Titanic's Tragic Twin: The Britannic Disaster

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 was a tragedy unlike any other.

Surely it could never happen again?

But it did.

Because, incredibly, Titanic had a near identical sister,

who suffered an almost identical fate.

And here, deep in the warm waters of the Mediterranean,

within only a few years of her older sibling,

she met her end.

Her name was Britannic.

She was Britain's biggest ship.

After the Titanic disaster, Britannic was re-engineered to be

even more unsinkable. And yet,

on the 21st November, 1916,

she sank in just 55 minutes -

three times faster than Titanic.

I'll be speaking to the descendants of survivors who we've tracked down

for the very first time.

Using rarely seen and unpublished diaries and letters of captain

and crew, we'll recreate what it was like for Britannic's survivors

to have one hour to fight for their lives.

And we'll discover how Britannic's victims died horribly,

and avoidably.

Tonight we'll be piecing together what happened in that 55 minutes.

On the anniversary of her sinking,

we're recreating the first

minute-by-minute account of the events

that led to the tragic end of Titanic's lost sister, Britannic -

Britain's mightiest ship of World War I.

This is the dry dock in Belfast where both Titanic and Britannic

were built. And it is truly vast.

In 1910, it was the biggest dry dock in the world,

established to allow the building of two of the biggest ships that anyone

had ever seen. Just to give you a scale of them,

Titanic or Britannic alone would have filled this entire space.

Our guide to Britannic's story is Simon Mills,

owner of the Britannic wreck.

Simon is going to help me find eyewitness accounts to the disaster.

Now the Britannic story isn't nearly as well-known

as the Titanic's story,

and I'm trying to, kind of, unpick it and discover what happened.

Titanic sank, very high publicity, I mean,

they interviewed as many survivors as possible,

newspaper coverage all over the place.

Britannic sank in the First World War.

OK. Are there any key characters, any relatives,

anyone I can talk to who can give me a, kind of,

picture of the people that were on this ship?

I can give you some starting points.

For instance, we have here Captain Charles Alfred Bartlett.

He was in command of the Britannic on the day she sank.

-Archie Jewell, who was also on the Titanic...

-Oh, really?

..actually one of Titanic's lookouts, believe it or not.

Violet Jessop, very experienced White Star Line stewardess.

-Oh, she's beautiful, isn't she?

-She is indeed, yeah.

Anyone else that would be able to shed any more light on what it might

have been like that day?

-Sheila Macbeth, nurse...

-Right.

-..kept a very detailed diary.

One of the big challenges, and you know this as a historian,

is to hear the voices of people who weren't educated.

The people who were, I don't know, right in the bowels,

at the coal face doing the work,

but not necessarily ever recorded.

There's a story of an Antrim seaman

we believe, who was actually on the Britannic.

He told a very, very dramatic story down in the engine room.

-He was from Ulster?

-He was an Ulsterman.

Can you also give me a sense of...

Of what the ship was doing?

Was this a, sort of, to all intents and purposes, an ordinary day?

Pretty routine, yeah. I mean,

Britannic was a very, very safe posting.

She was a hospital ship. She was, in theory, inviolable,

could not be attacked. It was beautiful, calm, clear weather.

There was nothing unusual about what was going on.

They'd all been sitting down to breakfast,

and suddenly the world collapsed.

So all is smooth sailing aboard His Majesty's Hospital Ship, Britannic.

Everyone, and everything, is in order.

The day before, we'd worked like factory hands,

tying up all the kits ready for the next day,

so that we might rest the day before the patients came on board.

What a day of rest that was.

The first person I need to meet is Margaret Meehan,

niece of Violet Jessop, the adventurous stewardess who,

amazingly, survives both Titanic AND Britannic.

What's important for me,

is that Violet writes the most complete account

of the Britannic's sinking.

Do you remember your, sort of,

first time meeting her and what she was like?

She was great fun.

I think she was just highly practical

as well as everything else.

And she never complained about the things she brings up in her memoirs.

And certainly of the terrible experiences she'd had,

she didn't talk about.

It wasn't till later that I realised what she'd been through.

I've got this thing here.

-Is this the original?

-Oh, well, this is 1930 typing, you know.

I can read a little bit out if you like.

I'd love you to.

"It was the feast of Our , November 21st, 1916.

"The early sun was shining through the windows of the lounge,

"they were there for Mass..."

Everybody scrambled down to breakfast talking and joking.

For breakfast was quite the nicest, friendliest time on board.

