Claes-Göran Wetterholm

One Swedish survivor said that this is the last time we travel over the Atlantic because they didn't like how people behaved and appeared. There's drinking and dancing every night, she said. And this woman thought it was going far too far with this drinking, far too far.

There was not much to do but to sit and talk. There was a piano in the common room. But apart from that, they could not use a gym or whatever. But actually, many of them brought musical instruments. So it was quite a lot of music anyhow. And people could dance and so on.

This was still the Edwardian-Victorian times, so nothing should happen. But there was this long, long corridor on Ideg, the Krukolitskovlan road, that connected these parts. But of course there was romance going on, like in the rest of the world. And they befriended each other, and some of them stayed friends throughout the life.

They'd never seen anything as large as this. There were two immigrants from South Sweden, Neda and Edvard Lindbl. They were third-class immigrants. And she wrote back to her brother saying, you can't imagine what a monster it is, what a beast it is. She uses that Swedish word best, which is beast in English.

A ticket to America was very, very expensive. An ordinary third-class ticket from Scandinavia was around £8, which is 181 kroner. An ordinary working-class family paid for their flat in 1913 throughout the whole year, 179 kroner. So £8 is more or less what a flat cost throughout the whole year. And then you can compare with Helen Baxter who had this suite for which she paid 247 pounds.

We're speaking of different worlds, different universes.

Everything was very much appreciated, I would say. One Swedish survivor, Agnes Sandström, said later on in interviews that we couldn't have had it better here in third class. Everybody looked after us well. The food was fantastic, the seating, the living conditions, it was clean, it was nice. So that was her impression.

Leonardo DiCaprio couldn't possibly have been able to come up to first class and walk around like that. He couldn't. There were guards, of course, sailors, making sure that nobody stepped over the borders. I know that quite a few people believe there were these enormous gates from floor to ceiling. I've never seen any sign, any written document about big gates dividing the classes. I haven't.

They were sort of half a meter high, but they said something like no trespassing or crew only or only first class or whatever. And so people did not pass. And if they did, they would certainly very soon be discovered by a steward or a sailor and then shown back to where they, so to speak, belonged.

The White Star Line was the second most popular shipping company in Sweden then. One must remember this is during the immigration times when 25% of Swedes left for America. There were more Swedes living in Chicago in 1912 than in our second largest city, Gothenburg. Actually, Chicago was Sweden's second largest city. The second largest language on the Titanic was Swedish.

The third largest language on the Titanic is Arabic.

Almost all the notes, all the stories that I found afterwards from steerage passengers is that they were very happy, very comfortable. Those who wrote back about the ship, they were all in awe that it was a fantastic ship. So they felt very, very safe and secure on the Titanic.

Well, one of the most tragic things about Titanic is that as human beings, we're all programmed to survive. There were so many cries and screams going up that someone described it as like locusts, like listening to locusts. There was so much noise.

And what we do know is the painful truth that stronger people, such as men, were drowning weaker people, such as women and children and boys and things, because I'm afraid we are all programmed to survive and they were all sort of a bit like rats in a trap.

Because there's very little buoyancy left in the upturned hull of this small, collapsible boat, which is much smaller than the other lifeboats, by the way. But they worry that new people coming on will swamp them.

There was this dreadful decision of, in order to save who we have, we can't save more.

I think the sinking of Titanic put the people on collapse will be in an impossible situation. I mean, we talk nowadays about things like PTSD, but most survivors never spoke about those sort of unspeakable decisions that had to be made.

When you read the inquiry, it becomes so alive, because you think, what could I have done there? Could I have done something different, something else? How would I have reacted in a situation like this? I'm thinking about what another third-class passenger said. He was at boat A and they were fighting and the boat was turning up around and around and around.

And he said, there were about 150 people around me. And it was because I was strong and I could fight them away that I survived. It's horrible, he said afterwards, but in the circumstance like this, it's your life and nobody else's.

Lightoller was definitely someone who was capable of making very tough decisions. He was known by the other crew as a hard case. And given that the whole crew were hard cases, he must have been a real sort of, what we would think of today as like an SAS man or a US Navy SEAL.

We waited until it had thinned out. It's an extremely strong story in the US inquiry because the senators couldn't accept it. They could not accept that somebody has the possibility to save people and still didn't do it. But under those circumstances, it was just suicide going back.

There was a lot of phosphorescence in the water. And of course, you know, one doesn't think about this when there's 1,500 people struggling in the water. But as they were struggling in the water, they would have made bright fluorescent green angels as they were swimming from disturbing all the phosphorescence.

He's unique because he survived. I think he was more or less marinated in liquor.

It is very, very confusing. There were eight musicians, and they are wrongly today called the Orchestra of the Titanic. But there was a trio, and there was a quintet. And they only played together when the ship was sinking.

