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June 4, 2009 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:47
Edition 21 - The Titanic

As promised Robin Gardener joins Howard whose book "The Titanic Conspiracy" isabout to be published.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
No well, thank you for coming back to the show and thank you for the great feedback from the last one.
I'm still sifting through emails that are still coming in from that show because it's very, very recent.
And that was the show with Liverpool medium Phoebe.
A lot of people asking how they can get in touch with Phoebe.
Well, she's contactable via and you can find out more about her through yeoliverpool.com.
Yo Liverpool1Word.com.
And there you can find out what she's all about.
And also, of course, last time we featured Ron Plunkett, who's given his life, or a pretty big chunk of it, to searching the skies for possible definitive proof that UFOs and aliens and ETs do exist.
Fascinating man in Bristol, England.
It's been a while since he's been interviewed, and I just thought time to bring him to you as well.
So thank you for the feedback on that show.
Please keep it coming.
And also about the things that I said last time about radio in the UK and whether perhaps some changes might be needed.
I wanted to get your thoughts on that.
Maybe you're listening to this and you are in the radio business.
Maybe you're a listener to radio and you have some thoughts.
Well, please email me.
It's unexplainedh at yahoo.co.uk.
That's unexplainedh at yahoo.co.uk.
If you're listening to this on iTunes or in any other way that you've found it, links to it in different places or whatever, if you could do me the great favor of going to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, that's www.theunexplained.tv, and just registering a hit on the website.
It helps us to track numbers for how many people are actually hitting the website so we get an idea of how the listening numbers and the viewing numbers for the website are going up and up and up, which they are exponentially, which is very, very good news for, as I've said before on this show, something that is not publicized anywhere.
In fact, it's spread by word of mouth.
So if you've found this, and if you like it, well, thank you, please, could you tell your friends about it so we can get the word out there, or if you can get this mentioned on other websites or in magazines or whatever.
Now, something I've been meaning to talk about for just a little while before we get to author Robin Gardner, who will be talking about the Titanic and the possible conspiracy about that disaster.
I just want to mention this.
And I should have done this months ago, so I'm sorry to these guys, but there is a band in this country, and they were championed by a great rock broadcaster, a guy called John Peel.
The band is called the Pocket Gods, and they were one of John Peale's favorites.
John's sadly no longer with us, but he was a man who championed many, many rock bands and different fresh kinds of music in this country.
He is greatly missed.
And he was a big supporter of this band called The Pocket Gods.
Well, The Pocket Gods last year recorded and put on their recent album, a song about me and the unexplained.
It's called Howard Hughes.
It's a great tribute that these guys, who are based just to the north of London, thought that I was worth it.
But there is a slice of my show running all the way through this song.
And I'm really, well, I'm quite moved by it, really, that somebody would think that I was worth doing that for.
So at the end of this show, once we've heard from Robin Gardner, I will play you that.
It is The Pocket Gods with their song, Howard Hughes.
Believe it or not, if you want to find out more about them, just search them online.
The Pocket Gods, they are called.
And they have some good music out, and I believe they have another album coming out soon.
Okay, that's the plug for them.
Let's get to Robin Gardner now, as promised.
Robin Gardner is a man who's given a big portion of his life to researching the Titanic disaster.
He simply didn't buy the explanations that we've had over these last 90-odd years or so about how that disaster happened and how 1,500 people came to die on that night.
He has a new book coming out soon.
Its working title is The Titanic Conspiracy.
And for a radio show at City Talk in Liverpool, I recently caught up with him.
So for City Talk and for The Unexplained, I did this interview with Titanic writer Robin Gardner.
I hope you enjoy it.
Here for the first time is the story of that night.
A night when 2,200 men, women and children were faced with a terrible fact.
The fact that most of them were going to die.
Well, that was a clip from the theatrical trailer for the 1958 movie A Night to Remember.
And for me as a child growing up in Liverpool, I remember that the TV companies who were obviously strapped for cash, late at night at the weekends, would quite often put that movie on.
So in the 1970s, gosh, I must have seen that movie so many times, but it taught me a lot about the facts of the Titanic.
I think to an extent that movie maybe told the facts better than any other movie, but did it of course, in a dramatic way, because they had to put bums on seats just like the makers of any other movie.
But I think by the time we got up to the 1970s and we had a movie about raising the Titanic, you might remember, and then we got to the 90s and we had Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet with their theatrical production of the theme tune by Celine Dion, a movie most of us went to see and some of us now regret seeing, I think maybe the truthful telling of the Titanic tale had begun to come unstuck.
Well, let's try and bring it on track now because I'm about to introduce to you a man you might have heard when I was filling in for Pete Price on City Talk 105.9 at the end of last year.
And we said then that we would bring him back nearer to the time that his new book would be published.
Well, his name is Robin Gardner, and he's based in Oxford, and he's online now to City Talk 105.9.
Robin, thank you for coming on again.
That's right.
Now, Robin, that theatrical trailer, very, very dramatic, great performances in that 1950s movie from the likes of stalwarts Kenneth Moore and people like that.