The ship was steaming 20 knots, weather fine, and the sea is smooth.

Bound to Moudros to embark sick and wounded.

But this is just the calm before the storm. At 8:12am, disaster strikes.

The Britannic and her crew now have just 55 minutes left.

There was a dull, deafening roar.

Britannic gave a shiver.

A long drawn-out shudder from stem to stern,

shaking the crockery on the tables, breaking things.

Until it slowly subsided...

We all knew that she had been struck.

I'd only managed two spoonfuls of porridge before...

Bang! And a shiver...

..right down the length of the ship.

There was a horrible jar, and a...

..grinding noise. But...

down below we hardly realised what had happened.

At 8:12am, a tremendous but muffled explosion occurred.

The ship trembling and vibrating most violently fore and aft.

Britannic has taken a hit on her lowest deck,

ahead of her boiler rooms.

But surprisingly, no-one on board is particularly worried.

That's because when Britannic's more famous sister Titanic sank,

Britannic was still being built in Belfast.

Ship builders Harland and Wolff need to avoid another disaster.

They give Britannic a second hull, watertight engine rooms,

and plenty of lifeboats.

Britannic really is the world's most unsinkable ship.

As World War I broke out,

the British government decided that sturdy, safe Britannic

would make a terrific hospital ship.

Sailing peacefully from Southampton via Naples to Greece, Britannic is

in fact on her fifth mission.

She'd already brought over 12,000

wounded British soldiers safely home.

Now, in the wake of the Gallipoli disaster,

she's off to collect another boatload.

This is Kea island,

it lies 60 miles south-east of Athens on the beautiful Aegean Sea.

And 100 years ago, His Majesty's Hospital Ship, the Britannic,

sailed past here on its way to the port of Moudros to pick up

thousands of injured Allied troops who'd been fighting the Turks.

But little did the 1,065 sailors, doctors and nurses on board realise

that this would be the Britannic's last journey.

During my 25 years of diving,

I've always dreamed of reaching Britannic.

Now, on the centenary of her sinking,

I've been lucky enough to join highly experienced British and American divers

on a rare expedition to the wreck of Britannic.

It's 100%. 100%. Here it is, it's in order.

Team leader Richie Kohler has dived

both Britannic and her sister, Titanic.

What do you think the risks are on a dive like this?

It's an incredibly hostile environment at 400 feet.

We're using multiple different gas mixtures,

some would not support life here on the surface,

and yet they are life-supporting at 400 feet.

If you make a mistake, it can cost you your life.

As a diver who's dived shipwrecks all round the world,

why is Britannic so special?

Like many other people, the story of Titanic is what drew me to Britannic.

And not to be glib, I fell in love with the younger sister.

She's even more beautiful.

When you look at Titanic, it's dark,

it's gloomy, it's broken apart, it's in pieces.

When you look at Britannic, she's in beautiful clear water,

surrounded by life.

As Britannic is hit by the explosion,

Able Seaman Archie Jewell is working on deck

right over the point of impact.

Archie also survived Titanic.

I'm meeting his great, great-niece, Tamsin Jewell.

So he was on the Titanic first?

He was, yes. He was on the Titanic as a lookout.

So was HE responsible for the Titanic hitting the iceberg?

He was a lookout, yes, but not THE lookout.

He was actually in bed

and it was the sound of the impact that woke him.

Right. When you look at the photo of him here, he looks very formal,

he looks very... I don't know, composed.

But presumably he must have been hugely upset,

hugely traumatised by the experiences that he went through?

There was plenty of times he describes openly weeping when he's

reminiscing about the things that he saw.

And I would imagine, even though he had a relatively short-lived life,

it was something that stayed with him the whole time.

So do we know his role in the story of Britannic?

We do. Archie wrote a very detailed letter about what happened

on the morning, where it happened on the ship,

and in the days and weeks that followed on his journey.

He's quite descriptive in this letter.

There's one part that always, sort of, stands out.

That's a part where he says, "But thank God I am not dead...

'For that is the nearest to death that I have ever been.'

'I was working right close to where she was struck.

I saw the water coming in. The smell of powder.

Before I knew where I was, this man came rushing out of a cabin door,

right where she was struck, and ran into me -

struck me with his head just above my eyes, so...

I was blood, all over.

I ran up to the boat deck.

And then someone tied up my eye...

..so I was like old Nelson.

Only one eye.

Archie was incredibly lucky.

The first piece of evidence I want to see is the site of the explosion

that set Britannic on the path to disaster.

