Episode 2 Titanic with Len Goodman

A century after it sank, it still fascinates us.

Titanic.

Gigantic, extravagant, doomed.

And 100 years later, the ship that has become a legend.

As she headed out to sea,

she carried over 2,200 passengers and crew.

The rich, the poor and everything in between.

And it's their stories that I want to discover.

When Titanic hit an iceberg,

1,500 men, women and children died.

But the human cost was counted not just at sea,

but on land, where the impact of the tragedy lasted for generations.

And that is why to this day, Titanic touches us all.

I'm Len Goodman, dance judge and ex-ship builder.

In this programme, I'll discover the stories

of the heroes who deserve to be remembered.

And the man who longed to be forgotten.

Any man who survived was on a hiding to nothing.

And the mystery of the lost relative solved after a century.

She's like our daughter, Jane. Yes, you can see the broad face.

And our story begins in Belfast.

For three years, the construction of Titanic

dominated the lives of the 15,000 men who built her.

They put their blood and sweat

into making her the finest ship that ever left their yard.

But for some, the story of Titanic didn't end with the last rivet.

There was a group of nine men who helped to build her,

who sailed on her

and who eventually died on her.

On April 2nd, 1912, Titanic finally left Belfast.

She cruised into the Irish Sea and headed for Southampton,

from where she began her maiden voyage to New York.

She was Harland and Wolff's biggest creation.

They were proud of her and wanted to guarantee every part of her construction,

so they put together a special team.

They were called the Guarantee Group.

They were the very best at their trades.

Their job was to sail on Titanic, spot problems and fix them.

Doors that jammed, pipes that leaked.

Their boss was Thomas Andrews.

These are the offices where he and his team once worked.

You can still feel the ghosts of shipbuilders in these empty rooms.

Every room you come into, amongst all the rubble,

you suddenly find things.

This laying here, "West Coast of India. Pilot."

The pilot's book for navigating around the west coast of India.

Look at this. What's all this about?

There's a drawing.

"Ship name - English Star."

It's just fantastic.

Just a load of old drawings, just chucked aside and forgotten.

It's haunting to think of Thomas Andrews

assembling eight workers here and giving them the exciting news

they'd actually be sailing on Titanic.

Among them was Anthony Frost, the fitter.

He had a wife and children.

Francis Parkes, the plumber.

A young lad still living with his parents.

And there was Roderick Chisholm, the draughtsman.

He drew the detailed plans of Titanic.

This is him in Harland and Wolff's drawing office.

This was the nerve centre of Harland and Wolff,

where incredible ideas were translated into workable plans.

Draughtsman would produce thousands of drawings

on every aspect of the ship.

And these drawings were crucial to understanding how Titanic worked.

And it took a trained eye to interpret them.

Roderick Chisholm was in the Guarantee Group

to decipher the mass of blueprints, diagrams and cross sections.

He was Thomas Andrews' right-hand man.

Deirdre MacIntyre is Roderick's great-granddaughter.

This is Roderick here. This is them on a family holiday,

Roderick and Susan.

And my grandmother, Alice, and her brother, Jimmy.

This conveys to me such a lovely family.

Yes. He was a wonderful man.

A wonderful draughtsman, but, by Jove, he was a great Papa.

And that's what matters.

When he wasn't with his family, he was in the drawing office,

where he was responsible for the most complicated drawings of Titanic.

Gran was only 14 at the time, but family life changed dramatically.

-Changed dramatically for them.

-Because he was the breadwinner.

He was the breadwinner of the family and under such tragic circumstances.

It must have been horrendous.

In those days, you got on with it. And that family did.

I haven't shared a lot about Roderick

because I suppose Roderick's memory with me was my grandmother sharing

very infrequently these stories because it was painful.

On April 14th, 1912, at 11:40pm,

an iceberg tore a hole 100-metres long in Titanic's hull.

Water began to flood six of the forward bulkheads.

Thomas Andrews made his calculations

and then he knew his ship would sink within three hours.

But the Guarantee Group did what they could.

