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April 5, 2025 - Jim Fetzer
30:27
Titanic Conspiracy: The Full Truth | Part Two
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Titanic, history's most infamous ship.
Her sinking shocked the globe, but in recent years, theories have begun to emerge accusing the ship's operators of a shocking fraud.
In part one of Fraud, the Titanic Conspiracy, we learned about the originator of the famous switch theory itself, Robin Gardner, and began to examine his claims in some detail.
The damage done to Olympic by its collision with HMS Hawk, and the value the White Star Line's sister ships were insured for.
Gardner's theory was that Olympic, too badly damaged to be of any use to the White Star Line, was swapped with the new Titanic and sunk on purpose to collect an insurance payout.
In part one, we spoke to naval architect Stephen Payne and learned how the damage to Olympic was not so severe as Gardner claims.
And examining insurance records shows that White Star Line's ships were underinsured by a significant amount.
Today, we'll look closely at the actual act of swapping Olympic and Titanic themselves.
Just how similar were these two supposed identical sister ships?
What would be needed to kit Olympic out as the newly finished Titanic and sink her on purpose?
We'll examine the evidence of the sinking and the wreck on the sea floor to reveal the truth.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Lighter Designs, and this is the story of the Olympic Titanic switch theory, the greatest fraud in modern historiography.
geography.
First, we'll look at the real core of the theory, the actual act of switching the ships.
Gardner said that the situation for White Star looked bleak.
Olympic would need to either undergo costly repairs or face the scrapyard.
This is where Gardner supposes that Joseph Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star line, along with a privileged few higher-ups, came up with the plan to switch the ships.
Now, as we've mentioned before, the two sister ships were apparently near identical.
So could it be possible that a switch could be completed quickly and easily before anyone truly realised what was happening?
Let's take a look at how Gardner supposes this entire thing went down and how the switch was accomplished while being completely unnoticed.
Gardner says, The reason why diverting labour for a matter of six weeks from the fitting out of Titanic to the urgent repair of Olympic only put the completion date of the former back by three weeks has been a puzzle for many years.
The possible solution is that the workforce, instead of repairing Olympic, were engaged in removing alterations already carried out to Titanic, at least as far as B-Deck was concerned.
While Olympic and Titanic looked externally to be near identical, even Gardner admits that serious alterations needed to be undertaken in order to pass one ship off as another.
One of the main areas in which the differences are most evident is actually on B-Deck.
On Olympic, the entire length of B-Deck served as an enclosed promenade, and while it was an aesthetically pleasing choice, it wasn't very popular with passengers, and it was ultimately seen as a waste of space.
But on Titanic, the B-Deck promenade was subsequently deleted.
This decision was actually made after Titanic's launch, once the lessons had been learnt from Olympic.
In fact, when the ship was launched, she featured the same square promenade windows on B-Deck that the Olympic had.
But then Titanic's B deck was divided up into a variety of public spaces and staterooms.
The Café Parisienne was installed, and the popular à la carte restaurant was extended out.
Luxurious first-class staterooms were installed that came way out to the ship's side, and only a tiny section of the original promenade deck was kept intact for the massive parlor suites, the best accommodations on board the ship.
The changes made Titanic larger than Olympic because by enclosing and converting the promenade space the ship's usable internal volume had increased over that of the Olympics.
By the time Olympic had collided with Hawk we can see from photos that as she's led into the Thompson Graving Dock for repairs to commence, workers have already started on Titanic's B-Deck changes and the whole sections of plating have been cut away so that new irregularly spaced stateroom windows could be installed.
Now Gardner is suggesting that Olympic's B-Deck would need to resemble Titanic's planned B deck and vice versa.
Now, obviously, this is not something that could be done overnight.
Gardner suggests that about six weeks was used to pull this off.
But when we take time to actually understand the monumental undertaking this would actually entail, we see that it would have taken far more than just six weeks to pull off such a stunt, and it would encompass much more than just B deck.
Switching the two ships begins to get complicated when you realise that Titanic was then Nowhere near completion, with just one funnel standing and hardly any of her interior fittings installed.
Olympic would have also needed to be made to look like her sister ship in order for the illusion to work.
So at this point, workers would have needed to remove Olympic's funnels and strip her paint to match the progress that had been made on Titanic up until that point.
Meanwhile, Titanic would have needed to be entirely finished in the span of six weeks.
Now, this would entail all of her engines being completely installed and functional.
Work on all those B-Deck changes reversed, and then the windows rearranged, the lifeboats and their davits installed, the anchors placed, the interiors finished, miles and miles of wiring and corresponding electrical fittings installed and working, the list goes on.