But I'm going to need some hi-tech help to reach the wreck.

Our base at sea will be the extraordinary Russian ship,

the U-boat Navigator.

It's been designed specifically to support underwater exploration.

Nearly three miles offshore, we spot the wreck on sonar.

The two multi-million pound mini subs will guide us

and light our way to the wreck,

while remote-controlled underwater cameras will track our every move

with all the safety backup of a space mission.

There is no clear single reason why Britannic was lost,

just a series of clues which I want to see for myself.

So I've plotted an exploration path that will take me from the bow where

the explosion hit, up to the captain's bridge,

deep down to the boiler room corridor,

and finally to the mighty propellers at the back.

Each of these points on the ship

will help me understand what led to Britannic's end.

Ready? Let's go.

OK, lads.

Everything changes as we leave the world of air

and enter the ocean.

Deep-sea diving is the closest thing on earth to exploring outer space.

This line will guide us to Britannic.

The subs, and the robot cameras,

will light our way in the darkness when we're 400 feet down.

And then, out of the blue, she appears.

Britannic.

I'm overwhelmed. Seeing Britannic is like seeing her sister, Titanic,

as we imagine her to be -

majestic, intact,

and so peaceful on the seabed.

I'm meeting Jonathan Mitchell, grandson of nurse Sheila Macbeth.

Sheila's testimony will tell me how the crew reacted to the explosion.

Did you ever get a sense of the sort of woman that Sheila was

-before you were born?

-She was a strong-minded, strong-willed woman,

like many of her family.

And she'd also, of course,

been driven in a way that everybody was in those days by patriotism

-and a feeling that you ought to do your bit.

-Right.

What sort of age is she at this point?

26.

Did you ever get a sense of how

Sheila felt or reacted when the explosion happened?

Yes, my father decided to record her memoirs.

Many, many hours' worth.

She talks about exactly this.

-ARCHIVE:

-'We were at breakfast.

'And we were sitting in the huge dining room,

'there was this sudden bang as the ship shook.'

Major Priestley told us to sit down again, as the siren had not sounded.

It was quite the best thing to do

as the doors were few and narrow,

and there might have easily been a panic.

As it was, there was only a most unnatural silence.

The engines were going full speed at the time, but they were stopped,

and everyone was ordered to stand by.

We're about to see what Sheila and the unnamed sailor could not -

we've come to the exact point of the explosion that crippled Britannic.

100 feet back from the bow of the ship, is the immense crevasse

in the hull where Britannic was torn apart.

This massive canyon was caused first by the explosion holing her,

and later, when she sank,

she was split apart by the ship hitting the seabed.

But what caused the explosion?

The British press claimed the Germans have torpedoed a defenceless British hospital ship

against all rules of war.

But is this view credible?

At that particular stage of the war, the Germans were not targeting

hospital ships, and so it was unlikely.

But, you know, presumably, mistakes are made, or presumably,

not everybody follows the rules. I mean, this is a war, after all.

Yeah. The German commanders at this stage were under increasing pressure

not to antagonise America.

So the potential consequences

for a commander who made a mistake could be quite heavy.

Given that was the case, given that was the rule,

why were torpedoes ever really in the mix as a possibility?

Whenever ships were sunk in the war

there was always someone who saw a periscope or a torpedo.

On Britannic, for instance, we had two definite sightings of torpedoes.

The problem is that one person saw the torpedo at the front of the ship on the starboard side,

and the other saw it on the back of the ship on the port side.

So it was one of these situations whereby people see things,

-but they're not really quite sure what they've seen.

-Right.

So, if indeed it was a mine,

do we know that that area of the sea had been mined?

We do, as it happens. There's this gentleman here.

Kapitan Gustav Siess.

He was the commander of the German submarine U73.

She was a mine-laying submarine.

Three weeks before Britannic hit the mine, he laid mines

in the exact same waters where she went down.

So you're saying it was a mine, not a torpedo?

-Absolutely.

-Categorically?

-Categorically.

Bottom line, wrong place, wrong time.

'My first impression was that we'd struck a mine'

and would probably be safe.

Captain Charles Bartlett is responsible for the safety

of the 1,065 souls on board.

He has 33 years' experience at sea,

so Britannic's crew should be safe.

His grandnephew, Richard Ellis,

might be able to help me judge the captain's character and competence

thanks to stories passed down from his father.

Did your father give you any idea of what sort of man he was?

Well, he was quite a large man.

17 stone. Wow!

So he's a big man. He was renowned for his caution.

He was a cautious captain.

