Speaker 01 Everyone holds their breath.
4:33 Speaker 01 For a moment, it looks like she won't move after all. Freed from her wooden moorings, the giant ship stands stock still. A towering, immobile monument.
4:46 Speaker 01 Then, almost imperceptibly, she begins sliding towards the water. Gradually picking up speed. Five, ten, fifteen miles per hour.
4:59 Speaker 01 Finally, after the longest 62 seconds in history, Titanic floats freely for the first time.
5:13 Speaker 01 But while all eyes are on the ship and the lagoon, there is a crisis playing out 500 metres away at the top of the slipway.
5:22 Speaker 01 Under the giant gantry that until a minute ago housed the Titanic, 43-year-old shipwright James Dobbin lies seriously injured. He's been crushed under a heavy wooden support. His pelvis is shattered.
5:37 Speaker 01 While James's wife Rachel watches the launch with their son Jimmy, enchanted by the sight of the great ship floating for the first time, his colleagues are hauling him out from under a heavy weight of timber. James is bundled into a Holland and Wolf car and taken straight to the nearest infirmary.
5:56 Speaker 01 While JP Morgan and his fellow VIPs enjoy a slap-up lunch before embarking on a pleasure cruise to Liverpool, the doctors at the Royal Victoria Hospital are doing all they can to save James Dobbin's life. Ultimately, their efforts will prove futile.
6:15 Speaker 01 Even before touching water, Titanic has claimed her first victim.
6:26 Speaker 01 From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Titanic Ship of Dreams. Part one.
6:54 Speaker 02 Titanic is this metaphor for the whole of mankind. I think the reason ultimately why we're talking about Titanic today is because it speaks to the human condition.
7:05 Speaker 03 There is only one more story that is more popular in the history of mankind, and that is the story of how Jesus was crucified.
7:15 Speaker 04 It became known as the Ship of Dreams, the largest and heaviest moving man-made machine built to date. And this complex and ancient relationship between man and technology has always been captivating.
7:31 Speaker 05 Here you have the biggest ship in the world, carrying the richest people in the world and also the poorest, and this supposedly unthinkable ship sinks on her maiden voyage.
7:43 Speaker 06 It's such an unbelievable story. There's so much material there to impose so many symbolic meanings on it.
7:53 Speaker 03 As always, the truth is a little bit more intricate.
8:02 Speaker 01 The story of RMS Titanic is defined by how it ended. At 11:40 PM on the 14th of April 1912, an impact that would reverberate for more than a century.
8:16 Speaker 01 A hundred years later, state-of-the-art submarines pay visits to Titanic's final resting place, almost 4,000 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
8:27 Speaker 01 This mass grave has become a magnet for ultra-wealthy tourists, those who can afford the quarter of a million-dollar ticket price, desperate to see where the Ship of Dreams ended its first and only voyage.
8:42 Speaker 01 Peering through the murky depths, they can just about make out the rusty barnacle-clad remains of the once grand and glittering vessel.
8:51 Speaker 01 The end of RMS Titanic is a story every schoolchild knows.
8:57 Speaker 01 But where exactly Titanic began? That's a little harder to pin down.
9:04 Speaker 01 In this series, we'll take you right through the Titanic story.
9:09 Speaker 01 From first designs, through the years of construction, to the fateful voyage that sealed the ship's fate, and beyond.
9:18 Speaker 01 We'll consider some of the questions that still haunt Titanic scholars more than 100 years later. Did White Star boss Bruce Ismay really order the captain to increase speed? Why were so many iceberg warnings ignored in the lead-up to the collision? And with almost 1,200 places available in the lifeboats, why were only 700 people saved?
9:43 Speaker 01 We'll look at Titanic's storied legacy in the years following the disaster. From the 1958 blockbuster A Night to Remember, and James Cameron's $200 million epic four decades later, to the Ocean Gate disaster of 2023.
10:03 Speaker 01 But we begin our story in 1907, five years before the fateful collision that ensured the ship's place in history. In fact, before the iceberg that sank the Titanic had even begun forming in Greenland.
10:22 Speaker 01 It's a balmy summer's evening in London. We're at Downshire House, a white-colonated building in Belgrave Square. In monopoly terms, this is very much purple territory. Smartly dressed waiters carry drinks on silver trays, passing them round to wealthy men and women in their best Edwardian formal wear. The scent of fine cuisine wafts up from the kitchens.