On top of all of this, the entire ship would have been completely unpainted upon Olympic's arrival.
It would now need to be painted bow to stern in order to pass off as our sister.
Now, this would typically take between four to six months of additional work to accomplish, and indeed the historical record tells us that Titanic was not due for completion then until about March 1912, some six months later.
A gardener says it was all done in just six weeks.
Now, as if that's not bad enough, during all of this there would have been access to just one large floating crane, available for installing funnels and larger machinery.
Olympics funnels would have had to have been removed to make her appear to be the unfinished Titanic.
That would involve draining the dock, moving the ship out of the dock, removing the funnels, then reinstalling those same funnels on the Titanic.
Now, we can clearly see that even with every worker on duty working around the clock, there would simply not be enough time to efficiently and covertly pull off the switch in just six weeks without anyone ever noticing.
Having been on site during many ships constructions, having been on site where Queen Mary II was being built in France, what is your opinion of the practical possibility of actually performing Well, let me put that in perspective, Michael.
I think there's more of a chance of the Earth being flat rather than round than that actually happening.
The Titanic had improvements built into the design from experience of operating the Olympic.
And Thomas Andrews had suggested various amendments and the like.
One complete first-class promenade deck on the Olympic was eliminated through pushing the first-class cabins that were in wire of that promenade.
I think it was B deck.
I think it is the one.
They're right out to the side of the show and you just can't suddenly make all those alterations go away.
There would have been a huge amount of work to build those cabins and the like.
It's just a complete nonsense, absolute fallacy.
We always seize upon the big difference between Olympic and Titanic too, but there were many, many smaller ones.
For example, Olympic's bell at the forward mast sat on the forward aspect while Titanic's sat at rear.
Olympic's funnels early in her career had small pad eyelets installed about midway up, something that Titanic never had.
Photos from Titanic's boat deck show no pad eyelets, but photos from Olympic's early career and her later career show the same ones.
One popular theory gotcha involves the number of portholes on Titanic's bow.
Titanic on her departure clearly had 16 portholes on sea deck forward on the port side, while at launch she had just 14, just like the Olympic.
Now clearly additional portholes had been added.
Now lo and behold, after Titanic sinking, suddenly photographs show Olympic with 16 portholes too.
It's meant to suggest evidence of a swap.
But it ignores the fact that lessons were being taken from Titanic and implemented on Olympic as well.
That area is a very specific part of the ship.
A crew galley where hot stoves, cooked meals and generated cooking gases and fumes.
The photo of Olympic early in her career, about 1911, shows a desperate attempt at getting fresh air into that exact galley, a wind scoop fitted to the outside of the porthole.
Clearly, it just wasn't enough, so on Titanic, early on, they cut two extra holes and fitted portholes to get extra light and air into the compartment.
And after Titanic sank, and Olympic was in for refit, a number of changes were carried over and implemented on Olympic, and that was one of them.
The extra portholes were cut in, And the galley cooks got their fresh air.
Now, interestingly, it wasn't just B deck that changed either.
Olympic's C deck had a larger number of big, utterly pivoting portholes.
On Titanic, her designers had realised that in the bathrooms and toilets along that deck, smaller portholes could be used instead.
The photos of Olympic all those years later, at the scrapyard at the end of her career, show the correct number of bigger, large, utterly side lights.
For this to have been switched between the two ships, all of the heavy, reinforced plating with the massive hydraulic rivets all the way along Seadeck would have needed to have been ripped out, recut, and reinstalled on both ships.
But an effective swap would rely entirely on the people pulling it off in the first place.
Harland and Wolfe employed about 15,000 workers during this time, with another 20,000 offering their services on a subcontractor level.
How on earth did no shipyard worker ever confess to the devious scheme they were being asked to pull off?
Well, Gardner claims that the solution for White Star Line was simple.
Threats and bribery.
He said, Working conditions for manual workers in the early part of the 20th century were not dissimilar to those of today.
There was no security of employment.
If a man did not do as he was told, he was fired, and somebody else was brought in to replace him, which would automatically reduce the entire family to starvation level.
Then, of course, there was the simple expediency of bribery.
The expenditure of a few pounds would normally be sufficient to satisfy the curiosity or pacify the misgivings of a worker.
If all else failed, then there was always the threat of the Official Secrets Act.
Keeping the secret, at least for the foreseeable future, would not have presented very much of a problem.
Now here, Gardner is relying upon the fact that shipyard workers were kept on the cusp of unemployment in order to keep them in line.
If job loss wasn't enough reason to keep one's mouth shut, then perhaps a little extra pocket money would do the trick.