But also, you know, a man in command.

If you were in his presence, you knew that he was in command.

-He was in control.

-So what was his route up to becoming captain of the

-Britannic?

-He joined the White Star Line and worked his way up the ranks

very quickly. He captained some of their largest ships.

He then came onshore, he was marine superintendent, and in fact,

he oversaw the final fitting out and the crewing of the Titanic.

-Oh, really?

-So he knew these big ships enormously well.

So given his experience, you know, the fact that he actually oversaw

the, kind of, final fitting and crewing of the Titanic,

surely it would have made sense if he'd been the captain?

I think if the timing was just very slightly different,

then a few months later,

he almost certainly would have been captain of the Titanic.

And, you know, with his cautious approach, you know,

the Titanic disaster would never have happened.

That's what the wags would tell you.

And when the Britannic was struck,

do you know, does history recall,

how Captain Bartlett reacted?

-What he did?

-He was off duty, but he raced up to the bridge,

he did what was needed to be done.

SOS. Have struck mine off Port Nicholas, Kea island.

This is the bridge where Captain Bartlett stood that day.

Incredibly, the tiles are still on the floor

from where the ship was steered.

Though it's becoming a man-made reef, if you look carefully,

you can see the steering gear underneath.

And if you rub a little,

you can still find the glass of the telegraph that Captain Bartlett used

to send orders to the engine room.

But time has taken its toll.

It's only thanks to the wood and walls rotting away that the most

astonishingly intimate relic has been revealed.

Captain Bartlett's bath tub.

He was the last man to sit in it, and the plug is still in.

One story goes that he'd been in his tub

when the explosion sent him running,

in his pyjamas, to the bridge.

Emergency quarters were sounded on all alarms throughout the ship.

The engine stopped, and orders rung below to close watertight doors.

I gave orders to clear away all boats and have all possible ready to be sent away.

As one man, the whole of the saloon rose from their seats.

Doctors and nurses vanished to their posts,

men jumped over presses with the agility of deer.

In seconds, not a soul was to be seen.

And not a sound had been uttered.

Britannic's crew mirrors society -

most men below deck are considered the lower orders.

As medical staff like Violet head to the lifeboats,

in the decks below,

men in the boiler rooms are fighting incoming water.

Many of these men will die,

so the testimony of those who survive is vital evidence.

When this explosion hit,

there must have been people in those boiler rooms.

The boiler rooms would have been full, absolutely.

There would have been a couple of hundred people down there working.

One gentleman in particular,

is a guy here by the name of Bert Smith.

Now, he was working in the forward boiler room, number six,

when the explosion occurred.

The medical staff, captain are away from it,

-Bert was experiencing it first hand.

-Look at this. This is amazing.

So he was right there.

-He was right there.

-"Bert Smith groped his way into the exit tunnel,

"his one route to possible safety.

"There he was met by the full weight of in rushing water which pinned him

"against the boiler."

So the explosion had happened

and that water was then being,

effectively, funnelled down that exit.

-Absolutely.

-That corridor.

Like a tidal wave. All coming in one direction.

Right up against Bert.

"Grabbing a handrail, he was swept almost upside down

"in the salty torrent, then somehow

"he managed to scramble up a 90-foot staircase to the boat deck."

-That's an amazing story.

-He was a very lucky man.

Well, sort of.

So Bert and these people down below

knew exactly what was happening

and would have had a very, very good sense of the very real danger this ship was in,

whereas the nurses and Captain Bartlett, way up in the posh bits,

wouldn't have known at all.

But it's only the upstairs staff like Violet who can tell me how well

the captain is managing.

And let's not forget,

Violet's already been through this on Titanic.

This time though, she wants to be a bit better prepared.

I sorted out things to take.

The things I treasured the most.

There was my prayer book...

..and my toothbrush.

Ned's ring, and my clock, of course.

Incredibly, that clock has outlasted both Violet AND Britannic.

-Is this the clock?

-Yeah.

What an extraordinary keepsake.

I can't believe she had the presence of mind,

when the ship is going down,

to go down to her cabin and fill her pockets.

-But it sounds like that's quite typical of her character, would you say so?

-Yes.

I think it is. Also, her brothers had told her,

"don't forget your toothbrush!"

I stuffed all sorts of things into my pockets.

Even a roll from the breakfast table.

Up on the bridge, Captain Bartlett

has no idea how much water has come in.

Britannic's watertight boiler rooms SHOULD prevent her taking on water.

But she's sinking - and fast.