10:50 Speaker 01 Downshire House is the opulent London pad of Lord Piri, the 60-year-old white-bearded chairman of Harland and Wolff. And this evening, he's hosting a dinner party. Among Piri's guests is White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay. At 44, Ismay has been running the company for the best part of a decade, ever since the death of his father, Thomas. Five years earlier, he oversaw the sale of White Star to J P Morgan's International Mercantile Marine for an eye-watering thirty-two million dollars. He now holds the top job in both companies. But despite his business acumen, Bruce Ismay is an awkward, unclosable man.
11:35 Speaker 01 He's never quite emerged from his father's shadow.
11:39 Speaker 01 Tomahneering, bombastic, even brutish at times. Thomas Ismay was what you might picture as a titan of industry. Bruce very much the eldest boy who just happened to succeed him. Nonetheless, he has big plans for White Star, and they hinge on the company's longstanding relationship with Lord Pirrie's Harland and Wolf. Thanks to a deal struck forty years earlier, the two firms have an exclusive relationship. White Star entrust all their big construction projects to the Belfast firm, and in return, Harland and Wolf promise not to build ships for their competitors. It's an arrangement that has seen White Star's fortunes rise
12:23 Speaker 01 to become a major player in the transatlantic passenger trade.
12:29 Speaker 01 After dinner, Ismay and Pirrie sit up smoking together. And it's here, at least according to Titanic mythology, that they first come up with the idea for a new kind of liner. Not quite scribbled down the back of a napkin, but not far off it either.
12:47 Speaker 01 This new vessel will need to be bigger, better, more luxurious than anything passengers have seen before.
12:55 Speaker 01 The dream of Titanic is born.
12:59 Speaker 01 Well, sort of. In fact, according to most modern experts, plans for a trio of plus-size liners must have been underway well before Pirrie's party in London.
13:13 Speaker 01 The huge new gantries required to build them are already under construction.
13:18 Speaker 01 What exactly Piri and Ismay discussed that evening, like so many of the key moments in the Titanic story, is shrouded in mystery and myth. What we do know is that sometime around 1907, both White Star and Harland and Wolf begin laying the groundwork for Titanic, along with her two sister ships, Olympic and Gigantic. And both Ismay and Piri are heavily invested in ensuring that they get the new ships right. White Star's market standing depends on it. Professor Stephanie Barchewski is the author of Titanic: A Night Remembered.
13:58 Speaker 06 So, the Titanic is very much the product of a maritime arms race. The big ocean liner companies of the time, so in Britain it would have been Cunard and White Star, are competing on this kind of sliding scale. Cunard has sort of won the race to build the fastest ships, right? They have launched a few years before, the Lusitania and the Mauritania too, also of the most famous ocean liners of this kind of golden age of ocean liners. White Star decides not to compete on speed. They decide that you're not going to beat the Lusitania and the Mauritania for speed. They're going to go for luxury.
14:34 Speaker 01 Clausurin Vetterholm is the author of five books in Swedish about the Titanic disaster and the curator of Titanic: The Exhibition.
14:44 Speaker 03 They had been testing a lot and realized that the cost for driving a ship so fast to beat the Lusitania and Mauritania was impossible because the cost was far too high. So it was decided that they should not build high-speed vessels. It was safety, luxury and comfort, which was the important main issues when building these ships.
15:10 Speaker 01 Titanic and her two sisters will be part of a major play by White Star for domination of the lucrative transatlantic passenger route.
15:20 Speaker 06 They are largely competing for two groups of passengers. So they're competing for upper class, wealthy passengers. They're also competing though, for this is the age of immigration. So they are also carrying large numbers of steerage passengers across the Atlantic on one-way voyages to permanent new lives in the United States. This means that they need to be big because they need to hold a lot of steerage passengers and because they need to provide luxurious accommodation for the upper-class passengers. And it means that they need to be fast because the first-class passengers want to get where they're going. They want to know that they're going to leave Southampton at whatever 5:00 PM on a Friday and they're going to get to New York at 5:00 PM on a Wednesday or whatever the timing
16:04 Speaker 06 of the particular voyage is. It used to be that you'd take off across the Atlantic and, you know, it might take two weeks and it might take six weeks, who knows, right? Now this idea that these ships can power themselves across the Atlantic on a very regular schedule is important.
16:18 Speaker 01 With three brand-new ships plying their way back and forth across the Atlantic, the hope is that White Star can outdo Cunard's slightly faster two-ship offering. And even if one of the three is put out of action, the weekly service won't be interrupted.
