An hour after hitting the iceberg Titanic has come to a dead stop. The still-slumbering passengers are told the ship is sinking, but many of them refuse to believe it. Wireless operators Phillips and Bride continue their attempts to summon help. And as freak weather conditions wreak havoc with the distress calls, a rescue ship finally sets a course for Titanic’s position… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Stephanie Barczewski, Jerome Chertkoff, Julian Fellowes, Tim Maltin, Susie Millar. Special thanks to Southampton Archives, Culture and Tourism for the use of the Eva Hart archive. Visit SeaCity Museum for an interactive experience of the Titanic story (seacitymuseum.co.uk) 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 and Liam Cameron | Compositions by Oliver Baines and Dorry Macaulay | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | 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 happens after Titanic hits the iceberg?
It's 12.37 a.m. on April the 15th, 1912. The small Cunard liner Carpathia is en route from New York to Gibraltar. In the wireless room, 21-year-old Marconi operator Harold Cottom is exhausted. He's been on duty since 7 o'clock in the morning. Kottam has just returned from the bridge, where he gave his final report of the day to the ship's officers.
Now he's slipping off his work jacket and unlacing his boots, preparing for bed. But he keeps his headphones on, just in case. Like most liners at the time, Carpathia has only one operator.
The ship's wireless communication is not an around-the-clock service, so when Cottam is off duty or out of the room, any incoming messages go unheeded, including, this evening, the distress calls broadcast by Titanic, both the old signal CQD and the brand new SOS. Before he turns in, the young man decides to do one last good deed for the day.
He's overheard the shore station at Cape Cod struggling to get private messages through to Titanic. Knowing that Carpathia is much closer to the White Star vessel, he decides to lend a hand. But when Cotton makes contact with Titanic to let them know they have messages waiting, he gets a lot more than he bargained for. Come at once, sends Titanic's senior operator Jack Phillips.
We've struck a berg. In case Cottam should doubt the severity of the situation, Phillips adds, it's a CQD, old man, before giving Titanic's last known coordinates. Cottam is stunned. Shall I report this to the captain? He sends back feebly. The answer comes back right away. Yes, come quick. Cottam races to the bridge, where he finds First Officer Horace Dean on watch.
Together, the two men go to wake Captain Arthur Rostron. What the hell? exclaims Rostron, demanding to know why Cottam and Dean have barged into his cabin. The young Marconi operator describes the message he just received from Titanic. You're absolutely sure? Rostron asks. Any trace of irritation gone now? Certain, replies Cottam. Captain Rostron leaps out of bed and throws on a dressing gown.
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Chapter 2: How does the Carpathia respond to Titanic's distress call?
The three men make for the bridge. Within moments, the captain is issuing orders. Call all hands on deck, he commands. Get ready to swing out the boats. Rostron sets a course for Titanic's position, full speed ahead. He tells Cottam to let Phillips know help is coming. But the distance between the two ships is more than 50 miles.
For a steamer like Carpathia, with a top speed of only 14 knots, that's about four hours sailing time. The question is, will Titanic still be afloat when they reach her? From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Titanic Ship of Dreams, Part 6. An hour after hitting the iceberg, Titanic has come to a dead stop. The sea all around is as calm as the mill pond.
The stars so bright that you can read your watch by them. Passengers have begun to come up on deck in their life jackets. But although this ship has already developed a slight list, very few people on board know that she's sinking. Let alone that her designer, Thomas Andrews, has predicted she'll go down within a couple of hours.
Chapter 3: What are the challenges faced by the wireless operators?
In the wireless room on the boat deck, Marconi operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride are hard at work. They're still trying to reach other potential rescue ships, and they're not having much luck. Tim Moulton.
One of the things that came out of the Titanic disaster inquiry was that there should be 24-hour radio watch. In reality, what that meant was that there should be two radio operators on all ships. Now, Titanic was a vast ship, and she did have two radio operators in Phillips and Bright.
But all the other ships in the area that were smaller, that were responding to these distress signals, they only had one operator. So I think it was hit and miss at that time of night. Had the collision occurred in the daytime, everyone would have been awake and it would have been no problem. In fact, the first distress signal was not sent out until after midnight.