Three miles from Kea island,

he decides he must beach the ship.

Steering gear appeared to have failed.

So I turned the ship to port to head for land by the engines.

But as Britannic pushes towards shore, she continues to sink.

The forward holds filled up rapidly

and water was reported in numbers five and six boiler rooms.

But why? Bartlett has ordered

the watertight doors to the boiler room shut,

no more sea water should get in.

But stoker Bert Mills has told us

that water IS flooding through the boiler room corridors -

could the explanation lie right here

inside the corridor to the boiler rooms?

But I can't go in.

It's so frustrating.

Britannic's interior is so dangerous,

the Greek government has now banned anyone from going inside.

But two of our dive team DID get inside her before the ban.

Evan Kovacs took the dangerous path through the boiler room corridor

also known as the fireman's tunnel to try and confirm if the watertight

safety doors were fully closed.

Evan, what did you see that very first time you went into the wreck?

We travelled down the fireman's tunnel and eventually we got to the

watertight door. That was open.

Through the next set of boilers and then that opens up,

and that's where we saw the other watertight door, open.

Fully open, not even partially closed.

What this means is that as Captain Bartlett is steaming full speed,

trying to get to Kea

to save his ship,

in effect he is actually ramming

more of the water,

forcing more water into these boiler

rooms and flooding the ship even quicker.

So why do you think the watertight doors didn't close?

Now, it's been a mystery for nearly 100 years.

We know that Captain Bartlett threw the switches to electrically

close the door, maybe the wires were broken.

Engineers believe that the explosion

twisted the ship, and that prevented,

or wedged the doors, and wouldn't allow them to close.

So maybe it was a technical error.

But Ritchie suspects the all too human behaviour

of the boiler room workers.

These men were not trained sailors.

They were referred to as the black gang,

and you would have stokers and firemen,

trimmers and people that just had to work

in an incredibly unforgiving environment.

I mean, can you imagine it, being at the very bottom of the ship

with the lights flickering

and a gush of water coming in through that fireman's tunnel?

And you have seconds to make decisions.

Am I going to sit here and try to monkey around with this door?

Or am I going to run for my life?

Some people wouldn't blame them for running.

But even if they did,

it doesn't make the sinking of Britannic their fault.

She was so well engineered,

she should stay afloat a lot longer than 55 minutes,

even with this many compartments flooded.

Nurse Sheila Macbeth's family point the finger far higher up the social

ladder towards one of the ship's doctors.

Somebody had opened all the portholes.

On both sides of the ship, so as to ventilate the wards,

in which there were, in fact, no patients requiring ventilation.

Now, who this doctor was who had given these orders,

nobody by now will ever know.

Nobody has ever come forward and said, "It was me."

But we have it.

It happened. And it shouldn't.

The ship should have been unsinkable.

It should have beached on the island of Kea

with no casualties whatsoever.

We didn't get any inrush of water where we were.

That seemed to be in the forward part of the ship.

As the list grew worse...

..we knew what was happening.

The unknown sailor knew one thing for sure.

Despite the claims that this ship, like her sister could never sink,

a terrible domino effect was now in play that would pull Britannic down.

No-one on board imagined she'd go down as quickly as she did.

With the doors open, water rushed down the fireman's passage

and flooded boiler room six.

From there, it spread through another set of open doors

into boiler room five and now

the whole fore part of the ship is flooded.

And as the ship sank, it was listing to starboard,

and with water rushing through the portholes on E deck,

the ship's fate was sealed.

But why will Britannic suffer such terrible loss of life?

Unlike her sister, Titanic, there are plenty of lifeboats.

And by 8:36am,

most of the crew were up on deck ready to board them.

We were kept hanging over the side of the boat for a long while,

as the vice captain, who was looking after the lowering of the boats,

had to dash off in the middle to call back some 14 or 15 firemen

who'd gone off from the poop deck

in a boat that should have held about 84 persons.

No lifeboat should be released without the captain's orders.

But Sheila sees some of the boiler room gang jump into a boat

and set off early.

They were desperate to get away, but, of course,

they were the masters of their own fate because the "abandon ship" command had not been given.

Frankly, you would have expected officers to have stopped it,

but clearly they were unable to prevent these men, sort of,

grabbing the boats, if you like, and going.

Meanwhile, Captain Bartlett is trying to save Britannic

by driving her hard towards Kea island.

He has no idea several dozen of the crew

have already launched their lifeboats.

He would never have expected anyone to be in the water,

because HE had not given the "abandon ship" command.