16:34 Speaker 06 You know, White Star has always been a little bit to Cunard, the sort of second shipping line in Britain, right? It starts out not being particularly prestigious at all, right? And then the Titanic, you know, sort of represents the pinnacle of, oh, White Star's finally sort of caught up to Cunard. They've built these fantastically luxurious ships and they're finally going to be like just the equal to Cunard in terms of the rivalry. And then it's not like they go out of business after Titanic, but they don't, they're not really going to fully recover from the most famous maritime disaster in history.
17:04 Speaker 01 Not that anyone before 1912 was particularly worried about maritime disasters. By the early 20th century, travel by sea is safe, as safe as it's ever been.
17:16 Speaker 06 I think everybody, you know, had great faith in the ability of these ships. So just that had not been a major kind of maritime passenger disaster in a very, very long time. The size of these vessels had been expanding dramatically, right? So we're talking about them going from, you know, Wilbur Orville Wright's first biplane to a modern Boeing transatlantic jetliner, right? The difference in scale over, say, 20 years had just become enormous. We are constantly told that sort of flying on an airplane is the safest way to travel, right? You're in more danger driving to the airport than you are, you know, being on that actual plane. And I think very much the same thing was going on with luxury liners.
17:55 Speaker 01 In fact, by March 1909, when Titanic's keel is laid at the Harland and Wolf shipyard in Belfast, you're more likely to die building one of these ships than sailing on them. The tragic end of James Dobbin, crushed under a wooden stage during Titanic's celebrated launch, is just the latest fatal accident involving the new Olympic-class vessels.
18:20 Speaker 01 Harland and Wolf record 246 injuries during the construction of Titanic alone, 28 of them classed as severe. Several workers have died after falling from the scaffolding surrounding the ship, the youngest just 15 years old. Nonetheless, for the working men of Belfast, Harland and Wolf are considered a top employer. Susie Miller is a Belfast tour guide, whose great-grandfather worked for the company.
18:53 Speaker 05 It's hard to believe now just how important Belfast was at the turn of the last century. It really was a huge industrial hub. My great-grandfather was a guy called Thomas Miller, and he grew up just outside of Belfast, a little town with the lovely name of Bonny Before. It's more of a collection of houses really than anything else. And that's about 15 miles north of Belfast, on the shores of Belfast Loch. So, you know, his childhood, he would have been watching big ships come and go up and down the loch in front of his house. So, you know, maybe that was part of the reason why he wanted to get involved in shipbuilding. Harland and Wolf employed, at its height, over 40,000 people. And it
19:35 Speaker 05 was like an army of men going into work for 6:30 in the morning. You didn't need an alarm clock in this city because the tramp of boots on the cobbles would have woken you up as those men streamed into Queen's Island to start their long day down in the shipyard. And, you know, it was fairly well-paid, especially once you got yourself established. So for my great-grandfather, for example, he was able to provide his children and his wife with a good standard of living. So, yeah, a very important place back in the day. And Harland and Wolf, which is still on the go today, the biggest shipyard in the world.
20:12 Speaker 01 As one of Harland and Wolf's most experienced engine builders, Tommy Miller is asked to work on the company's latest prestige project, Titanic.
20:23 Speaker 05 My great-grandfather used to come home after his long shift in Harland and Wolf and to talk to his two sons about what he was working on. He obviously had a great deal of pride in that and he instilled that in his two sons, you know, telling them that this was something special that was going on a couple of miles away and that they should be very proud of their father for being part of the team that was building these massive ships.
20:48 Speaker 01 And Tommy's not the only one who feels a surge of pride at the thought of the new Olympic-class vessels. His boss at the shipyard, another Thomas, is the man responsible for designing Titanic and her sisters, giving form to the dream conjured up by Lord Piri and Bruce Ismay.
21:07 Speaker 05 Overseeing all of this was Thomas Andrews, who's very famous in the Titanic story. He's always portrayed as the hero in the movies about Titanic. And he was the head of the design department and very much a hands-on manager. So, you know, he spent long days and nights down at the shipyard overseeing what was going on. There's a story about him taking his wife down there one time and saying, "There go my boys, Nellie," and showing her, again with this wonderful sense of pride, how Titanic was coming along. So, you know, he's an integral part of the ship from start to finish and that's why he was so important when things started to go wrong.
