Titanic is cleared for departure, but no one tells the inspector that a fire is raging in one of the coal bunkers. Extra lifeboats are proposed then rejected, as the first and only lifeboat drill takes place. White Star boss J. Bruce Ismay makes himself at home in his deluxe suite, as Titanic’s first-class facilities are unveiled in all their glory. And on the way out of Southampton Harbour there’s a nail-biting near miss. One that almost scuppers the maiden voyage before it’s begun… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Stephanie Barczewski, Julian Fellowes, Clifford Ismay, Tim Maltin, Susie Millar. Written by Duncan Barrett | Produced by Miriam Baines and Duncan Barrett | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design & audio editing by Miri Latham | Assembly editing by Dorry Macaulay, Anisha Deva, Liam Cameron | Compositions by Oliver Baines and Dorry Macaulay | Mix & mastering: Cian Ryan-Morgan | Recording engineer: Joseph McGann | Nautical consultant: Aaron Todd. Get every episode of Titanic: Ship of Dreams two weeks early, as well as ad-free listening, by joining Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened during the Olympic and HMS Hawk collision?
It's September the 20th, 1911. We're in Southampton, on the south coast of England. In seven months' time from this exact spot, RMS Titanic will depart on her ill-fated maiden voyage. Right now, though, it's another almost identical vessel that's about to weigh anchor.
While Titanic is still in Belfast, being fitted out with all the bells and whistles that will turn her into a floating five-star hotel, her sister ship, RMS Olympic, is ready to set off for New York. Olympic has been plying the transatlantic route for three months already. A total of eight crossings, back and forth, without incident.
Unless you count a minor scrape with a tugboat in the Hudson River, which left a few scratches on her paintwork. Her commander, White Star Commodore Edward Smith, is regarded as the safest possible pair of hands. When asked by a reporter to describe his 40-year career, he can honestly reply, Uneventful. But Smith is about to receive a rude awakening. At 11.25 a.m., Olympic weighs anchor.
Some of her 1,300 passengers gather on deck, watching the quayside slowly recede into the distance. Others remain in their cabins. It's a wet, windy morning. Not the best time to take the sea air. Before long, the giant ship approaches the Solent, the strait of water separating mainland Britain from the Isle of Wight. It's a busy passage, with clear shipping lanes marked out by buoys.
At 12.43 p.m., Olympic makes the turn to port, signaling her intention to any other ships in the vicinity with two sharp blasts of the whistle. Captain Smith orders an increase in speed from 11 to 16 knots. But another ship is traversing the same narrow stretch of water on a parallel course, a naval warship, HMS Hawk. And the Hawk is equipped with a battering ram.
As Olympic gains on Hawk and begins to overtake her, the narrow waterway grows increasingly cramped. The Hawk's commander, William Blount, takes evasive action, ordering his helmsman to turn the warship to starboard. But something goes wrong. Rather than moving away from the Olympic, the Hawk begins drifting towards her.
She's turning alright, but to port, her arm at bow swinging round towards the liner. After a few anxious seconds, Hawk drives headfirst into the side of Olympic. Her battering ram crumples flat. It leaves a 12-foot triangular hole in the side of the liner. Olympic starboard propeller shaft is crippled. Mercifully, there were no injuries reported on either ship.
Both limped back to harbor for repairs. Olympic's passengers are transferred to an older White Star vessel, Adriatic. They continue their journey to New York in less stylish environs. It'll be another two months before Olympic is seaworthy again. And the emergency patch-up will mean plundering parts from her sister ship, Titanic, including her propeller shaft.
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Chapter 2: How did the collision delay Titanic's maiden voyage?
The result of that is that Titanic's maiden voyage will be delayed. Just a few weeks, but long enough for an ice shelf off Greenland to begin to melt, disgorging hundreds of bergs into the Atlantic. From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is Titanic Ship of Dreams, part two. The collision with HMS Hawk leads to a costly legal battle for White Star.
Although most press coverage at the time blames the Royal Navy for the accident, the official inquiry holds Captain Smith responsible. But White Star don't take the judgment lying down. Author Tim Moulton.
Chapter 3: What legal battles arose from the Olympic-Hawk incident?
White Star backed Smith 100%. They knew how safe he was. They knew how good he was. He had an absolutely perfect safety record.
On March 13, 1912, less than a month before Titanic departs for New York, White Star take the Navy to court, arguing that Hawke's Captain William Blunt steered his ship into the side of Olympic. But the Navy's lawyers introduce an intriguing new theory to account for the collision. Suction. Suction.