That was when ships without dual radio operators had no one on radio watch that night.
In fact, Titanic's wireless men have just made contact with another liner, the Frankfurt. Unfortunately, she's even further away than the Carpathia.
Phillips and Bride are tapping away for about an hour and a half after the collision, trying desperately to hope that someone else is going to wake up who's nearer to them and get the message. Unfortunately, most of the replies that are coming in are coming in from ships that they know don't have the speed to arrive in time. Professor Jerome Cherkov.
There was no ship that could come and help them in time. If another ship had been within hailing distance, that would have saved a lot of lives.
They get a heartbreaking reply from the Olympic that says, OK, I've got it. I'm 400 miles away. Are you steering to meet us?
Titanic's sister ship, Olympic, is captained by White Star veteran Herbert Haddock, the man who put Titanic through her sea trials in Belfast Loch just two weeks earlier. At first, it's hard for Haddock to grasp just how serious the damage from the iceberg really is. After all, these are the ships that everyone said were unsinkable.
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Chapter 4: Why did the Californian fail to respond to Titanic?
And of course, the inquiry actually tried to trace this ship and they wondered, was it the Samson? Was it this? Was it that? They all tried to think of what is a ship that is five miles between these two vessels.
It's not until more than a century after Titanic sank that the discovery of the Coldwater Mirage offers a possible solution.
And of course, what the miraging discovery made me realize is that the mystery ship was a mirage, if you like. It was the Californian appearing nearer to Titanic than she was, and it was Titanic appearing nearer to Californian than she was. So there was, in fact, no mystery ships. Survivor Eva Hart.
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Did you know that the team behind Titanic Ship of Dreams makes other podcasts too? Discover them all at Noisa.com, the home of the Noisa podcast network. Real Dictators, also hosted by me, Paul McGann, returns on April the 30th with the story of Fidel Castro. Head to Noisa.com to find out more.
For Titanic's crew, identifying the ship they can see to the north of them is less important than getting its attention. Since their wireless distress call has gone unanswered, other means of communication must be attempted. But these two fall foul of the freak weather conditions that night.
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Chapter 5: What impact did atmospheric conditions have on the rescue?
At a quarter past one, Captain Lord is woken by his second officer, Herbert Stone, and informed that rockets have been sighted. Are they company signals? The captain asks. Stone replies that he can't be sure. Well, go on morsing, Captain Lord tells him, before drifting back to sleep. It's a violation of the strict regulations regarding rockets spotted at sea.
According to the Board of Trade rulebook, if there's any doubt about their intended meaning, then they must be assumed to be distress signals. In the inquiries to come, the Californian's captain will be heavily criticized for his inaction. With the benefit of hindsight, it's hard not to see Lorde as grossly negligent, certainly compared to the heroic Captain Rostron of the Carpathia.
Julian Fallows
The Carpathia had an efficient, disciplined captain with a proper sense of values, and his only limitation was simply the distance he was away. He got there as quickly as he could, but it was too late. The Californian is the example of how not to run a ship. And actually, ironically, it was the Californian that gave rise to the greatest change in shipping rules and laws.
I mean, the fact that after this accident, you could never turn off a ship's radio again because the Californian just turned off their radio when everyone wanted to go to bed. I mean, it sounds incredible to us, but that is exactly what happened. And they didn't even turn it on when they woke the captain up to tell him the rockets were still going off, the alarm rockets were still being sent off.
We have the benefit of hindsight and he did not. And we have to remember that the reason that captains are captains is because all of their experience is brought to bear and they look at things and they trust their judgment sometimes more than the judgment of their junior officers because they've got more experience.
And just as Captain Smith's experience was working against him, so Captain Lord's experience was working against him.
Captain Lord has had his defenders over the years, but I think they're on a poor wicket, to be honest. I think his behavior is disgraceful and inexplicable. All he had to do was very slowly and carefully travel the five miles that separated him from the Titanic to find out what was going on. And if nothing had been going on, then he could have stopped there and gone back to bed.