21:51 John Hopkins? Hi, listeners. If you're enjoying this episode of Noises' new podcast, Titanic: Ship of Dreams, then search Titanic: Ship of Dreams in your podcast app. Hit Follow for weekly episodes. You can hear episode two straight after this one.
22:05 Speaker 01 Despite all the fanfare surrounding Titanic's launch, the ship that slides into the lagoon on May 31, 1911 is far from complete. It'll be almost another year before the ship of dreams is ready for her passengers. In the meantime, it's her elder sister, Olympic, that will carry White Star's fortunes across the Atlantic.
22:30 Speaker 01 Just two weeks after Titanic is launched in Belfast, Olympic sets off on her maiden voyage to New York. Meanwhile, Titanic is towed to a special fitting-out berth to begin her transformation into a floating luxury hotel.
22:47 Speaker 05 It gets launched, and it's just empty at that point, so it goes down to what's called the fitting-out wharf, where all the special stuff happens. You know, all the craftsmen get on board, and it turns into a luxury liner. And that's where the engines and the boilers are put in, and the funnels put on top. And then the final stage is just a brief spell in a dry dock, just to finish off the hull of the ship, to paint it, final bits of electrics and plumbing and that sort of thing.
23:13 Speaker 01 Once completed, Titanic is pretty much Olympic 2.0, taking everything that works from her sister ship and then improving it with small adjustments. She's very much the pro version of the new model, or, as she's known at the time, Olympic perfected. Strictly speaking, she's also a record-breaker, the biggest ship ever manufactured.
23:41 Speaker 01 But only because minor changes to her layout and interiors add extra weight compared to Olympic, to the tune of about half a percent.
23:53 Speaker 01 Tim Malten is the author of 101 Things You Thought You Knew About the Titanic But Didn't.
23:59 Speaker 02 Titanic is more or less a carbon copy of Olympic. The only difference visually really is that on the Olympics maiden voyage, some of the first-class passengers complained about spray from the bow waves washing over the promenade deck. And so they therefore decided to enclose the promenade deck, which gives Titanic that slightly more modern look. Internally, her area was the same. The reason why they could say she had a higher tonnage than her identical twin sister ship is because they rearranged the accommodation on the ship. And tonnage was actually calculated by accommodation. So she was said to be the biggest ship in the world, but actually she was the same as Olympic. And almost all photographs of Titanic being built and, you know, her staterooms coming
24:44 Speaker 02 together, almost all of them are actually the Olympic. Because Haaland and Wolf completely documented the building of Olympic all the way. They then didn't need to document the building of Titanic very much at all.
24:58 Speaker 01 In the years following the Titanic disaster, the similarity between the two ships will lead to some interesting theories. Even today, some people believe that it's Olympic and not Titanic that ended up at the bottom of the ocean.
25:14 Speaker 03 I love conspiracy theories. I think they are great. They say more about us than about the Titanic. There were two British journalists who wrote a book about it, The Riddle of the Titanic. And the second one was called The Ship That Never sank, because those books sold so well. Although they have to be looked upon as fairy tales, they sold so well that so many people read them, and some people even believe in this. One of those stories is that because of accidents that had happened with the Olympic, she was so damaged that they couldn't repair her. And therefore it was decided they would be swapped to Olympic and Titanic. And that the Olympic, now called the Titanic, was to be sunk in the mid-Atlantic.
25:58 Speaker 03 It's a very far-fetched theory, very interesting.
26:03 Speaker 01 Far-fetched it may be, but for those who were familiar with both ships, the similarity between them must have been uncanny. More than two decades after the Titanic disaster, Olympic was still ferrying passengers across the Atlantic.
26:19 Speaker 06 It must have been always very weird, right? If you happened to be a survivor of the Titanic and to see the Olympic, right? Because again, it looked almost identical to the Titanic.
26:30 Speaker 01 All of Titanic's most iconic design features are shared with her sister ship, including the magnificent grand staircase. Immortalized in James Cameron's 1997 movie, the elegant seven-story staircase runs right through the first-class section of the ship, providing access for White Star's richest passengers to their luxurious dining and smoking rooms. In fact, Titanic actually has two almost identical grand staircases, one near the bow of the ship and another towards the stern. It's the former, which stretches all the way down to the dining saloon on D-deck, that gets most of the attention.
27:12 Speaker 01 Because this staircase is more than just a means to an end. It's a destination in itself.
27:23 Speaker 01 Veronica Hincky is the author of The Last Night on the Titanic, on sinkable drinking, dining, and style.