Using a pair of wax models, scientists at the National Physical Laboratory in Tellington demonstrate that a ship the size of Olympic, traveling close enough to the Hawk, could displace enough water to literally suck the smaller vessel into it.
In the end, Smith lost the case and the White Star had to pay compensation to the Navy.
To be fair to Captain Smith and his previously unblemished safety record, White Star's new Olympic-class vessels are very hard to steer. They're one and a half times as heavy as their closest rivals, Cunard's Mauritania and Lusitania, and almost three times the weight of Smith's previous command, the Adriatic. Forget too big to fail, the Olympic-class may be too big to succeed.
Professor Stephanie Botchewski.
This race to build bigger, better, different ships that are competing for sort of different markets and in different ways, it's causing them to kind of push up against the limits of what they can do in terms of maritime technology. It's not actually so much the Titanic that comes to mind here. I think if we think about the Lusitania.
So when the Lusitania gets hit by a German torpedo in 1915, the problem is that V-shaped hull of the Lusitania that has been designed to make the ship very fast, it becomes a major liability because what happens is that the torpedo hits the ship on one side, right? So it's tilting.
And a huge problem why people can't get off the Lusitania is because when it starts to tilt, what happens with the lifeboats... The lifeboats on one side are swinging out so far away from the side of the ship that you can't get from the ship to the lifeboat, right? Because the lifeboat's too far away.
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Chapter 4: Why were Olympic-class ships considered hard to steer and how did this affect safety?
Again, I don't want to overstate this. I don't want to make it sound like this is why it crashed, but they were pushing a little bit against the limits of like what maritime technology could do.
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When it comes to the general public, the collision with the Hawk actually makes the Olympic-class vessels seem safer. Rather like parents who do the school run in hulking Range Rovers, confident that if they hit anything, it's the other car that's going to crumple. White Star's passengers might reasonably conclude that the bigger the ship they're on, the safer they'll be if anything goes wrong.
After all, photographs of the two ships after the incident make it clear that the Hawk suffered the brunt of the damage. A warship, equipped with a battering ram no less, struck the Titanic's elder sister at speed and failed to sink her. Not for nothing are the Olympic class referred to in the trade press as unsinkable. Susie Miller.
The interesting thing about the unsinkable moniker is that the builders, Harland and Wolfe, never claimed that. This was something that came about by a magazine called Shipbuilder Magazine where they said, this ship cannot be sunk.
But neither Harland and Wolfe nor White Star do anything to correct the exaggerated claims made in the press. In the public imagination, the idea of an unsinkable ship takes hold. At a time when technological progress is at its zenith, it seems relatively plausible.
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Chapter 5: What safety features made Titanic and her sister ships appear 'unsinkable'?
There were 9,000 other ways that it could have hit the iceberg, and it wouldn't have had the incredibly catastrophic result that it had. It's just this complete, you know, kind of butterfly effect of, you know, eight million tiny little things happen from the moment they laid the keel in Belfast to the time that it hit the iceberg.
And if one of those eight million things hadn't happened, then maybe it wouldn't have actually hit that iceberg. I think that bothers us. We don't like to believe that life is that random.
Curator Klaus-Johann Wetterholm
The British shipping journal The Shipbuilder wrote afterwards, in the case of the Titanic, the unlikely happened. And I usually say that when a ship goes down, it's unlikely. Every time it goes down, it's unlikely. But there were so many things that, let's say, prepared for the disaster.
There's another reason that passengers in 1912 aren't particularly worried about a disaster at sea. Because at the time, a liner going down in the Atlantic is known to be eminently survivable. Three years before Titanic sets off on her maiden voyage, another White Star vessel, the Republic, sank following a collision with another ship.
Only three passengers were killed, and all of them as a result of the initial impact. The ship's 739 survivors, rescued thanks to a distress call from the Republic's new Marconi wireless set, were seen as proof of the relative safety of modern sea travel.
The Republic's young wireless operator, Jack Binns, was hailed as a hero, thanks in no small part to Mr. Marconi's press contacts, and I for a juicy story. Bin's distress call summoned a dozen other ships to the scene of the accident, long before the Republic eventually sank 40 fathoms beneath the surface. Plenty of time to ferry the passengers across in lifeboats to the rescue vessels.
The fact that the lifeboats only had room for half the Republic's passengers at the time was never an issue.
People often wonder if the Titanic had had more lifeboats, would more lives have been saved? Well, in fact, what most people don't know is that even though Titanic only had 20 lifeboats, in fact, she didn't have time to launch even the 20 that she did have.
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Chapter 6: Why did Titanic have only 20 lifeboats and were they sufficient?
