Episode 3 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 how in 1912,

'the press were determined to point the finger of blame.'

It's very unpleasant. It clearly was designed to create a...

a bad impression of my great-grandfather.

'How a respected sea captain lived for decades

'with an undeserved reputation.'

It's a miscarriage of justice in this country.

'And the words of the man who died

'after desperately trying to get help.'

I'm a big old tough welder and it really breaks me up.

When Titanic left Belfast in 1912,

she joined dozens of ships already competing on the route to New York.

Titanic wasn't the fastest, but she was the grandest.

The wealthy paid thousands of pounds in today's money to travel on her.

And the crew were eager to work for the rich clientele.

When Titanic left Southampton, there were 2,200 people on board.

Upstairs, 1,300 passengers and the crew below.

And normally, their lives would never cross.

But they were left entwined forever

when they boarded the most luxurious liner of its day.

100 years later, there's only one ship like it.

And like Titanic, she's the biggest in the world.

The Queen Mary 2, at 150,000 tons,

she's three times as heavy as Titanic.

At 1,100 feet, she's one-and-a-half times as long.

-Hello, everyone.

-ALL: Hello!

Lovely.

'Wherever you look, there are echoes of Titanic's luxury.'

This is fantastic.

These beautiful walkways, the murals on the walls,

the luxury carpet.

Oh, my feet have never felt so good.

The Titanic was crammed with the great and the good

of British and American society.

They were all there.

Benjamin Guggenheim,

JJ Astor,

Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff-Gordon.

Multimillionaires, over 30 of them.

And that's why the press called it 'The Millionaires' Special.'

As it happens, I know what it's like to work on a luxury liner.

This...

This is fantastic!

And I'm going to let you into a secret.

1970, I worked on a ship -

The Empress Of Canada.

And me and my partner Cherry demonstrated.

All this luxury and glamour on the Queen Mary 2 gives an idea

of what life would have been like for the rich passengers on Titanic.

But on this ship, just like on Titanic, it comes at a price.

Well, I am excited.

No!

Jerry, I cannot believe that I'm on a ship.

What sort of money would this cost?

It costs around 25,000.

Look at it! And you can sit on this balcony

overlooking semi-naked ladies.

What more could you want out of life? Eh?

If you think down there is good,

come up here and have a look at this.

The staterooms on Titanic were even more expensive.

The best cabin cost £60,000 in today's money.

That got you a parlour suite with a sitting room,

separate bedroom, private bathroom and private deck space.

And that's what made it so fantastic

and why you got so many of the rich and famous

cruising the first time on the Titanic.

It took an army of staff to provide all that luxury.

One of them was Violet Jessop.

She was Irish, but she was born in Argentina,

and she grew up an adventurous soul.

Then, at 24, she signed on to Titanic as a stewardess,

looking after first-class passengers.

On the Titanic, some of those first-class passengers

could really be a stuck-up bunch.

And in her memoirs, Violet describes

how they would really get on her wick.

People like Miss Marcia Spatz.

"Suddenly, like the meteoric person she was,

"she arrived, packages, hat boxes and flowers galore.

"She came with that determined look,

"meaning to get service from the start."

And how would you fancy waiting hand and foot

on somebody like Miss Townsend?

"She had been blacklisted by another famous shipping line

"because of her utterly unreasonable behaviour

"and her demoralizing effect on other passengers."

But soon, the petty demands of the well-to-do

was the last thing on Violet's mind.

When Titanic stroke the iceberg, Violet was in her cabin.

She dressed and took instruction from the officers.

She ran upstairs to the passenger decks.

Violet went from cabin to cabin, knocking on doors, waking people up,

making sure they had their life jackets, warm clothes and blankets.

Violet watched the lifeboats gradually fill

and the couples making their final farewells,

and then it was her turn.

She climbed into a boat, and as she was being lowered,

an officer called out, "Catch this!" and a bundle landed in her lap.

And she undid it, and there was a baby.