27:32 Speaker 07 This staircase adds to the theatre of what the Titanic truly was. It was a place for people to go and to meet their friends or make new friends. As you were dressing up in your cabin, you'd be thinking about, how am I going to look on the grand staircase tonight? And it was just a really special gathering place. And we see that in the details throughout the staircase. The cherub statues, the scrolling stair rail, and the beautiful ornate design of it. And then very subtle, but yet thoughtful floor design, where you see a square pattern repeated throughout.
28:15 Speaker 07 And again, discreet windows that aren't just like a porthole, a round porthole that you'd expect to see on a ship, but they are arched windows that let the light in. Those were the things that made the Titanic special.
28:31 Speaker 01 And then there are the dining facilities themselves. Not just the three giant saloons for first, second, and third class, each with their own all-inclusive set menu. But for the richer passengers, two stylish cafes. The airy Palm Court and Veranda Cafe, on the promenade deck at the top of the ship. And one floor below on B-deck, the French-inspired Café Parisien, with its wicker furniture and white trellises covered in ivy. But the ship's boldest culinary innovation, nestled behind the aft grand staircase on B-deck, is the intimate à la carte restaurant. For Titanic's well-heeled elite,
29:16 Speaker 01 paying extra to order off the menu is seen as a mark of luxury.
29:21 Speaker 07 The Titanic was a ship of firsts in many ways. And one of them was the à la carte restaurant. It was a much smaller area, but it still had a lot of the same types of features as the first-class dining saloon. A little more floral. This was a more feminine room, pink throughout. Lamps with little shades around them. Mirrors on the walls to give the same type of Versailles-type of impression to make that French influence throughout.
29:55 Speaker 01 All in all, the vibe, for the first-class passengers at least, is that of a five-star hotel. One that just happens to be floating on the ocean. Somewhere between the Ritz in London and the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
30:11 Speaker 03 You could actually sail on the Titanic not until you reached harbor, you'd realize you'd been on a ship. Because the interiors were so great. They had spent an enormous amount of money to make it look like a palace.
30:29 Speaker 01 In the years following the disaster, questions will be raised about whether Haaland and Wolf may have scrimped on some aspects of Titanic's build. In fact, thanks to the company's longstanding relationship with White Star, if anything, they're encouraged to overspend.
30:47 Speaker 02 What they did was, Haaland and Wolf were paid on a cost-plus basis, which meant that instead of White Star giving them a budget, really, what they did was they just said, "Look, show us your books, open books, and show us what you've spent, and then, you know, your profit will be 5% more than what you spent." So actually, in a way, Haaland and Wolf was incentivized that the more money they spent on the ship, the more money they would make. There was no incentive to cut corners.
31:16 Speaker 01 Every element of Titanic's interior has been debated in minute detail. Every high-end supplier carefully vetted to ensure their products reach the highest possible standards. The candelabras that adorn the grand staircase come from Perry and Cove, Bond Street. China ware from Royal Crown Denby. As one senior Haaland and Wolf designer will put it later, "We spent two hours discussing carpet for the first-class cabins and 15 minutes discussing lifeboats."
31:54 Speaker 01 After almost a year in the fitting-out berth, at last, Titanic is ready to set sail, joining her elder sister Olympic on the transatlantic passenger route. But first, she must pass a series of sea trials to check that everything is working as it should be. In charge of the operation is one of White Star's most senior officers, Captain Herbert Haddock, no relation to Tintin's hot-tempered friend. This Captain Haddock is a 51-year-old former Navy officer who's been commanding White Star ships for almost two decades. In other
32:33 Speaker 01 words, a safe pair of hands. Starting at 6:00 a.m. on the 2nd of April 1912, Haddock puts the new ship through her paces, first in Belfast Loch, then out in the Irish Sea.
32:49 Speaker 01 Over the next 12 hours, with the help of a 119-man skeleton crew, Haddock drives the ship at various speeds, practices turning to port and starboard, and even has a go at an emergency stop, which in the case of a ship this big, takes over three minutes to accomplish.