They helped keep the generators going

to stop the ship from plunging into darkness.

They kept the lights working until two minutes before the ship sank.

But all along, each one of the Guarantee Group

knew Titanic was doomed.

And all along, each one was certain

they were going to go down with their ship.

The entire Titanic Guarantee Group was killed.

Men who died on what they thought

was the greatest ship they'd ever built.

100 years later, the families of the Guarantee Group should be proud.

Proud that their ancestors had done everything they could

to save the passengers on their ship.

SOMBRE RECITAL

For those who did survive,

Titanic became a defining point in their lives.

For some, it was the moment fear overwhelmed them.

But for some of these men, it was a chance to prove themselves heroes.

And there are memorials to men like these.

But not every Titanic hero had their bravery remembered in stone.

Maddie Matthews is a schoolgirl from Barmouth in North Wales.

She's determined the bravery of one local man

who sailed on Titanic should not be forgotten.

I became interested in Harold Lowe

when I watched the film Titanic when I was 11.

And I noticed one of the characters had a Welsh accent.

I did some research and found it was Harold Lowe

and he spent some of his life in Barmouth.

Harold Lowe was the fifth officer onboard Titanic,

but one of the first to be hailed a hero.

Those heroics began the moment the iceberg struck.

While others were messing around, wondering what to do,

his 15 years experience kicked him straight into action.

He worked tirelessly.

First on the starboard side and then on the port side,

to load as many lifeboats as he could

and to get them all off safely and into the water, away from the ship.

Lowe took charge of lifeboat 14

and got the boat and its occupants to safety.

But it was what he did next that earned him his unique reputation.

While others sat in shock,

Lowe realised there were still survivors in the water

and there were empty places in the lifeboats.

To Lowe, it was crazy.

So he did something no-one else even tried.

He went back to pick people out of the water.

In the darkness, Lowe lashed together four lifeboats with empty spaces.

He transferred passengers between the boats,

then he rode back in the empty vessel

and rescued four survivors from the freezing water.

I think the fact that only one man

out of the 750 survivors actually went back,

shows he had incredible bravery to deal with what many others

were finding incredibly difficult to cope with.

Maddie isn't the only person to celebrate Lowe as a hero.

In 1912, many of the passengers he saved

gave Lowe gifts to express their gratitude.

Today, these are treasured by Harold Lowe's grandson, John.

These are two of the presents from a passenger,

Mrs Henry B Harris. They consist of a sextant.

The other part was the telescope.

"To Harold G Lowe, fifth officer, RMS Titanic.

"The real hero of the Titanic.

"With deepest gratitude from Mrs Henry B Harris."

To have one of his own when he was still a junior officer

was very significant.

-Would these have been expensive gifts?

-Yes.

'Harold accepted these gifts

'only after refusing money from Mrs Harris.'

Whilst on the Carpathia, she approached Harold

to try and give him some money for his bravery.

And again, in New York. He was summonsed to her apartment,

and he said, "No. I was only doing my duty".

Harold Lowe was not commemorated in his home town of Barmouth,

so Maddie decided something had to be done.

It was ridiculous that Barmouth had nothing

to commemorate a man who lived here and learnt to sail here

when he was most known for his actions at sea.

I wrote a letter to the local paper, the Cambrian News,

and I started a Facebook group.

Maddie's efforts quickly came to the attention of the local council.

The council commissioned an artist

to create a memorial plaque in Welsh slate

to the memory and bravery of Harold Lowe.

They've invited Maddie to see an early mock-up of the final work.

-If you would like to look at it and see what you think.

-I'd love to.

-OK.

There we are.

"In commemoration of fifth officer Harold Lowe,

"who played such a heroic role in the rescue of survivors

"from the tragic sinking of RMS Titanic on 15th April, 1912."

I'm now determined that the memorial will be a fitting tribute to him

and that he'll be remembered in Barmouth

and by everyone who visits Barmouth for generations to come.

Some who survived the Titanic disaster

found that their names were remembered

not in stone, but in newsprint.

Nonetheless, their stories have endured for just as long,

and often, for the wrong reasons.