Beautiful performances.
And I think, you tell me, I think that was probably the most truthful portrayal of the story.
Certainly it was.
It was by far the best film on the loss of the Titanic.
His only problem, of course, was Kenneth Moore played all the parts of every officer.
Yes, apart from that.
But I still think it was very credible for its day.
It was an excellent film.
As I say, far and away the best of them.
And they managed to get what I liked about it is, and which we seem to have lost these days, is that they got the key facts of the case across.
If you were writing a factual book about the Titanic or giving a lecture about it or something, you could do worse than use that as a base for it, couldn't you?
Yes, it says it is.
It's far and away.
It's probably the best book with the possible exceptions of Jeffrey Marcus and The Maiden Voyage.
But other than that, they are.
It's an excellent account of the loss of the Titanic.
And we have to say, because of the way that ITV used to work, that movie got a lot of screenings in different regions up and down the years.
And in my formative years, that's how I came to see it so many times, which is why the lines of that movie and the order that things happen in that movie are imprinted in my head.
Yes, it reawakened the interest in the Titanic.
That book and film on their own basically brought it back into the public eye.
So a shame that later we got a movie that Lou Grade made, Lou Grade's famous ITV boss made, called The Raising of the Titanic, which was almost like a joke, wasn't it?
It was.
What was it, Lou Grade said?
Cheaper to lower the Atlantic to raise the Titanic.
When they came to him with the budgets, he said, raise the Titanic, it'd be cheaper to lower the Atlantic.
Yeah, but they still made the movie.
They showed it on TV again a few weeks ago, and it hasn't improved with age, we have to say.
That's it.
The one scene after the ship breaks surface towards the end of the film.
Which is hugely impressive, but of course it was never going to happen that way because any ship of that size that goes down and hits the bottom is going to either break up on the way, on the surface, or at the bottom.
One way or another, it would never come up intact.
No, well, we now know that it's broken into two major parts.
Yep, true enough.
But it was a nice piece of fiction as long as you treat it just, you know, for entertainment purposes only.
And unfortunately, things did not improve in 1998 when we had the movie with Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
Again, it was beautifully filmed, and there are some great lines in that, like a real man makes his own luck, but not a great portrayal of the story.
No, it's very poor, and a lot of people actually believe it's a factual account.
Well, that must really peeve you because, and we'll get on to your lifelong interest in the Titanic in just a sec, but it must peeve you.
This is the notion that most people will have these days.
Anybody in their 20s or 30s, all they will know about the Titanic is that movie.
That's right.
Yeah, they've never seen Anotro member.
They've certainly never read any of the decent accounts.
So you're trying to set that straight.
And look, in my lifetime, Robin, I have known a few people who are fascinated by the Titanic story.
I'm not sure what it is that gets into them.
And these are quite well-adjusted people.
They have other interests, but their passion for the Titanic story is...
are intensely interested in the Titanic story and they have to get a You must be.
They have to get every piece of information that's published, everything that's written, every DVD.
They're completists about it.
Yes, I'm afraid I've got them all.
So what is it then that grips and consumes people?
Most people realise that the story's wrong.
The thing is, it's the whole story, it just doesn't ring true.
So it's not that people are gripped by any tragedy.
We all think about what happened in the World Trade Center when the towers came down, how terrible it must have been.
Or to take that even further, there was a period between 1914 and 1918, wasn't there?
Yeah.
That actually removed Titanic from the newspapers and from the public eye.
Well, true enough, but there is an interest that people have in tragedy and the mechanics of tragedy, but this, as you say, goes further than that.
It goes deeper, yes.
Literally, absolutely.
So tell me about your passion for it.
How did it start?
I don't really know.
I just developed an interest, and I started reading everything I could find, basically, and eventually it dawned on me that this thing was wrong, totally wrong.
The whole story.
I mean, this idea of people standing back and patiently waiting while women and children were loaded in the boats and then standing on the ship as she sank underneath them.
In an orderly fashion.
Well, that just does not ring true.
People aren't like that.
Well, you don't have to know anything about psychology.
You don't even have to know the Titanic story.
All you have to do is know a little bit about human nature to realize that in a situation like that, people panic.
Yes, people will be fighting to get into those boats.
And according to the accepted versions, they weren't.
We now know from reading the eyewitness accounts from the time and the inquiry transcripts and the rest of it that they did.
I mean, there was panic.
There were passengers shot.
I mean, the crew had their hands full doing their best to get 750 people off of the ship in the time they'd got.
Is it very hard for you, Robin, to research something that there are...
I think there might still be one living survivor of the Titanic, but it is nearly a century ago, and anybody with a personal recollection of it, of course, is not going to be here anymore.
No, I mean, even Nilvina Dean, which is the survivor.
She was a babe in arms, basically, at the time.
She doesn't remember anything.
All she knows of the Titanic is what she's been told.
So, as you say, all she would know would be the accounts given to her by those people closest to her on that night.
Yeah, her brother.
Her brother was there.