But he chose not to do it. He was a shameful figure for the rest of his life. And without sounding too hard, I think he deserved to be. He condemned many men and women and children to their deaths when he could have saved them all. And it really is as simple as that.
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Chapter 6: How did Captain Lord's decisions affect the rescue efforts?
There's a crew member who's sleeping and some of his buddies come in and tell him, hey, you know, we've hit an iceberg, there's ice all over the decks. And he just says, yeah, well, that won't do any harm and, you know, rolls back over and goes back to sleep.
Only 12 hours earlier, White Star Chairman Bruce Ismay was cheerfully boasting to first-class passengers, we are in amongst the icebergs. Even now, after the collision, hitting a berg is seen as a novelty. Fletcher Williams is in his first-class cabin on Seadeck, sipping on a whiskey cocktail, when his business partner, Elmer Taylor, knocks on the door.
We've struck an iceberg, Taylor declares gleefully. I brought you a piece of it for your highball. Ever since Captain Smith gave the order to start loading the lifeboats, Titanic's stewards have been knocking on doors, doing their best to persuade the sleeping inhabitants to come up on deck, with limited success.
Titanic had no, if you like, tannoy system. She had no sort of global system where the bridge could make a message. So in fact, you know, stewards would have been told to get people up, but they didn't want to create a panic. So I think they'd have given the impression that it's a precaution. you know, that we've had some serious damage as a precaution, people should get in the lifeboats.
They had to walk that tightrope between creating a panic on a ship where there were not enough lifeboats for everyone versus actually getting an orderly evacuation and saving as many people as possible. Not everyone is in the mood to cooperate.
It is very late at night. Many people would have eaten a heavy meal, probably drunk a fair bit. I mean, I think some people are just going to be in such disbelief. They're going to say, oh, you know, and the fact that you're in bed and you're warm and you're cozy and you don't want to get up. If nothing else, it's going to delay you reacting to it, right?
Because you're probably going to say, oh, five more minutes and then I'll get up. This can't really be that sort of urgent.
They'd been sold a ticket on an unsinkable ship and here they were being told, it's sinking.
It's not just that you were woken from sleep, it's that, you know, if I'm sitting in my cabin awake and somebody comes and tells me, we've hit an iceberg, you need to get your life belt on and get up to the boat deck, and the bump seems really minor, is this guy right or not? I think if you have a public address system with the captain telling you,
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Chapter 7: What lessons were learned from the Titanic disaster?
Lightoller was in bed when the iceberg first scraped along the side of the ship. From his cabin on the port side of the boat deck, the damage didn't feel that severe.
Lightoller said he felt a slight bump and heard a grinding sound. That was it. And he didn't think it was a big deal. And other people didn't think it was a big deal. Some ice had fallen on the deck where passengers went sometimes on promenades and they were playing with the ice. You know, getting the lifeboats out and down was just kind of show and tell. It was just pro forma.
It wasn't really needed, but we probably ought to do it just because that's sort of what you're supposed to do. Something happens to the ship.
That morning, Titanic's crew were supposed to have taken part in their first lifeboat trail at sea. But that was canceled by Captain Smith in favor of an extended church service. Now, a little over 12 hours later, they find themselves lowering the boats for real.
They were cradled in what are called davits, so a cradling and lowering mechanism. It was basically chain-based, so you lowered them down using a chain system.
So there's the crewmen on each side holding the rope, right, through a pulley. And then there's the rope is attached to the bow of the lifeboat, the stern of the lifeboat. And the crewmen have to work together to lower it. And that's very hard to do. And again, remember, they hadn't had much practice, right? So what would often happen is one crewman would lower too fast.
And so suddenly the bow of the ship is dangling down and everybody's about to fall out of the lifeboat. And then the same thing would happen with the stern. So it's a very, very scary, perky-jerky process. Early on, they can't really convince people to get into the lifeboats. People are like, why would I want to get off this nice warm ship and go out there in the freezing cold ocean?
The ship seems a lot safer. But part of it also is because the lifeboats are not being loaded in a very kind of orderly fashion.
There was no emergency planning and training. There was no practice or training on the ship of passengers going to the lifeboats. Passengers were not assigned to specific lifeboats. So there was pretty much chaos.
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