The UK enquiry took evidence from maritime experts,

company employees and the survivors,

both passengers and crew.

And they all got a real grilling.

There were certainly heroes,

but not everyone who lived to tell the tale

told one they could be proud of.

In particular, male survivors needed to account for their actions

and explain why they survived in the lifeboat

while women and children perished in the freezing water.

For one man, that question was particularly awkward to answer.

And the experience destroyed him

and his reputation for ever.

I'm off to meet Sir Andrew Duff Gordon

whose great uncle was Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon.

DOORBELL

-"Hello?"

-Yes, it's Len Goodman.

-"Oh, good. Come on up."

-Thank you.

Sir Cosmo was travelling with his wife, Lady Lucille.

They had cabin A16,

one of the most expensive first-class cabins,

for which they paid thousands of pounds.

As you'd expect from a celebrity couple.

He had been an Olympic fencer.

He was a very good athlete, he was a trained singer.

He was quite a decent-looking man, a tall fellow.

And was, you know, known around the place.

After the iceberg struck,

many of the first passengers to board the lifeboats

were the rich, just like Sir Cosmo.

Where most of the men chose to hold back

in favour of women and children,

Sir Cosmo took a seat beside his wife.

It would be remembered as a notorious and selfish act.

You see this little boat down below. It's not full.

You look down and maybe get in.

Yes, get in.

-So they did.

-Right.

If that's a crime, it's a crime.

Neither the UK nor the US enquiries were actually a court,

but they were emotionally charged.

And as survivors were cross-examined,

every word was scrutinised just as closely by the press.

He's not on trial, but it's as if he's in the dock.

And the press is covering his defence.

The hoo-hah in the press was so,

any man who survived was on a hiding to nothing.

Particularly passengers who were slightly better known than some of the others.

Sir Cosmo was not the only man to take a place in the lifeboat,

but his action once he was in the lifeboat

also came under special scrutiny.

The Duff Gordon boat

rowed away from the sinking Titanic only half full.

Sir Cosmo is specifically accused of ordering the lifeboat and saying,

"No, we mustn't go back and try and pick up people who are drowning".

Now, this is a grave accusation

that he was saving his own skin

rather than thinking of others.

Sir Cosmo's account was very different.

Well, the crew said, "Look, if you go back,

"you'll get everybody putting their hands

"on the gunwale of the boat, on the edge of the little boat,

"and we shall all be drowned".

I don't know whether I would have been...

Made the decision to try,

and hope that the boat wouldn't go down with 40 people on it

instead of 20 or whatever.

I simply don't know how I would've behaved.

And with respect, I don't think you do either.

On his rescue by the Carpathia,

he was seen to reward each of the crew members from his lifeboat

with a cheque for five pounds.

This looked very suspicious.

Had he actually given all the men five pounds

so that they wouldn't row back?

That was the accusation.

And it was hotly debated at the enquiry.

He didn't wave a cheque in the air and say,

"Here's five pounds. Get us off the boat".

When they were picked up by the Carpathia, the sailors rightly said,

"It's all right for you, you can buy another suit.

"We've just got the clothes we stand up in,

"and we'll be out of a job".

And so, my great uncle,

who was obviously hugely relieved that they'd been saved,

drew a cheque for five pounds on Coutts Bank

for the crew that had been in that boat.

No-one was actually on trial at the enquiry.

However, there was no question

that society was judging Sir Cosmo.

Edwardian culture venerated the endurance

of hardship and sacrifice.

And there were numerous examples on the Titanic

of men who had died bravely.

Benjamin Guggenheim, for example, who goes down with the ship.

I think Sir Cosmo knew full well

the degree of disapproval

which his actions had generated.

And that sense that the Titanic disaster

had shown up a flaw in Sir Cosmo's character,

I think that must have lived with him for the rest of his life.

Having been a well-known figure in London society,

if you'd like to call it that way, he spent more time in Scotland.

-Yeah.

-I think Lucy spent more time in her business.

They never separated,

but they slightly drifted apart.