For four hours, Violet comforted the baby

until they were eventually rescued by the Carpathia.

Amazingly, Violet found the mother on board.

But she never learnt the name of the child she'd saved.

Then, just weeks later, Violet was back at sea.

Violet went on to do over 200 voyages.

She circumnavigated the globe twice and was shipwrecked twice.

And yet, she went on to retire in 1950.

And then, to produce this - her memoirs.

What a girl!

Violet Jessop was a woman who loved the sea

and one who would probably have been right at home

on the Queen Mary, upstairs or down.

But not every survivor was able to move on with their lives.

Some were left to struggle with a lifetime of guilt

and a broken reputation.

One very private Englishman had his character destroyed publicly

in the pages of America's newspapers.

In 1912, the Titanic disaster was the news story of the century.

For months, Titanic was emblazoned

across front pages around the world.

Editors were looking for stories

about tragic victims, heroic survivors.

And Titanic gave them plenty of both.

Newspapers filled their pages with

sensational stories

of bravery, escape and disaster.

All told in vivid detail through

exclusive interviews with survivors.

The press wanted more than heroics and tragedy.

They were looking for cowards and villains.

The public were outraged

and the press needed to find someone to blame.

And when they found him, they were merciless.

The man they chose was J Bruce Ismay.

Ismay was the president of the White Star Line.

He had commissioned and paid for Titanic.

At 20 to midnight, he was asleep in his cabin,

when he was woken by the sound of his ship hitting an iceberg.

He asked the captain whether it was serious,

and the captain said, "Yes, I'm afraid it is."

At which point, Ismay went back to his room,

put on an overcoat, put on his slippers

and went on, went to the starboard side of the deck

and immediately started loading women and children into the lifeboats.

Around 1am, water was pouring over Titanic's bows.

Ismay was helping lower one of the last lifeboats.

He saw there was still room for one more person,

and he made a decision in an instant that would haunt him forever.

He jumped into the lifeboat.

Hundreds of men, rich and poor, chose to die to let others live.

The injustice was that while they died on Ismay's boat,

HE saved himself.

Ismay's account of his departure from the Titanic

into Collapsible C was that he was helping as much as he could

and then he took his chance.

There was room in that lifeboat.

Had he not got in, there would have just been an empty space.

I don't know what I would have done

faced with the choice of certain death

or taking a place in a lifeboat.

But to the press in 1912, it was perfectly clear.

At home and abroad,

Ismay was scorned as

a selfish coward.

The American press singled out Ismay almost immediately

as a criminal for having survived.

They decided that he was guilty.

And what he was guilty of was cowardice.

The most aggressive criticism of Ismay came from the American press.

But this was more than just an expression of public contempt.

For 30 years previously, Ismay had been personally hated

by the American newspaper baron

William Randolph Hearst.

Angus Cheap is Ismay's great-grandson.

Randolph Hearst, who was the Rupert Murdoch of his day,

and Hearst disliked Bruce Ismay very much, I think.

And what happened on the Titanic gave Hearst a wonderful opportunity

to have a go at my great-grandfather.

And he didn't hold back.

The two men were opposites.

Hearst was outgoing and a self-made man.

Ismay was shy and had inherited his wealth.

The result was a profound clash of personalities.

Randolph Hearst had met Ismay

years before, when Ismay was a younger man

working as a White Star agent in New York,

and Hearst loathed him.

He found Ismay's shyness to be arrogant. He thought he was aloof.

He was the epitome of everything that

Hearst disliked in an Englishman.

This cartoon is typical of how

Hearst's newspapers treated Ismay.

It shows a ghoulish Ismay

as the only man in a boat

full of grieving women and children,

escaping the sinking Titanic.

And it suggests the emblem

of the White Star Line

be changed to the White Liver -

the mark of a coward.

This is from a New York newspaper,

just on the 20th.

So we are only talking five days or so after the Titanic went down.

It's absolute vintage - it's Randolph Hearst.