And he is the only person, as captain, who could do that.

So he had the right to expect that nobody would be in the water.

They should not have been there.

There's a couple of things that I want clarified.

The first is that I thought lifeboats

could only be released from a ship

on the orders of a captain.

-Yes, that's right.

-So how on earth could Captain Bartlett be unaware

that there were lifeboats in the water?

The initial order, after the explosion was to uncover the boats,

to fill them, and to lower them over the side.

No order was given to release the boats.

So how did they end up being released without his authority?

It could have been part of the chaos, confusion that was going on.

We do know that a couple of boats went away off the stern without

permission and had to be called back. It depended where

your officers were. A degree of control was lost in places.

People were in a panic.

-Maybe in a panic, yeah.

-And what state was the ship in at this time?

At this stage, very serious.

She's increasingly listing to starboard on the right-hand side.

As she moves forward, she's flooding

so fast in the bow that the stern is now beginning to rise up.

As a result, the poor propeller is now working above the surface.

As the propeller rises, it pulls towards it the lifeboats already in the water.

I'm now approaching that very propeller.

23 feet of enormous spinning power.

Meanwhile, Violet is hanging above,

in a lifeboat suspended off the side of the ship.

She can see the propellers turning.

Just at that moment, a lifeboat caught my eye.

It had been lowered safely to the water but then drifted with sudden

impetus, resisting the efforts of skilled oarsmen -

right into those cruel, swirling...blades.

It was cutting the poor fellows to pieces.

There was legs, arms and bodies flying everywhere.

What made it so bad,

the blades, they were half out of the water.

So they were coming down right on the boat.

Eyes were looking with horror at the debris.

And the red streaks all over the water.

Up on the bridge, Captain Bartlett is unaware of the tragedy unfolding

at the back of the ship. He has not yet given the official order

to release the lifeboats. Violet, Archie,

and many of the crew are about to find themselves fighting for their lives.

The ship started listing to starboard

as our lifeboat began to lower.

A young sea scout near me took a deep breath as he got in,

he was only a kid.

So tell me a little bit about this sea scout.

Well, that little sea scout was George Perman.

He was 15 at the time.

He was one of the lift operators on board,

and he was very fortunate to be on duty,

because his quarters were actually destroyed in the explosion.

So he ran to the lifeboats and got in,

and I managed to speak with him in the late '90s.

This is what he said.

ARCHIVE: I made my way to the top deck,

and on my way to my lifeboat,

I was given this lifebelt.

And lowered into the water.

His first shock came as our lifeboat,

hooking itself onto an open porthole, tilted us,

then righting itself again,

started gliding rapidly down...

..making a terrible impact upon the water.

After we touched the water,

I turned around to see how my small friend had taken the impact...

..only to find him halfway up the ship's sides...

..still attached to the rope.

Violet was beckoning him to come into the sea before it was too late,

so he lowered himself down into the water,

nothing worse really than bad burns on his hands,

but George was very psychologically scarred for the rest of his life.

He saw the red blood being flecked against the side of the white ship,

and they always thought, George's family, although they were

quite tall people, George never really grew very much and they

believed that his growth had been stunted by the shock of what he saw.

So George is in this red,

blood-filled water, I mean,

it's unimaginable what that must have been like.

Violet, she's still in the lifeboat, is she?

She's still in the lifeboat. She's surrounded by this scene of complete

carnage. Blood everywhere, hacked bodies in the water.

It must have been very traumatic for her.

In Violet's lifeboat, it's every man for himself.

Deciding they have more chance trying to swim for it, one by one,

her companions dive into the water.

Fumbling hands, struggling, unsuccessfully to get control.

Every man jack in the group of surrounding boats

took a flying leap into the sea -

taking to the water like a vast army of rats.

It was extraordinary to find myself, within a few minutes,

almost the only occupant of the boat.

One man, a doctor,

was standing in the silence beside me.

I turned around

and saw Britannic's huge blades churning

and mincing everything near them -

men, boats - everything was just one ghastly whirl.

In another moment, I would be under those blades.

Unless...

I have always been afraid of the water.

I'd not learned to swim.

Then I just jumped overboard down and down into bottomless depths,

clutching at my lifebelt.

"Why had I put it on over my coat?"

was one thought, as I felt its weight dragging me down deeper.

I kept my eyes tightly closed.

And held my breath.

The only hope for Archie's boat is to stay tethered to Britannic.

I shouted out not to let go of the boat.

But someone let her go. And away we went, right towards the blades.