He then goes on to claim that the shadow cast by the First World War pushed the events surrounding Titanic and the switch with her sister far into the back of everyone's minds.
Now, the flaws in these claims are pretty evident right away.
When speaking about Heartland and Wolfe, it's important to realise this was not just a small shipyard.
The yard employed nearly one-fifth of Belfast's entire population.
It is more than a bit outlandish to expect 15,000 Irishmen to keep a secret like this over a round of beers at the pub, and for the rest of their lives.
Even once the glory days of the ocean liner were long past, it's hard to imagine that no stories were ever told at the dinner table, no local gossip was spread, not a soul ever came forward.
The bribery and threats must have worked like a charm.
As every last worker went to their graves without muttering so much as a peep of the conspiracies surrounding the world's most famous ship.
Save, according to Gardner, for one man, but we'll revisit him in a bit.
Now aside from the shipyard workers though, there was the entire town of Belfast to consider as well.
The progress of each of the yard's ships was monitored very closely by the city's 385,000 inhabitants.
Now, Belfast city centre is only one and a half miles or 2.5 kilometres from where Olympic and Titanic were moored in late 1911.
The ship's swapping would need to take place in full view of the entire city for six agonising weeks without raising suspicion or alarm.
The story of your own career very closely echoes and mirrors those of designers like Thomas Andrews, Carlyle, the men who actually designed and built Olympic and Titanic from the ground up.
What is going through these men's minds if they are presented with a plan by the White Star Line to intentionally sacrifice?
You know, when you're designing a ship from scratch and you're getting it through all the regulatory bodies that you need to do before construction begins and then you start construction...
And then there's a myriad of things you have to do with all the subcontractors, equipment that you've got to put on the ship, choosing which you're going to have.
You certainly build up a very personal relationship.
And, you know, my experience with Queen Mary 2, I was five years from being given the commission to design and being charged with the construction of it to actually handing the ship over to Cunard.
And you build a tremendous bond with this thing you're creating and building and that.
It's very much, you know, like a father of a child and that.
And the thought that you would fall in line with some conspiracy that you're going to sink the ship to claim insurance because...
That just makes you as guilty as the people that are actually going to do the sinking and that.
And you've got not only professional pride and everything, but as I say, there's the legal capability as well.
So, you know, these people like Andrews and everybody else were honourable people.
And it's totally against anything that I think that they would get involved with, certainly.
Belfast was only one part of the story, as many of Olympic's loyal patrons who'd sailed on the four voyages prior to her collision with Hawke, and some more afterward, would then go on to sail aboard Titanic during her ill-fated maiden voyage, but no story ever came from a survivor recounting how it felt as though they were travelling on the same ship they did throughout 1911.
Quite the contrary, many of the Titanic's passengers noticed the unfinished state of the ship, with fixtures missing from lavatories which were not missing on the very much completed Olympic.
Second class passenger Imanita Shelley recalls fixtures being still crated up and one forcer that would not stop running due to being improperly installed and not tested for use before.
Now this certainly would not have happened on a ship which would have already been in service supposedly for almost a year.
Now with the switch somehow pulled off the old Olympic now needed to be passed off As the new sister ship and then purposely sunk to collect on the insurance money, which was a remarkably convoluted plot that was supposed to go down through the use of a predetermined point, opening the ship's seacocks and then safely evacuating the passengers to a waiting rescue ship.
But Gardner says the plan went awry.
He said, since an iceberg could not inflict such damage on a steel double-hulled vessel such as the Titanic, it must have hit something else.
In this case, an IMM rescue ship that was drifting with its lights out.
Titanic crashed into the waiting vessel, tearing at least one of that ship's lifeboats from its davits and also stripping some planking.
The stranger's lifeboat crashed down into the sea, where it remained afloat, now attached to Titanic, probably by the ropes of its own falls.
The rescue ship was quite severely damaged in the collision so badly that she took no further part in the proceedings, except to confuse everybody by firing a series of white distress rockets.
Now this is where the logistics become truly complex.
We're all familiar with the fate that befell Titanic.
Her unfortunate elision with an iceberg, which forced open her hull enough to flood her watertight compartments, far beyond what the ship was designed to handle.
But Gardner asserts that a different chain of events led to the sinking of the apparent Olympic.
But unfortunately, Gardner presents us with a fundamentally flawed understanding of Titanic's construction.
This was not, in fact, a double hulled vessel.
Rather, she was constructed with a double bottom.
But it wouldn't be until after Titanic's sinking that ships began to employ the use of a double hull.