It's very unpleasant indeed.

It clearly was designed to create a...

a bad impression of my great-grandfather.

How did it make J Bruce Ismay feel?

It probably made him feel terrible.

It'd make anyone feel terrible

to have one's name blackened in this way

by a newspaper proprietor.

Despite the assault on Ismay's name

by the press,

he never publicly apologised

for his actions on Titanic.

Ismay never repented his actions,

because he didn't think there was anything to repent.

But I think he regretted his actions.

I think on many, many occasions, he must have thought,

"Why on Earth didn't I just go down with the ship?

"What was the point of the rest of my life?"

Certainly, my great-grandfather lived for the rest of his days

under the shadow of doubt.

Did they become quite reclusive, or...?

Well, I think he certainly did, he certainly did.

And my great-grandmother's way of dealing with it

was to close the whole thing down and never discuss it.

It was a non-subject.

And indeed, until I left school, although I'd heard of the Titanic,

I was really blissfully unaware

that it had much to do with my family.

Titanic was Ismay's brainchild.

He imagined it, commissioned it and paid for it.

As he left Southampton on board his ship,

Ismay might have expected his Titanic legacy to be glorious.

Instead, it destroyed his good name.

It was easy for J Bruce Ismay to jump into a life oat.

The problem was, for the rest of his life,

he could never climb out again.

The press saw to that. He was always known as

the man who saved his own skin.

But Titanic has also left us men regarded as heroes,

like the man responsible for successfully summoning help

as Titanic sank.

His actions ensured his reputation

and that of the new technology he was in charge of.

As soon as Titanic hit the iceberg,

each of her officers drew on

a lifetime's worth of seafaring experience.

While they put their hands to ropes and pulleys,

one man turned to brand-new technology

in the hope of saving lives.

In 1912, technology didn't come any more cutting edge

than the Marconi wireless radio.

It was developed at the turn of the century

and allowed messages to be sent wirelessly between ships at sea.

The man at the controls of the Marconigraph on Titanic

was Jack Phillips.

Jack was only 24 when the Titanic sailed,

but that didn't stop him being

one of the most highly-rated wireless operators

that the Marconi Company had.

He had already served on the Lusitania, the Mauritania,

the Oceanic, so highly-regarded liners,

so he was regarded as one of the best.

The Marconi room was located on the port side boat deck.

But in 1912, the Marconigraph was

still not yet installed on every ship.

And on ships that did have it,

it wasn't regarded principally as a safety measure.

It was aimed at commercially-driven traffic,

so it would transport messages about arrival times,

arrangements for meeting people off of the ship,

just novelty messages, like,

"Guess where I am? In the middle of the ocean."

Essentially, to give the upper classes

something to amuse themselves with.

The rich sent hundreds of Marconigrams to their friends and family,

bragging about their time on Titanic,

but if there'd been less of that,

many more lives could have been saved.

The simple fact is that Marconi operators

were so busy sending messages from passengers

that they didn't have the time

to listen to ALL the warnings about ice from other ships.

Jack Phillips was in the midst of trying to clear a backlog of traffic

when a last ice warning came in at 9:40 from the Masaba,

and for whatever reason, it ended up not making it to the bridge.

If Phillips had had time to take that message,

perhaps history would have been very different.

But he didn't, and two hours later, Titanic collided with an iceberg.

But from that moment,

Jack realised the importance of the Marconi machine.

It was the only way to get help.

With it, he could contact any ship within 2,000 miles of Titanic.

The Carpathia was the nearest to respond,

but it was still hours away.

So Jack kept at it, frantically sending distress signals.

Captain Smith came to the wireless shack

at about two o'clock, just after,

and relieved them of their post and said, "You've done all you can."

By this point, it's likely that there was water coming into the cabin.

They were quite near the bow of the ship.

They both stayed and Jack remained for as long as he could.

It was an extraordinary act of bravery.

