Titanic

As a cultural touchstone, it really is unsinkable

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With innumerable books, several blockbuster movies and countless papers and articles about the Titanic disaster, you’d think there would be no story about the ill-fated ship that hasn’t been told and that the tragedy lost its power over the public’s imagination in the 102 years since it went down.

Not so. The massive ocean liner still looms large in the culture’s imagination. In that respect, at least, the Titanic was truly “unsinkable.”

In doing a story about the Steamship Historical Society of America (SSHSA) moving into the former library of New England Tech on Post Road in Warwick, we came upon a copy of the spring 2012 issue of PowerShips, the Society’s magazine that featured “Titanic: The Final Board of Inquiry” by Commander Richard R. Paton, USCGR (Ret).

That issue came out around the same time that the English newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, did a story about a cache of letters from Lord Cosmo Duff-Gordon and his wife Lucy that they claimed exonerated Duff-Gordon of bribing the lifeboat crew to row away from drowning passengers and make no attempt to rescue more.

This charge of callous disregard for others has been common knowledge among Titanic enthusiasts but less commonly known publicly. Paton lays that case out in his article.

Now, in a screenplay by Cranston native Ken Dooley, that callousness is revisited as a subplot in “Bellevue Avenue,” a script that Dooley has been shopping around to backers, most recently as a preliminary finalist in the Creative World Awards, a contest designed to draw attention to promising scriptwriters from around the world.

In the screenplay, two of the villains in the piece are survivors of the Titanic, a fact well known in their circle. What their friends don’t know is that the villain, Lord Richard Bolles and his valet, Reggie Thorpe, fresh from their adventure of surviving the Titanic, got a visit from Iain Taylor, a Titanic crew member who commanded the lifeboat Bolles and Thorpe survived in and who threatens to tell of how Bolles and Thorpe dressed up as women to get into a lifeboat for women and children only. He threatens exposure if he doesn’t get paid a lot of money. Reggie convinces Bolles that murdering Taylor is the only option.

“I wish I could give you a great story about how I came to the Titanic for our two heroes,” explained Dooley. “I just wanted to come up with something that best illustrates their character – or lack thereof.”

The dressing up as a woman was not formally charged to Duff-Gordon. It was only a rumor and even Paton, who is unsparing of his subjects, doesn’t cite the story or even name Duff-Gordon as the passenger who bribed the lifeboat crew. 

As Paton described the incident:

“It is further alleged that one passenger influenced the actions or inactions of the crew by offering and tendering a bribe to each crewman – to wit, a check drawn in the amount of five British pounds sterling. Said lifeboat had a rated capacity of 40 persons and carried 12 persons, including crew at the time of the alleged criminal acts … Further that such promises to the crew were actually paid by check once on board the Carpathia.”

Like many members of the SSHSA, Paton has a favorite subject, and it happens to be the Titanic. Paton has reviewed all of the available material and has come to the conclusion that, in spite of all of the facts at their disposal, both the British and the American Boards of Inquiry failed to place the blame for the disaster on anyone. No one was prosecuted or punished for the multiple failures of the owners and the crew. Even passengers who were accused of intentionally ignoring the well-being of passengers.

Duff-Gordon never got out from under the cloud the Titanic inquiries cast over him. Even the story of going in drag persisted in spite of no real evidence. But Duff-Gordon was not the only villain to emerge from the lifeboats of the Titanic. Witnesses also gave accounts of two businessmen who bribed crewmembers to give them uniforms so they could board a lifeboat disguised as crew.

Now Duff-Gordon’s nephew claims that the recently discovered letters, which, by odd coincidence, surfaced during the 100th anniversary of the disaster, exonerate his great-uncle. If they do, the story discussing the letters published in the Daily Telegraph that year doesn’t offer any concrete evidence of his innocence.

“The historical significance of the find is that it contains fresh detail that could finally restore the good name of the Duff-Gordons, who were accused of urging, or even bribing, the crew of their boat to row away from the sinking ship and not to pick up survivors, even though the boat wasn’t full. Though they were cleared of all blame by the Board of Trade inquiry in May 1912, they were savagely cross-examined and remained tainted by suspicion that they had acted selfishly.”

“I am elated that these papers have come to light. I never doubted my great-uncle, who was a most upright and self-effacing person, and his account of that night shows beyond doubt that he acted honorably,” said Sir Arthur Duff-Gordon.

The problem is, the “evidence” vindicating the Duff-Gordons is in their own words. In the letters, Lady Duff-Gordon claims that the Duff-Gordons turned down several opportunities to escape in other lifeboats and did so because Lady Duff-Gordon clung to her man and refused to leave without him. You have to take her word for it.

In reality, the letters appear to be an inventory of what the Duff-Gordons lost when the ship went down and a rather bloodless display of self-pity on Lady Duff-Gordon’s part.

“Well, my beloveds,” she writes to her family. “You know how I always said I longed for experiences and adventures and sensations, well, I’ve had it this time and no mistake.”

Sir Arthur contends that the crew’s complaints about losing all their possessions and their jobs prompted Duff-Gordon to promise to give them £5 toward restitution – “an offer that was deliberately misinterpreted by one of the crew later as a bribe not to return for survivors because the Duff-Gordons were afraid the boat would be swamped.”

“‘It was complete nonsense to call it a bribe,’ says Andrew Duff-Gordon. ‘My great-uncle was incredibly grateful to survive and what these papers show is that, when they got on the Carpathia, he wrote the seven oarsmen a Coutts cheque for £5 each to replace what they had lost.’”

The Daily Telegraph has Andrew’s wife Evie, commenting: “One wonders if an act of philanthropy has ever had such dire consequences for its benefactor.”

One thinks not. One thinks that doling out five-pound checks to a lifeboat crew smacks of bribery. Especially when it isn’t accompanied by other acts of spontaneous generosity on the part of Duff-Gordon. Duff-Gordon once said that all the stories against him had been contradicted and proved untrue.

But, right or wrong, Paton points out that no passenger, crewmember or officer was found guilty of any crime, let alone manslaughter. The Boards of Inquiry on both sides of the Atlantic failed to convict anyone.

But it is hard for anyone other than a relative to believe that Duff-Gordon was blameless or alone. Witnesses also gave accounts of two businessmen who bribed crewmembers to give them uniforms so they could board a lifeboat disguised as crew.

But the crimes of passengers and crew should be eclipsed by the incompetence, willful negligence and outright stupidity of the ship’s officers and owners, all of which went unpunished.

Nevertheless, the stories of bravery and sacrifice that came out of the Titanic have far eclipsed the tales of cowardice and incompetence. According to “The Titanic: Historiography and Bibliography,” 674 articles and books have been published about the Titanic, with more appearing on a regular basis. It’s likely that the star-crossed ship will remain “unsinkable” in our collective consciousness. I think we could use at least one more book explaining why that ship keeps popping up. In the plot of “Bellevue Avenue,” Molly Brown, the society maven who survived the Titanic and inspired a book, a musical and a musical movie, shows up in Newport to tell the story behind Lord Bolles’ and Reggie Thorpe’s amazing tale of survival and the trial where she arrives in time “to testify how Lord Bolles and Reggie escaped drowning.” Yet another plot is hatched to smuggle Bolles and Thorpe out of the country before they can be tried for murder.

Will the villains escape again?

We’ll have to wait for the movie to find out. In the meantime, we’ll just keep reading and writing about the Titanic. The Steamship Historical Society’s library on Post Road in Warwick is a good place to start.

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