Vera Dick and her husband survived in one of the starboard boats, and she said that she saw these musicians, and she said that they were gallant, fantastic, and they played Near My God to Thee. Now, Vera Dick's boat was about half a kilometer and a kilometer away from the sinking ship.

So she must hear this tune when everything was collapsing and people were screaming and funnels falling and so on and so on. Second wireless operator, Harold Bride, he was jumping into the water about three minutes or so before the ship plunged. And he said, from aft came the tunes of autumn.

So therefore, I tend to believe that what they did play in the end could have been very melancholic, beautiful waltz called Sange d'Automne, Autumn Dreams.

Ismay was pilloried because he was the owner. He was the person ultimately in charge even of the captain. And I think that his bad press has more to do with people perceiving him as being probably the main person that should not have survived.

There is a French person who wrote a letter at the time, and he seems quite clearly to say that the officer stepped back and made a salute and then shot himself.

It could have been Wilde. It doesn't have to have been Murdoch. But I think having looked at all the evidence, I think on the balance of probability, it probably was Murdoch. But if more evidence comes to light, it may be shown otherwise.

I started not believing this. And the more accounts I've read about it, I actually think he did shoot himself. All the officers had revolvers. They were all issued with revolvers. And I think he had shot someone who was storming the boats.

And I think the combination of him feeling guilty for all the sort of carnage that was going to happen and the fact that he just shot someone, I think he did step back and shoot himself. So I do actually believe that. But, you know, at the time, there was a sort of stigma against that.

The story of Titanic is told in a very romantic way. In fact, the whole sinking sequence almost from the collision was utterly terrifying.

A great wave swept Titanic as she lurched down forwards, and this wave actually caused the forward funnel of Titanic to become unmoored and smash down on a lot of people swimming in the water.

The strength funnel falls down onto the starboard wing bridge and then sploshes down into the water. It creates a tidal wave, if you like. It creates a huge wave that flips over collapsible B and pushes it away from the ray.

The reality of Titanic after the lifeboats left is just too ghastly. It was like a living hell. It was absolutely like carnage on the battlefield.

The keel itself was actually ripped in half, if you can imagine that, by the forces of the waterlogged bow and the buoyant, still airtight, if you like, stern, sort of fighting against each other.

Titanic did then sort of break her back, if you like. And what happened was the keel stayed attached, but the superstructure split away. The stern crashes down to the water.

And then for a moment, all the passengers who mostly are on this little sort of stern, it's called the poop deck of Titanic, they think they're going to survive because once the bow has shaken itself free, the stern actually settles a bit and goes a bit more on an even keel.

Some people say they were able to just step off the stern without any waves. One person says they didn't even get their head wet when they stepped off the back of the ship.

As the water filled into the bow, the ship, a bit like an ice cube tray that gets heavier and heavier at one end, it just dragged down the bow.

Eventually, the whole what we call the forecastle, which is basically the front triangular deck on the ship, that actually gets submerged with water as well.

There were many, many who did not speak English, who didn't understand a word, what was being told to them, or what they were supposed to do, and so on and so on.

And he's standing there by the mantelpiece. And this steward says he came in and saw Andrews and said, aren't you going to make a try for it, Mr. Andrews? Andrews didn't answer.

This whole area imploded, broke away, disappeared. It was a mess afterwards. Nothing was left. It's like you had taken Harrods in London and broken it in half and spread everything. Spread out over the ocean bottom.

Light told her on the port side he allowed no men into the boats. There were men standing by the boat and they refused to enter. And they died, of course. On the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch allowed anybody into the boats. And actually, afterwards, over 80% of all the surviving male passengers, they had their lives, thanks to William Murdoch.

It goes back to something called the Birkenhead tradition, where the warship Birkenhead sank close to the South African coast. and there were relatives to the soldiers on board.

Because they did not have enough lifeboats, they got the orchestra on the ship to stand up and play songs, marches. When women and children were put into the boats, this was shark-infested waters, and therefore very, very few of the men survived.

Every English schoolboy knew the Birkenhead story and they had the Birkenhead tradition. In the light of this Birkenhead tradition, it was very important to tell the same story about the Titanic.

I met his son and we talked about it. It was very interesting. Steward Hart was ordered into boat 15 by First Officer Murdoch. Hart knew that there were still hundreds of people down on the deck who hadn't had a chance to get up yet. He knew that. And he knew how many people were on deck but had no chance to get into a boat. He knew that. And with his memories, he had to live the rest of his life.

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.

It must have been always very weird, right? If you happen to be a survivor of the Titanic and to see the Olympic, right? Because again, it looked almost identical to the Titanic.

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.

There's so much material there to impose so many symbolic meanings on it.

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.

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 p.m.

on a Friday, and they're going to get to New York at 5 p.m. on a Wednesday or whatever the timing 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.

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.

I think everybody, you know, had great faith in the ability of these ships. It just 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 and Orville Wright's first biplane to a modern Boeing transatlantic jetliner, right?