Several generations later,

the shadow of Sir Cosmo's action on Titanic

still sometimes falls on the family.

When I was getting engaged to my wife Evie,

her father said, "Hang on a minute,

"I think there's a skeleton rattling about in that family's cupboard".

And this was in 1975.

We all know the tragedy was in 1912.

And, um, you know, it never goes away.

Yeah.

Sir Cosmo survived Titanic,

but rightly or wrongly,

he had to pay for his life with his reputation.

One way or the other, Titanic always seems to take a toll.

While many wealthy men chose to die on Titanic,

many of the poorest men, women and children,

were never given a choice.

Third class passengers in steerage quickly found that on Titanic,

the odds of survival were stacked against them.

She may have been stuck with bells and whistles and the well-to-do,

but Titanic was far more than just a posh cruise liner.

She was an emigrant ship,

built to cash in on the dreams of Europe's poor.

Titanic carried emigrants from over two dozen countries,

all dreaming of a new life in the States.

They paid around seven pounds for their ticket.

600 in today's money.

Affordable, but still big business.

It was a significant revenue earner for all the shipping lines.

It wouldn't have been able to continue without the emigrant trade.

It wouldn't have been financially viable for them to do so.

Titanic was good value.

Accommodation in third class

was as good as second class on most any other liner.

Ensuite rooms, a comfortable lounge

and three square meals a day.

Better conditions than most were used to at home.

She carried 700 steerage passengers.

112 of them boarded at Queenstown, now Cobh,

on the south coast of Ireland.

Titanic's final port of call.

Gathered on a pier at Cobh were a crowd of Irish emigrants.

For them, Titanic wasn't a pleasure cruise,

but the start of a new life.

And for some, it would be over before it began.

In the midst of the crowd were two brothers, John and Philip Kiernan,

from the village of Aughnacliffe, County Longford in Ireland.

Helen Sheridan is their great niece.

John was, I think, 23.

And Philip was 21.

John had been in New Jersey and he'd been there for quite some time,

so he'd come home to bring his brother, Philip,

over to America so that he could work there, too.

Philip was the youngest of a large family.

In 1912, in this part of the world,

it was particularly common

for young people of large families to leave for America.

If you were born into a family of six children,

the eldest would probably inherit the farm,

the eldest daughter might marry into the farm down the road.

But what would happen then with the rest of the family?

The expectation was, particularly in the Irish context, that you would emigrate.

The Kiernans boarded Titanic in Queenstown,

but never reached America.

When Titanic struck the iceberg,

they were with hundreds of other steerage passengers

in the belly of the ship on E deck, far from the lifeboats.

And that's where Titanic's crew tried to keep them.

The chaos was witnessed by a survivor, Margaret Murphy.

"A crowd of men were trying to get to a higher deck

"and were fighting the sailors, all striking and scuffling and swearing.

"Then the sailors fastened down their hatchways.

"It meant all hope was gone for those still down there."

But John and Philip would not give up.

They led Margaret and a group of women

through the warren of passages and corridors, finally emerging five decks up.

"We made our way to the lifeboats. A boat was being filled.

"We pushed our way towards it. John was helping me.

"The sailors drove him away."

John and Philip were last seen from the lifeboats.

They were standing on the deck of Titanic,

arms around each other, as the ship went down.

The brothers died because, with a third class ticket,

the odds were always stacked against them.

There does seem to be a case to answer

that they were impeded, deliberately impeded.

That gates were closed.

This was going to prevent the third class passengers

from getting up on deck.

The official enquiry didn't support the idea

that the 700 steerage passengers were discriminated against.

But the fact is that only 25 percent of third class survived,

compared to over 60 percent in first class.

In 1912, the world wasn't an equal place.

And on Titanic, if you had money, it could save your life.

And what shocks me is that the price of your ticket

reflected the value of your life.

Many Titanic victims and survivors are remembered on memorials. But not all of them.

Luckily, there's a group of men and women making sure

these names and their stories won't be forgotten.

I love people with passion.