The iceberg could easily slice through that one layer of steel.
On top of this, there are many eyewitness testimonies from passengers who were unaffiliated with the White Star Line or their supposed scheme, all of which agree with the widely accepted account of Titanic's elision with the iceberg.
An elision, by the way, being contact between a moving ship and an immovable object.
Edith Rosenbaum, first class passenger, later described what she saw as a ghostly wall of white as it drifted by outside, and in fact for others the encounter was much more visceral.
Edward Kimball, who was a first class passenger down on D-Deck, had his cabin's portholes smashed in by ice, which then gathered on his floor.
Now finally we have the claim that Titanic slammed into the supposed waiting rescue ship so heavily that lifeboats were torn from their davits and thrown into the sea.
And that rescue ship was horribly damaged as well.
I actually don't know, for the life of me, where this assertion comes from.
No IMM so-called rescue ship arrived at a shipyard requiring immediate repair.
The claim doesn't match up with any evidence we have from eyewitness accounts and testimonies.
No passengers on Titanic ever reported seeing another ship pass near them, let alone witnessing such a violent collision.
Where the idea of lifeboats being torn off comes from is a mystery.
Now, whether or not the plan went awry is ultimately immaterial, because we need to think about this as an act of insurance fraud with the ultimate goal of destroying the ship.
So, in deciding to purposely sink Titanic mid-ocean to supposedly collect on the insurance money, the White Star Line would be seriously, irreversibly damaging its own reputation, a reputation which had already just been marred by Olympic's collision to begin with.
They would have known then and there that the sinking of Titanic, purposely or not, Well, of course, there always was.
Fire. Fire has claimed dozens of ships in dry dock, and in fact, it seems ships are most vulnerable when they're undergoing repair or construction.
Dangerous flammable chemicals are left lying around in tins and containers.
Wiring hangs unfinished from the ceilings.
Furnace Bermuda Line's SS Bermuda actually suffered a fire that nearly completely gutted her, and her rebuilding was nearly complete when she was gutted again in the dry dock by a second fire, which was even worse.
The cost fell to the ship's underwriters, which was a cool If White Star Line really wanted to collect on their insurance, then the story of an unfortunate fire in the docks as Olympic was undergoing her repair would be far, far more plausible, and easy to pull off, one that wouldn't risk hundreds of lives and which wouldn't risk destroying the company's reputation.
Despite all this, Gardner goes on to explain that when the plan went awry and the former Olympic actually sank in a horrible accident, the surviving crew members would need to be sworn to a life of secrecy.
He says, Now, it appears that this part of the theory has its origins with a man by the name of James Fenton.
Otherwise known as Paddy the Pig, who claimed to be a crew member on board Titanic and was determined to let the world know of the truth, or so-called truth, behind the sinking.
He was a large proponent of the infamous and often debunked theory that a fire in the coal bunkers was the real reason for the ship's sinking.
We already covered that on this channel.
Fenton was also convinced of the supposed switch theory, as well as the idea that the ship did not in fact hit an iceberg at all.
Now what's important to note here is that Fenton did not tell his story himself.
His account was written in a letter by a man named Frank Finch.
They claimed he had a conversation with Fenton in which Fenton revealed all of the dark secrets behind Titanic's sinking, as he was apparently no longer able to bear the burden of hiding the truth any longer.
That would make Finch, a retired seaman himself, to be the only person to ever be told a first-hand account of any kind of conspiracy.
Now, while a whistleblower on his deathbed could potentially spell disaster for a company like White Star Line, There are many flaws with this story too.
Firstly, while James Fenton was in fact employed as a sailor during the earlier years of his life, there is absolutely no record of him ever being anywhere near the Titanic.
Secondly, a letter written by a man unaffiliated with Titanic telling the story of another man who was similarly unaffiliated with Titanic really fails to stand up as hard historical evidence, especially with nothing concrete or actually in the records to back it up.
Now, as if that weren't enough, this claim displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how exactly the Official Secrets Act worked.
The law was meant not as a universal gag order for whatever inconvenient truth a private company did not want shared with the public.
According to the document itself, an individual is in violation if one, quote, obtains or communicates to any other person any sketch, plan, model, article or note or other document or information which is calculated to be, So clearly,
the Official Secrets Act was an attempt by the British government to counteract espionage, and would not have been relevant in the case of a conspiracy surrounding a private corporation.
Now finally, we come to the wreck of the ship that sits battered and broken on the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Now Gardner straight up came out and made a pretty He said something remarkable had happened when a French dive team was down there looking at the bow section of the wreck.
He said, There is no M or P in Titanic.