33:12 Speaker 01 At the end of a long day, the captain is satisfied that White Star's latest vessel is fit for purpose. But he won't be commanding Titanic's maiden voyage. That honour goes to an even more senior White Star employee: Commodore of the fleet, Captain Edward Smith. Smith is the archetypal British sea captain: trim white beard, crisp blue uniform, and a pair of gleaming military medals. Less Captain Haddock, more Captain Birdseye. As far as White Star are concerned, Smith is the cream of the crop. His easy way with the company's wealthiest passengers has seen him nicknamed "The Millionaire's
33:56 Speaker 01 Captain". At 62 years old, he has a glittering career behind him. In fact, this voyage will be his last before retirement. On Thursday, April 4, Haddock is formally relieved by Captain Smith. While the White Star Commodore settles into his new position on Titanic, Haddock heads over to Smith's previous command, RMS Olympic. With Titanic about to begin her maiden voyage, Olympic has just dropped down a peg to Number Two. Captain Smith wastes no time in reshuffling the chain of command. He brings trusted officers over from Olympic,
34:40 Speaker 01 and demotes or fires others already assigned to Titanic. But something is lost in the shuffle: A pair of binoculars earmarked for the lookouts in the crow's nest. The only man who knows where they are, former Second Officer David Blair, is no longer on board.
35:03 Speaker 01 Julian Fellows is the award-winning creator of Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age, and the 2012 miniseries Titanic.
35:13 Speaker 02 He'd been responsible for bringing everything aboard, checking it off, storing it, and so on. One of the funny things about the Titanic, given its size, was that the storage was in rather short supply. You often come across theatres that have been built with too few dressing rooms. The Titanic was quite similar. It was built with too little storage. And so things were sort of shopped here and put in there and in this drawer and that cupboard. And David Blair knew where everything was, and they sent him off.
35:50 Speaker 01 How much of an impact the missing binoculars will have on Titanic's fate is debatable, even today.
35:58 Speaker 01 Would seeing the iceberg a few seconds earlier have given the crew time to avoid it?
36:04 Speaker 01 Jerome Chertkov is professor emeritus of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Indiana.
36:12 Speaker 01 His books include Don't Panic: The Psychology of Emergency Egress and Ingress.
36:18 Speaker 03 When they left Belfast, we're Southampton. The second officer left, and nobody got the binoculars from him. Nobody came up with another set of binoculars for the lookouts. The lookouts didn't have binoculars. The lookouts testified at the Senate hearing and the Board of Trade that, in their opinion, if they had had binoculars, they'd have seen the iceberg sooner and that they would have been able to avoid it.
36:49 Speaker 02 I mean, I don't really subscribe to the theory that the Titanic sank because nobody had any binoculars. But I do think the fact of getting rid of the officer who knew where everything was was a mistake.
37:09 Speaker 01 Built in Belfast and registered in Liverpool, Titanic will in fact set sail from Southampton. Although the journey to New York would be 100 miles shorter from White Star's headquarters on Merseyside, these days all transatlantic passenger trips depart from the southern English port.
37:28 Speaker 06 Passenger shipping had shifted from sailing out of Liverpool to sailing out of Southampton quite recently because Southampton has the advantage, because of the Isle of Wight, there's a double tide in Southampton, so ships can get out of Southampton twice a day rather than just once a day out of Liverpool.
37:43 Speaker 01 As a result, it's from Southampton that the majority of the ship's crew are recruited: 431 men and women in the catering department alone, 290 stewards and stewardesses, and 280 of the city's strongest, toughest men to work in the engine rooms.
38:04 Speaker 01 But not all the new recruits are born and bred Southerners. One recent addition to the roster is Tommy Miller, the Belfast man who helped build and install the ship's engines for Harlan and Wolf. After a personal tragedy, Tommy is looking for a fresh start, and he's pretty sure he's found it: in America.
38:25 Speaker 05 My great-grandmother, Jeanie, died in January of 1912, and she'd had TB, so she died pretty suddenly. And it seems that everything happened pretty quickly because within three months, there was Tommy, signed up as the assistant deck engineer on Titanic. Really, his motivation was to give a change of scene to the family. He wanted a fresh start, and here was the opportunity. He was qualified to do the job, and he probably saw himself working for White Star for many years to come, but just based on the other side of the Atlantic.
39:00 Speaker 01 As a deck engineer, Tommy will be responsible for much of Titanic's onboard machinery: winches, cranes, even the Davids used to lower lifeboats in case of emergency. But for now, at least, he'll be travelling solo.
39:15 Speaker 05 There was no way that he could have brought his two sons with him on that voyage because he would have been working the whole time. He was going to go first, get himself organised and settled, and then come back and get his two sons. So it's just as well that they weren't on board with him because otherwise I probably wouldn't be here today.