And there's a tenacious band of men and women from all over the world

who spend their free time researching and recording

hidden gems, little stories about the Titanic.

They're affectionately known as the Titanoraks.

Two of the most dedicated Titanic researchers

are Brian Measner from Carolina

and Alex Churchill from London.

-He's still alive. He's still working at 70.

-That's the Irish!

Brian has researched hundreds of tales from Titanic,

but for 30 years, May Sloan is the one that has always eluded him.

She survived the disaster and made it to New York,

but then, she seems to disappear without trace.

He calls her the Holy Grail in terms of crew members

because he's never been able to find anything on her.

She is representative of the crew in a lot of different ways.

She's representative of females working at that time.

She's the common woman.

And she is Belfast's own.

But the details of her life have remained a mystery.

There was little clue to her descendants.

And to a Titanorak, that's tantalising.

So Brian joined forces with Alex

to try and crack May Sloan's story.

But it hasn't been easy.

Her name was the biggest issue

because there's a mixture of her going by Mary and going by May.

Also, it's quite a common name.

And there's a lot of emigration, as well.

So really, they were scattered.

It's taken a lot to pull them altogether.

But after months of detective work,

Brian and Alex have at last

begun to piece together the life of May Sloan.

Their first breakthrough was uncovering her life before Titanic.

So, to tell her story, we've had to really go back far.

The first time we found her in a public record was on the 1911 census.

And there she is. May Sloan.

'Brian and Alex turned to shipping records from the 1900s

'to uncover May's life before Titanic.

'They discovered she started out working on the SS Magic.'

It wasn't so much as a ship

as a cross-channel ferry running between Belfast and Liverpool.

'Within only a year, May had moved on

'and found a job as a first-class passenger stewardess on Titanic.

'Brian and Alex knew she survived,

'but once she made it to New York, the trail ran cold.'

Until recently, we didn't know anything about what she did after

until we found a record of her

coming into America via Canada a few years later.

And she's still listed as a stewardess.

What is that there, "ruddy"?

Her complexion.

-They said she had a ruddy complexion.

-That's good, isn't it?

That comes up quite a lot.

Fresh, ruddy complexion. Brown hair, blue eyes.

May Sloan's Visa for crossing from Canada to America

also recorded names of a relative.

From this, Alex and Brian were able to piece together a family tree

and trace it all the way back to Belfast.

We got all the way down to 1968.

And there's Hugh Alexander Sloan.

-Yep.

-May's great-nephew.

May's great-nephew.

The story of May Sloan

has brought me back to where my journey began, Belfast.

It's where Titanic was built

and where May Sloan lived until her death in the 1970s.

Her grandnephew, Hugh, lives here, as well,

but he never knew his great-aunt May.

I would like to show you this photograph.

Beautiful eyes.

That really is the only photograph I've ever seen

after 30-odd years of research.

I think she's like our daughter, Jean.

-Let's have a look.

-Try that there.

Yes. You can. The broad face.

I can see a resemblance.

'May Sloan even had an encounter with Thomas Andrews,

'the man who designed Titanic and who died onboard.

'As the ship was sinking, Mr Andrews helped May to steel her nerves.'

At one point, Mr Andrews brings your aunt May and another stewardess into a cabin

and gives them whiskey and water to fortify them.

And he said, "Now, girls, don't be afraid".

And she said, "I'm not afraid".

And he said, "That's a good Ulster girl".

At last, after 100 years,

May Sloan brings a Titanic story home to Ulster and to Belfast,

where the tale of the ship began.

When May left here, Titanic was famous across the city.

By the time May returned,

the ship was notorious throughout the world.

Join me next time when I explore Titanic's 100-year legacy.

I'll hear how one family did its best to forget all about the ship.

Until I left school, although I'd heard of the Titanic,

I was really blissfully unaware that it was much to do with my family.

How one man was blamed for all the deaths on board.

The way he has been treated, in my opinion,

is a miscarriage of justice in this country.

How the Titanic disaster changed sea travel for ever.

It's an international convention all subscribe to. It stands for Safety Of Life At Sea.

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