As the ship listed and sank, he chose to risk his life

by staying on to send distress signals,

desperately looking for help.

These are a few of the Marconigrams that Jack Phillips sent

just in the last hours of Titanic.

I think it will show you the calmness of the man.

This is at 12:25.

"Come at once. We have struck a berg.

"It's a distress situation, old man."

Carpathia says, "Shall I tell the Captain? Do you require assistance?"

Jack replies, "Yes, come quick."

What is amazing is that even though they are under this pressure,

he still takes the time to say "old man".

The gentlemanliness of the whole scenario is amazing.

"Come as quickly as possible, old man,

"the engine room is filling up to the boilers."

It's obvious that Jack is not panicking.

He's just going along with the thing.

In 1912, the distress signal was not yet SOS,

but a French expression - CQD.

And that is the final message Jack attempts to send at 2:17am.

With Titanic's bell sinking beneath the Atlantic

and water flooding the Marconi room.

"CQ."

Titanic signal ends very abruptly, as if power suddenly switches off.

So he doesn't even have chance to get the D.

It's just CQ... Gone.

Moments later, Titanic disappeared

beneath the waves, but Jack escaped.

He was left clinging to an upturned dinghy in the freezing water,

and thanks to the Marconigram, he knew help was on the way.

Without Jack Phillips and his Marconi machine,

the Carpathia would never have come to their aid.

But when it did come, it came too late for Jack.

The Carpathia arrived four hours later.

The first ship on the scene, it found 705 survivors

huddled in lifeboats, drifting in the Atlantic.

But Jack was dead in the water.

The Titanic disaster proved the value of the wireless at sea.

Without it, no ship would have gone to Titanic's aid.

Following the tragedy, Marconi's invention

was made mandatory on all ships,

and the largest Titanic memorial in Britain

was built in Godalming, in Surrey, to John Jack Phillips.

I love Jack. I think he's such a hero.

And he's just a man, he's alone in this little dark room.

He's tapping away, the water is flooding in.

He knows that he's not going to survive.

But he stays there, he stays at his post

until the very last second

and goes down with the ship.

This is so overwhelmingly sad that, honestly,

I'm a big old tough welder and it really breaks me up.

As the turbulent 20th century unfolded,

you might have expected the Titanic disaster to fade from memory.

And some that were involved in the tragedy

may well have wished Titanic's legacy be forgotten about.

The years went by, but the story of Titanic wouldn't go away.

And in 1962, one man dies still trying to clear his name.

Captain Stanley Lord was vilified by the British Inquiry

as the man who could have saved all the lives on Titanic

if he had taken action.

But he didn't.

His story is still controversial,

but here's the version the 1912 Inquiry decided had taken place.

As Titanic was sinking, ships raced to the scene.

But the closest to Titanic was Stanley Lord's ship,

the Californian.

She was around 15 miles away.

Her crew saw a ship on the horizon

and rockets launched into the sky.

But Lord did nothing.

The British Inquiry came to the conclusion that if the Californian

had responded early to the lights that she saw in the night sky,

she could have saved many, if not most of the lives that were lost.

But Captain Lord was indignant.

He claimed he had no reason to believe Titanic was sinking.

He received none of Titanic's distress signals

because his radio room was unmanned.

But that was common practice.

And the rockets his crew saw gave no cause for alarm.

In 1912, rockets at sea

were not exclusively for purposes

of indicating distress.

They could be for any manner of reasons. They were frequently used for illumination,

which wouldn't be, you know, unsurprising when you come into an ice field

and you want to know the extent of that field, or whatever.

It wouldn't be entirely surprising that rockets would be sent up.

Nowadays, we are all familiar with red pyrotechnic at sea indicating distress.

It was only post the Titanic disaster

that red was introduced as a colour exclusively for distress.

Nor did Captain Lord believe

the ship he saw was actually Titanic.

He believed it was a much smaller vessel.

At the Inquiry, this gave rise to a complicated dispute

over Titanic's final position.