39:36 Speaker 05 Just before he boarded Titanic, he took them both to one side and then he gave them each two 1912 pennies and he said, "Don't spend those until we're all together again." My grandfather remembers being given those pennies and standing on the shores of Belfast Loch later that evening and watching as Titanic disappeared. And he said he was clutching his pennies in his hands so tightly that the date of 1912 was nearly burnt into his palm. So, you know, these became a symbol of the connection between father and son. And of course, you know, with Tommy not making it off of Titanic, he'd been told to keep the
40:21 Speaker 05 pennies until they were all together again. That wasn't going to happen. And so he was true to his word. He never let them go and they've been passed down through the generations.
40:32 Speaker 01 Like many of his fellow crew members, when Titanic hits the iceberg, Tommy will still have work to do.
40:42 Speaker 05 I'm sure that Tommy was still doing his duty, trying to help others. So he would have had no chance of getting into a lifeboat and, you know, he probably couldn't swim. So it was just either the cold or going under the water that got him.
40:54 Speaker 01 As a deck engineer, Tommy will be working hard throughout the four-day voyage, maintaining the equipment on board ship. But at least his hands will stay relatively clean. The same can't be said for the 250-odd men who will power the massive engines Tommy helped build. Their work's so grimy and filthy that they're kept well out of view. Among them is a 29-year-old Liverpool lad, recently returned from a voyage to South Africa. His name? James McGann, my great uncle.
41:35 Speaker 01 In my family, he's known as Titanic McGann.
41:39 Speaker 01 But Uncle Jimmy was already an experienced sailor when he signed up for the new ship's maiden voyage. Born in the slums of Liverpool's North End, to a family who'd fled the Irish potato famine two decades earlier, Jimmy had gone to sea in his twenties, travelling to ports as far afield as Cape Town and Sydney. I never met Uncle Jimmy. He died almost half a century before I was born. But my brother Stephen, you might know him as Dr Turner from Called the Midwife, has managed to piece together his story.
42:13 Speaker 02 Jimmy was born with his brother Joe in a place called Porter Street, Clay Street, actually around the corner from Porter Street. And it's literally down at the end of the street, you reach, at that time, one of the richest stretches of Dockland in the world. The second docks of the Empire. A place which housed vast amounts of cotton going out, huge amounts of wealth coming back in. Yet they lived in levels of poverty you have never seen in your life, and the descriptions of them are practically toe curling. They were in one of the most appalling, described as the worst street in the Empire. Amongst their uncles and aunts, at least half of them died of disease. People who lived that kind of a life,
42:58 Speaker 02 it moulds you.
43:01 Speaker 02 The engine rooms of the British Empire took quite an astonishing percentage. Were not simply British working-class men. They were Liverpool Irish. So it's like one tiny ghetto became the veins of the Empire. These same people were so hard, so roughened to Dock life, and gradually to merchant sea life. These were your perfect people to go down into the bowels of the ship, to trim coal, to stoke coal, to be the fireman, to actually stoke the engines, the trimmers to work in appalling weather in filthy darkness. These guys would do it without complaint and do it well. They were rowdy, they were hard to...
43:46 Speaker 02 Discipline, but they were the only people to do the job. They were all part of what they called the Black Gang.
43:54 Speaker 01 For all the finery up above in first class, the liners of the Edwardian age rely on backbreaking manual labour down below in the bowels of the ship, far away from the eyes of paying customers.
44:08 Speaker 02 It was such exhausting work at the end of their four-hour shift. These bulldog fit men had nothing left. They had to be dragged and laid onto the deck. They were like this sort of rot violas that you could put down in this cage and they would do the job. And this was the fraternity of my great uncle.
44:31 Speaker 01 By rights, Uncle Jimmy should have nothing to do with Titanic. When White Star's newest vessel is originally scheduled to depart from Southampton, he is thousands of miles away, working as a fireman on the Kin Farnes Castle, sailing home from the Cape of Good Hope. But a three-week delay in the new ship's maiden voyage means Jimmy is in the right place at just the wrong time.
44:58 Speaker 02 What happens to Jimmy is he comes up and about two weeks before the Titanic sails, I trace him coming back into Southampton. He's got filthy lodging somewhere in Southampton. They get drunk, they have fights, they turn around, they put, get back their porn suits or whatever. Off they go again, trying to get another ship. There was a problem. There was a huge coal strike. So nobody could get coal. But apparently, there was this brand-new ship, which had managed to wangle its coal. So amongst all the Black Gangers, they must have been saying, yeah, but have you heard about this new one? Because apparently they're saying there's loads of jobs there for us, like two hundred and fifty-odd firemen and trimmers. This is a big old ship.