So I shouted, "jump overboard," and most of us jumped in the water,

but...it was no good.

It was pulled right in under the blades.

Violet is now trapped beneath the shattered lifeboat,

surrounded by dismembered body parts.

I myself felt rising,

and my head came into violent contact with something solid.

Something that prevented me from reaching the surface.

CRASHING BOOM

There was another terrific crash above me.

And something struck the back of my head.

My brain shook.

Panic seized me,

and I groped blindly in that water.

There was a thundering centre of noise.

Suddenly, I touched something...

..an arm,

that moved as mine moved.

My fingers gripped it like a vice.

Until my almost senseless head remembered that it is said

that people drowning retain their hold after death...

..bringing death to another.

I let go.

As Violet disappears under water,

Archie is pulled under the propeller.

Archie could hear the blades swirling above him,

and he goes on to write,

"The last thing I heard was the blades hit the boat,

"and I closed my eyes and said goodbye to this world."

But I was struck by a big piece of the boat, and I went under the blades,

and I was going around like a top.

And...when I came up again,

I came up under some wreckage.

And I couldn't get clear.

And everything was going black to me when someone on top who was

struggling pushed the wreckage away,

and I came up just in time.

I was almost done for.

There was water coming out of my nose.

And my mouth.

There was this poor fellow drowning.

He caught hold of me...

But I had to shrug him off.

So the poor fellow went under.

I was sinking.

My lifebelt was not sufficient to support me.

I saw another floating by.

So I grabbed at it.

At last I had something to hold on to.

And just in time,

Violet bursts upwards.

The first thing my eyes beheld was a head near me.

A head split open like a sheep's head served by the butcher.

All around were limbs,

wrenched out as if some giant had torn them in his rage.

The dead floated by so peacefully.

There were men coming up only to go down again for the last time.

A look of frightful horror on their faces.

Captain Bartlett stopped the propellers.

But only because Britannic had started sinking faster.

He knew nothing of the bloodbath in the water.

Do we know now how many people died?

We do. There were 30.

Nine of them were from the medical corps,

so they weren't actually ship's crew.

The rest were ship's crew,

but the majority of them were from what was known as the black gang.

They were stokers, firemen,

who had come up from below decks when the water entered.

So these men whose jobs were to be right in the bowels of the ship,

who were right there when the mine struck, reacted in, probably,

the only way they possibly could.

Sheer blind panic and survival kicking in

to get them out of that place

where the water was flooding in,

only to end up going to their deaths by a very human mistake.

It was. It was just a totally unnecessary loss of life,

because if procedures had been followed,

it should not have happened.

But you can understand, in the chaos and panic,

particularly coming up from below decks,

it's understandable that people want to get off the ship.

But, of course, that was actually what led to their deaths.

As a nurse, Sheila must stay on duty amidst the carnage.

In our boat, we'd got well away from the sinking ship,

and busied ourselves with the wounded

whom we'd pulled out of the water.

Our brandy flasks were invaluable.

Also, aprons and pillowcases

which were torn up as bandages.

Finally, Captain Bartlett gives the order to abandon ship.

Our chief engineer, Mr Fleming,

who was cool through everything

was the last of our department to join us on deck.

He had to swim for it,

narrowly escaping being drowned.

The ship was sinking very quickly then,

going by the head and listing to starboard.

Soon the water came to the bridge.

At 9am, 48 minutes after the explosion,

Bartlett reports that he and his two senior officers

are still standing on the bridge.

There is nothing more the captain can do.

As with Titanic, would he go down with his ship?

I've heard that it is a captain's duty

to be the last one to abandon ship,

-is that true?

-Absolutely.

That's the traditional way. And that's what happened.

He ordered his officers to leave the bridge, they left,

he blew the whistle for one last time,

and then he literally walked off the ship into the sea.

Assistant Commander Dyke, having reported to me that all had left,

I told him to go

and shortly after, followed myself,

walking into the water

by the forward boat gantry, on the starboard side.

Moments later, the bridge was underwater.

With sounds wailing and gurgling, Britannic sank bow first.

But she was so massive,

that when she hit bottom, her stern was sticking

over 30 metres out of the water.

With a final roar...

..she disappeared into the depths.

The noise of her going resounding through the water

with undreamt-of violence.

At 9:07am,

Great Britain's largest and finest ship of World War I is gone.

It's taken just 55 minutes to sink

the most unsinkable ship in the world.

Britannic joined her sister, Titanic, on the seabed -

where she has lain for 100 years.

