The Gray Monk

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August 30, 2004

The Titanic still making waves ....

I have recently watched a "documentary" which put forward, yet again, the theory that the RMS Titanic and her sister RMS Olympic had somehow been "switched" as an insurance scam. Even though this was admitted to have been disproved by the recovery of a number of items from the wreck site which bear the Yard Number 401 (Harland and Wolf's Build Number for the Titanic) the film makers had still got both their facts and their story wrong. The facts do, however, have a strange twist to the tail!

For one thing, there is constant reference to Titanic having only ONE sister, the Olympic, for another they make the mistake of labelling them "identical". In fact there were three sisters, RMS Olympic being the first to enter service with the White Star Line, RMS Titanic followed, and the third, RMS Britannic , would have followed the Titanic into service some twelve months later had her completion not been delayed by the necessity to remove workers from her to repair the Olympic after the latter had been damaged in a collision. As it was, the Britannic never entered service on her intended route, as the outbreak of the First World War saw her being commandeered while completing her fitting out, and her complete refitting as a hospital ship. She was sunk in this service in the Aegean in 1917 by a mine.

Of the three ships, the Olympic was the "odd one out" until after 1919, as the Titanic and the Britannic had been altered from the original plan to give an enclosed Promenade deck. Photographs of the Olympic show her with an open A Deck and she was known as a "wet" ship as a result. At sea she was prone to shipping spray and sometimes dollops of water onto this deck in rough weather. Titanic was modified as a result of the experience of this on Olympic's first voyages and so entered service with the glazed enclosure in place. Britannic was also modified and photographs of the two latter ships show that they, and not Olympic, were almost identical.

Ironically, both the Britannic and the Olympic were modified after the loss of the Titanic to bring their watertight bulkheads up to the main deck as they should have been designed to do at the outset. These had originally been designed to go only one deck above the full loaded waterline, which meant on some bulkheads a height of only 3 feet above the normal waterline. Both ships were also fitted with additional lifeboats, sufficient for the full crew and passenger list, a requirement even to the present day. This is an anomolous position however, because cargo vessels are required to have a lifeboat/raft capacity of 200% of crew and passengers, while the huge liners and cruiseships are required to have only a 100% capacity, which means that in any situation which renders some of the boats and rafts unusable you are back in the realms of the Titanic and 1912.

Of the three sisters RMS Olympic alone enjoyed a long and reasonably successful career, passing into the ownership of the Cunard Line under the banner Cunard White Star. She sailed as one of their fleet until 1936 when she was broken up for scrap. Part of her First Class saloon panelling is still to be seen lining the walls of a hotel in Merseyside. The Titanic lies beneath the Atlantic as Jack Ballard's team found her, and her only identical sister, HMHS Britannic, lies beneath the Aegean. In an even greater irony the mine that sank her struck in almost the same place as the iceberg that the Titanic hit. And the failure of the closing mechanism on the watertight doors (probably as a result of the explosion) ensured that one too many compartments flooded.

The facts are perhaps even stranger than the fantasies.

Posted by The Gray Monk at August 30, 2004 05:45 PM

Comments

Posted by: Graham Joinson at September 26, 2004 05:36 PM

Posted by: Jer at October 4, 2004 01:05 PM