Either the mighty ship had got it wrong in her distress signals,

or Captain Lord had mistaken the position of his ship,

the Californian.

The British Inquiry came to a decision and made a finding

that the Californian stop position on that night was not accurate.

Just try and imagine the level of prejudice and assumption

that goes into concluding that it must be the small ship,

the tramp steamer, that is to blame.

And it couldn't be the magnificent, new, state-of-the-art super liner

that has got its position wrong.

Rear Admiral John Lang is a retired UK marine accident investigator.

He believes the Inquiry's findings from the Californian

may have been badly flawed.

He studied both the evidence on Titanic

and the way the inquiries were conducted.

Quite honestly, they were appalling.

The questions which were not asked,

the witnesses were never called,

misinterpreting the answers...

I think Lord was being treated as really the villain of the piece...

-Yeah.

-..which I think was unfair.

Lord was not on trial,

but he was judged nonetheless

by the press and by his employers,

the Leyland Line.

In 1912,

the popular press and so on

managed to inveigh against Captain Lord

and weigh in against him

and suggest that this man was a mass murderer.

A director of the Leyland Line, which operated the Californian,

suggested very strongly that Captain Lord had to resign

because of popular opinion.

Lord lost his job and, right up until his death in 1962,

was still fighting to clear his name,

as the Titanic story was told and retold

in print and on the screen.

It was not until

over 20 years after he died

that a key piece of evidence

was discovered that may prove Captain Lord

had been unfairly treated.

In 1985, the case of Stanley Lord was thrown wide open

when divers discovered the wreck of the Titanic,

and she wasn't where she was expected to be.

Titanic was found by a submarine

13 miles further east

than she had broadcast

in her distress messages.

It may prove Captain Lord was right

and the Californian was nowhere

as close to the sinking ship

as the Inquiry chose to believe.

70 years after the disaster,

some experts believe this finally vindicates Stanley Lord.

What killed people was actually hypothermia and being very, very cold.

So, yes, he might have gone to the rescue,

but with the best will in the world,

I don't think he would have made much difference

to what happened that night.

But the way he has been treated, in my opinion,

I think...I'd go so far as

a miscarriage of justice in this country.

Captain Lord has been stripped out, hollowed out

and turned into a...a mere cypher, you know,

a destination for everybody's prejudices and dislikes,

whereas, in fact, it's robbing us of the real truth,

and that is a power ship could go to sea

by permission of the Board of Trade

with too few lifeboats,

and that ultimately, the responsibility

stays with the Titanic, going too fast in too dangerous conditions.

Gambling with those people's lives and losing that gamble.

In 1912, the world struggled to come to terms with the Titanic disaster.

But one thing was clear, sea travel had to be made safer.

On Titanic, there were only 1,200 lifeboat spaces

on a ship built to carry 3,500 people.

So an international agreement was drawn up - Safety Of Life At Sea.

It is still part of Maritime Law.

Details, life-saving appliances,

construction of the ship,

particularly the watertight subdivision,

where you have a bulkhead deck

to contain those compartments.

That was a problem with the Titanic,

the water came in and went over the top.

-That no longer can happen.

-No.

There are also in there radio protocols,

particularly emergency protocols,

reporting and receiving reports on dangers

and the International Ice Patrol.

And so, even in our present crossings,

we look at those reports every crossing

to determine where the limits of the ice are and where we should avoid.

And it was made mandatory to provide a lifeboat place for everyone.

We have more than enough room for every man, woman and child on board.

Since Titanic, no matter who you are

or where you rank in society,

your life is recognised as being

as important as anyone else's.

For me, the story of Titanic isn't about the ship.

The ship is just rivets and metal and engines.

It's about the people.

It's about the people that built it,

the crew and the passengers that sailed in it.

And the bravery of some and the cowardice of others.

If nothing else, 100 years on, the ship makes us ask,

"Who would I be on Titanic?

"And as she sank, what would I do?"

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