Well, that is certainly something.

The most impressive shipwreck I have ever seen.

You can peer in through windows,

and you see the medical room with the equipment where the doctors

and the nurses would have worked

and those injured soldiers would have been treated.

And it's these glimpses of humanity

that act as a reminder that it's the people and their stories that are so

closely interwoven with the story of Britannic itself.

Those who died on Britannic met terrible, violent ends.

But while Titanic's passengers and crew froze to death in the icy north

Atlantic, waiting for rescue that came far too late,

Britannic sank much closer to the shore,

allowing a fleet of Greek fishing

boats and three British destroyers

to come to her crew's rescue.

The largest number of losses came from the black gang at the bottom

of the ship and the bottom of the social ladder.

1,035 of Britannic's nurses, sailors and doctors survived.

A sailor pulled a chair from the water

and gave me a piece of the back,

which I guarded safely, under my coat.

-And here it is.

-No way!

-Absolutely.

-She didn't keep that for the whole of her life?

-Can I see it?

-She kept it the whole of her life.

She gave it to my father. My father gave it to me.

I keep it in my living room.

What an amazing story!

Sheila lived to be 103,

and towards the end of her life,

she featured in a documentary

about the discovery of the Britannic wreck.

So at the age of 86, she helicoptered off from Athens to Kea.

She takes this back with her,

so back goes the chair top to the island.

And off she goes, submarining.

-No way!

-To see the wreck of the Britannic.

She has a look inside it,

and then she put flowers into the water above the wreck.

-Oh!

-And then, of course,

a few years later, James Cameron directed Titanic.

-That's right.

-And you remember the incident there of Rose

-throwing flowers...

-Yes, the older lady

whose story is being told.

So we always say, in our family, that Rose was built, as a character,

upon my grandmother.

And what of Captain Bartlett,

who may have just missed being captain of Titanic?

Our commander was retrieved from the waters in his pyjamas.

SHE CHUCKLES

His face as unperturbed as ever.

He was swimming in the water for about 30 minutes or so,

before he was picked up by one of the lifeboats.

It was only then that he was told

about the tragic and unnecessary loss of life.

Do we know how he felt when he made this terrible discovery?

I think he was immensely sad about it,

because it should not have happened.

If those men had not panicked and been in the boats,

there would have been no life lost whatsoever.

And if, in fact, if the nurses hadn't opened the portholes

to air the cabins, you know,

he would have managed to save that ship as well.

But he did not sail a ship again.

No-one left Britannic unaffected.

When I tried to stand,

I discovered that my leg had been deeply torn and badly gashed.

I had not felt it happen.

All I had been conscious of underwater

was my head being battered,

almost to a pulp.

She didn't realise at the time she had this terrible blow on her head,

but she fractured it in two places.

But I know she had very

troubling time with her head later

and the strange result was that she lost her hair later.

-Really?

-Hm.

I think it's a stress thing.

Despite experiencing the horror of both the Titanic AND Britannic

disasters, Violet never did lose her taste for adventure.

She did marry, once, rather briefly.

But she was a ship stewardess for her whole working life,

visiting every corner of the globe.

I do remember, when I was four,

and going to her house always scared me a bit because she had an

alligator, a stuffed alligator hanging by the staircase.

-I used to look at that going upstairs.

-I can imagine!

She brought it from South America.

What happened next to Archie?

When Archie was picked up with the wounded, he then goes on to write,

"I could not feel my legs and arms when they got me into the boat".

There was this one sailor, he was with me in the boat,

his legs were nearly cut off.

They picked him up, but he didn't live long.

So Archie survived the Britannic,

he'd survived the Titanic,

he was 27 years old.

What did he go on to do next?

He went on to work on another hospital ship,

a smaller vessel called the SS Donegal.

And he was on it for just five months

before it was struck by a torpedo

and he died on the 17th April, 1917, and he was just 28.

As for the unnamed seaman from Ulster,

we have no trace of what happened to him after the sinking.

He's disappeared from history,

a bit like Titanic's tragic twin,

Britannic.

Well, we've listened to the testimonies of our witnesses,

we've amassed the evidence,

and it seems that Britannic sank because of bad luck and human error.

And the people who lost their lives alongside her did so

because in their desperation to survive,

they made a decision with fatal consequences.

But there's one other puzzling factor.

Why has a story as dramatic as this remained unknown for so long?

Well, think about the timing.

It was 100 years ago,

the tragedy of the Britannic was just one more in the monumental tragedy that was World War I.