45:41 Speaker 02 And so if you can get on that one, that's got its coal, we'll get paid. We can go out, go to America, five days to New York. He got on the ship as a trimmer, not as a fireman, and that ship was the Titanic.
46:00 Speaker 01 It's not just the Black Gangas whose lives are affected by the coal strike.
46:05 Speaker 01 Ordinary passengers too find their travel plans changing unexpectedly.
46:09 Speaker 03 There was a strike in the British coal mines. Because of this, coal was transferred from other ships to the Titanic. This maiden voyage, they didn't want to stall. Because of these, these ships were laid up and quite a few people were transferred from these ships to the Titanic.
46:37 Speaker 01 Among those unexpectedly bumped onto the new vessel is Eva Hart, one of the youngest survivors of the disaster.
46:46 Speaker 01 Eva is just seven years old when she boards the ship with her parents. And while her father Benjamin is thrilled about the change in their travel plans, her mother Esther has a bad feeling about the voyage.
47:00 Speaker 05 My mother had this dreadful premonition. She'd never had one before and she never had one after. But she said, "No, we can't do this. It's quite wrong something dreadful will happen." For her to behave like that was absolutely unbelievable to everyone.
47:17 Speaker 01 Eva's father has little time for his wife's superstitions. As far as he's concerned, his family have just scored the ultimate upgrade.
47:27 Speaker 01 Even in second class, Titanic offers unparalleled comfort, more like first class than most other liners.
47:37 Speaker 01 On April the 10th, 1912, the Hart family catch a train to Southampton, ready to board the biggest ship in the world.
47:47 Speaker 01 On arrival, they're awe-struck at the scale of her. To little Eva, she looks less like a boat, and more like a floating apartment building. But even as the family make their way up the gangplank, Eva's mother is still begging her husband to turn around.
48:07 Speaker 07 The first time in my life I saw her crying, that's something I'd never seen before. And for the first time also in my life, I heard my father raising his voice to her sometimes, which I'd never heard before. And she was so desperately unhappy about the prospect of going...
48:23 Speaker 01 Mrs. Hart can't fully explain it, but she's been gripped by an unshakable conviction. She tells her husband emphatically, "That ship will never reach the other side." But Benjamin Hart is unmoved. The tickets are paid for. There's no turning back now.
48:42 Speaker 07 We went down to the cabin and that's when my mother said to my father that she had made up her mind quite firmly that she would not go to bed in that ship. She would sit up at night and I remember my father saying to her, "Well, if you want to be so stupid, I can't stop you. But I don't know what you think people will say."
49:02 Speaker 07 And she said, "I don't mind what they say. That's what I'm going to do." And there was no further argument about it. She decided that she wouldn't go to bed at night and she didn't.
49:15 Speaker 01 Everyone knows that Titanic and her sisters are the safest ships that have ever been built. The press have made a big deal about the Olympic class's state-of-the-art safety features. So much so that Titanic has been called practically unsinkable. But to Mrs. Hart, that's just the point. It's overconfidence, bordering on blasphemy. "This is the ship they say is unsinkable," she tells her husband. "And that is flying in the face of the Almighty."
49:46 Speaker 03 The engineer of the day in 1912 was the high priest in the society when churches had begun to lost their grips on human souls. Instead, it was the engineer stepped in and proved that everything was possible. This was the belief back in 1912. "Yes, we can conquer anything. Everything is possible." Part of this story is the story of what the old Greeks used to say, call as one of the death sins, which was hybris. "You don't think that something so horrible can happen as this big ship to sink? It's too large, it's too big. Our technology has come too far." G. B. Priestley has written,
50:29 Speaker 03 "There are many places that should need big signs saying, 'Remember the Titanic.'"
50:41 Speaker 01 In the next episode, Titanic is cleared for departure by the British Board of Trade, but no one tells the inspector that a fire is raging in one of the coal bunkers. White Star's state-of-the-art safety features are put through their paces as the ship undergoes its first and only lifeboat drill. And on the way out to Southampton Harbor, there's a nail-biting near miss, one that almost scuppers the maiden voyage before it's begun. That's next time.
51:28 John Hopkins? Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this taster episode of Titanic: Ship of Dreams. To hear more, just search Titanic: Ship of Dreams in your podcast app and hit follow, or listen at Noiser.com. Episode 2 is waiting for you now with new episodes every Tuesday.
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