Gardner claims that when a French dive team examined the wreck, they found that the nameplate had raised lettering attached to the plating.
Now, this would be very compelling evidence if it weren't for one minor unfortunate fact, and that is that the imagery that Gardner put forward to support this claim is very clearly badly faked using computer-generated imagery.
In fact, in 2013, Gardner himself admitted fully that the image was faked in the email to a streaming network which had aired a documentary featuring his theory.
Whether or not Gardner realised the image was fake at the time of writing his novel, unwitting and curious viewers of the documentary were still presented with this forgery as though it was fact, and quite contrary to Gardner's claims, fairly clear video has been taken in the region of Titanic's nameplate, and the letters Each 18 inches or 45 centimeters tall and still etched into the side of the steel clearly spells out the name Titanic.
Gardner goes on.
While there was no need to have new bells made for the ship, she could hardly go to sea as Titanic with Olympic written all over them.
The simple way around that little problem was to grind the names off the bells or to switch those bearing the ship's names.
One of the ship's bells was recovered from the wreck, but although in excellent condition, there was no name on it.
Gardner's next claim states that Titanic and Olympic both had their names removed from their bells so as to mask the truth of which ship the bell truly belonged to.
Titanic historian John Hollis correctly points out the bell recovered from the wreck of Titanic was from the crow's nest, and those bells, way up high on the mast, away from passengers' eyes, very rarely carried ship's names.
In fact, very little from either Olympic or Titanic actually carried the ship's names.
Rather, the shipyard used a number system, with each of their hulls receiving a unique identifying number in the order of their construction.
Olympic was hull number 400, and Titanic was hull number 401.
And sure enough, the wreck down there at the bottom of the ocean shows a lot of 401, most famously on a propeller blade, but also on recovered wreck debris like cabinets, a watertight door gear shaft, And tools from the engine room.
By contrast, many panels and decorative fittings that were taken off Olympic during her scrapping survive to this day, with the hull number 400, Olympic's original hull number still clearly written on the reverse.
Gardner's theories sound, at face value, to be plausible, partly because there's just enough of the truth sprinkled in there to pass it off as fact.
But clearly, a little scratching beneath the surface and the use of common logic would render the idea of a switch impossible from the start.
The damage to Olympic, even if it was as extensive as Gardner claimed, would still be repaired by an experienced company like Whitestar and Harland& Wolff, who had dealt with similar situations before, and worse.
The actual act of the switch would need to take place in the full view of over 300,000 inhabitants of Belfast, and it would need to be pulled off in less than 50 days.
An incomplete shell, the Titanic, would need to be finished as the Olympic within six weeks.
The insurance payout would need to be falsified, all the documents faked to show an under-insuring.
Lloyd's, the Admiralty, the Board of Trade, they'd all need to be in on it and then be able to keep it a secret for over 110 years.
And nobody ever mentioned it again.
No single diary was ever kept.
No note was passed down the generations.
The Titanic switch theory is indeed one of the greatest frauds of our time.
But it's the switch theory itself that is one of, if not the greatest frauds in modern historiography.
Robin Gardner passed away You might think that theorising of an insurance fraud of that magnitude close to a hundred years later might be a victimless enterprise, but it calls into question the honour and the integrity of dozens, even hundreds of people who actually gave their lives trying to save others.
Thomas Andrews, the beloved shipyard manager, kind to all his workers and known as a warm and gentle soul, a proud naval architect and a doting family man, Gardner is calling him a fraud.
board. Bruce Ismay, the man who had taken over his father's company, who stood in his shoes and often boasted with intense pride of the ships and their magnificence, he would have had to have been in on it too.
The hundreds and hundreds of Belfast shipyard workers who toiled, day in and day out, to build the ships to set them to sea, the same men who openly wept when news of Titanic sinking reached their home city.
They would have had to have already known about it too.
Gardner is indicting all of them, and it's not just for insurance fraud, because logically, by extension of his arguments, he is accusing all of those people of complicity in murder.
The evidence is non-existent.
The Titanic switch theory, the great fraud of our modern historiographical times, has done immeasurable damage to the historic record.
Gardner probably I truly believed in his theory.
I wouldn't be so cynical as to think he only dreamt it up to sell copies of his books.
But the effect is the same.
Now, there is a pall of a question mark hanging over the wreck of Titanic in many people's minds.
It remains for them to just scratch below the surface, to read the reports, and to do the research to reveal that the sad reality is, Titanic, and her complement, were the victims of a terrible accident, and not the collateral damage.
of an insurance game gone wrong.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs.
Thank you so much for watching this video.
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