And people in a way, I think, were pretending that it was about snobbery and being well-bred and good manners and grace and knowing how to do things properly and all those phrases snobs use. But of course it wasn't really. It was about power. And the British were starting to see that the Americans were more powerful than they were.
The world is changing, right? When we talk about it being the kind of millionaire special, we are talking about American plutocrats more than we're talking about British aristocrats, although there are a handful. The Countess of Rothes and a few other kind of wealthy upper-class British people are on board the ship.
But mostly when we talk about wealth on the Titanic, we're talking about American wealth.
America had started to develop its own society. It wasn't anymore imitating Europe. It wasn't based on leading families who were the younger sons of Scottish gentry or Dutch gentry or whatever it was. These were new people who'd come along and they'd invented, you know, doorknobs or trains or yachts or whatever.
And they were vastly rich and they weren't about to be told what to do by the youngest son of someone from Argyllshire. You know, they could piss off as far as they were concerned. And they made a new society. And you see that on the Titanic, that actually Titanic first class was dominated by Americans.
Specifically, for this maiden voyage at least, New York royalty. Financier Benjamin Guggenheim, whose brother founded the famous art gallery. Ida and Isidore Strauss, the owners of Macy's department store. And at the top of the tree, John Jacob Astor IV, who gave his name to the Astoria Hotel on Fifth Avenue.
One of the richest men in the world, and certainly the richest on board, Astor's net worth is estimated at $90 million. In today's money, he'd be a billionaire. But as Titanic prepares for departure, there is one man missing from this fabulously wealthy group. The owner of the ship, J.P. Morgan. The bullish 74-year-old financier has changed his travel plans at the last minute, citing illness.
In fact, he's extended his stay at a spa hotel in Aix-les-Bains so he can spend more time with his 30-something French mistress. For Bruce Ismay, who is not only chairman of White Star, but also president of Morgan's International Mercantile Marine, the boss's decision means a significant upgrade. It's Titanic's owner who was originally supposed to occupy the deluxe parlor suite on B deck.
Now that privilege goes to Ismay instead. The two men have worked together for the best part of a decade, but their professional relationship hasn't always been easy. Especially for Ismay, who at 49 years old is still struggling to live up to his father's legacy.
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Chapter 7: What were the differing opinions on adding extra lifeboats to Titanic?
Chapter 8: How did the public perception of ship safety influence Titanic's design and regulations?
They had these lanes in the Atlantic with ships on them. They had an eastbound lane and a westbound lane, like railway tracks 60 miles apart. And they knew there was always going to be a ship coming along or a ship nearby. Plus they knew about radio. So lifeboats were not for, you know, chilling out on the ocean for a few days.
Lifeboats were for a short period of transshipment between a rescue vessel and a stricken vessel.
Nonetheless, by the early 1910s, when Titanic and her sisters are under construction, the question of how many lifeboats a ship should carry remains an active one. In Britain, the minimum legal requirements are set by the board of trade. And for now, at least Titanic's 20 lifeboats providing seats for approximately half those on board are more than enough to satisfy the inspectors.
The Board of Trade didn't want unsafe ships that were going to sink piled high with lifeboats just to make people think they were safe. What the Board of Trade wanted was to incentivize well-subdivided and well-built ships like Titanic to be able to carry enough lifeboats to be able to ferry passengers from a stricken vessel to a nearby rescue vessel.
Titanic had 20 lifeboats. There were 16 full size and four what they call collapsible. So, you know, smaller ones that were kept up on deck. And that was actually more than she needed to have by the regulations of the day. The regulations, unfortunately, were based on the tonnage of the ship and had not been updated for many years.
The laws of ships had just simply not kept up with the expansion in size of ships over time.
In fact, Titanic's designers are planning several steps ahead. They are determined that the new Olympic-class ships should be future-proof. That's why the davits, or cranes, installed on the ships to lower the lifeboats are actually designed to be double-banked. You can easily fit two lifeboats onto each, doubling the overall capacity.
That way, when the Board of Trade do get round to updating their rulebook, passing the new building code will be a cinch. But in the meantime, The idea of adding extra boats is not a popular one. In fact, when Titanic's chief designer, Thomas Andrews, suggests doing so, he's shot down.
As far as White Star chairman Bruce Ismay is concerned, more lifeboats would be just an eyesore, spoiling the sleek look of his new liners, as well as limiting the amount of space on deck for first-class passengers to stretch their legs. Board of Trade Inspector Morris Clark disagrees. He comes on board early in the morning of April 10, 1912, to conduct the final safety check before departure.
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