He's dead now, Bert Dean, but he would have remembered some of it.
But he was, again, only a small child.
And it was a long time ago.
I mean, it's another, was it three years?
It'll be 100 years ago.
Well, if you think how difficult it is to piece together the facts of something that happened recently, I was on City Talk Radio in Liverpool a month or so ago and had to do a programme about the 20th anniversary of Hillsborough, that terrible football tragedy where 96 people died.
And because of the fact that it's been 20 years, it's starting to get more difficult to get the eyewitness recollections.
Although those feelings run so deep and they always will in Liverpool, of course, inevitably people are going to start to move away or die off as time goes by and it gets harder.
And that's even, that's just 20 years.
Yeah, and people do get influenced by the stories they hear.
I mean, eyewitness evidence changed.
That's the way I try, wherever possible, to go Back to the witnesses, what these people said back in 1912 when it was fresh in their minds.
And before we unpeal the story itself, which I want to do in just a second, how difficult is it to get back, because I know your passion is to go back to the original material so that you're not influenced by anybody else's view.
How difficult is it to get hold of that?
Not that difficult.
You need to do some digging.
Supposedly the White Star records were all destroyed by when Cunard, Cunard destroyed the records of the White Star Line.
Or attempted to, but we now know that an awful lot of that stuff survived.
I mean, to the extent two lorry loads of it were transported away from Liverpool.
Well, I was going to say to you, it's true, isn't it, that some of those records were actually held in Liverpool.
Yeah, most of them were.
Yeah, Liverpool was the home base of the White Star Line.
The White Star building's still there.
And should we read anything into the fact that those records were fragmented in that way?
I don't know about that.
I mean, Cunard were just trying to clean house, I think.
There were obviously lots of bits and pieces.
All these shipping lines were up to all sorts of practices during the hard times, the late 19th century and so on and so forth, when the competition was intense.
There was very little money in shipping.
And these people would cheat.
We know even from Lawrence Beasley's account on the Titanic that she was shipping Chinese labor across to the taking Chinese labour to America, which was illegal.
So there's a lot of stuff in there that looked at with a modern eye.
A lot of things were going on at that time that we wouldn't really particularly want to remember with pride, and that's why records go missing.
That's right, yeah.
Yeah, they're weeded out.
I mean, luckily enough, I mean, things like insurance records, other insurance companies are not exactly free with their records.
A lot of these records do still exist.
And other company records, solicitors that dealt with the White Starline have all sorts of information.
There are lots of people, in actual fact, although the White Starline records were, to a great extent, destroyed, companies they dealt with managed to keep all of theirs, or a lot of those companies.
So it's possible to put this story back together again.
And have you found yourself having to travel to Liverpool in your search for information?
I've not been to Liverpool in 30 years.
Because we have to say, I mean, here's another point.
You're based in Oxford, and I wonder how, I can understand how somebody who's born as I was and brought up in the maritime tradition of Liverpool, I've got relatives who were dockers and merchant seamen and all that sort of stuff.
All of us in Liverpool have.
But I'm surprised that somebody who's in landlocked Oxford is interested in this.
Yes, well, I mean, all the...
My mother's side of the family were all sailors.
Royal Navy, but...
Yeah, well, I don't know, really.
It's just a hell of a story, isn't it?
Well, it is.
It is one of the greatest stories not to be told, I think.
I think the truth of it, and it's one of those things, it's like JFK and Diana.
The truth of it has yet to come up.
But I think there are people getting nearer to it.
And I happen to think, from what I know of you, that you are one of those people.
And it just amazes me, getting back to this research process, that here's a guy in Oxford who is willing to put the time and the shoe leather in, as we used to say, to actually do the job.
Well, I am lucky living in Oxford, in as much as we have the Bodley in Library, which is like the British Library, in as much as it keeps a copy of everything published.
There's only the two, as far as I know, in this country.
And so the British Library and the Bodleian.
And I have access to the Bodleian Library.
So things like transcripts of the inquiries are accessible.
They're not accessible to people living in...
You can now buy one.
But a few years ago, you couldn't.
So you have access to these records, and I suppose you're allowed to take copies of them or at least get notes from them.
So that's your starting point.
I mean, because the Buddha Library is not the easiest library in the world to use, although the librarians there are incredibly helpful.
Right, we're talking to Robin Gardner, who's in Oxford and has spent what's almost a lifetime researching the Titanic.
I know to Robin, it probably feels that way.
We're going to keep talking to him about this in just a second.
We want to get into next here at City Talk 105.9, the story of how the ship came to be built as it was built and sail as it sailed in the way that it did.
We'll tell you the story, and then we'll get to the theories about why it happened and who was responsible.
So Robin Gardner, talking about the Titanic here at City Talk, let's get to the ship itself.
First of all, tell me why a ship of this size, a liner of this size, to cross the Atlantic, why was that built at that time?
This was very early into the 20th century.
What was going on at the time that made that necessary?
Well, it was the means of crossing the Atlantic, wasn't it, Lona?
There were no airliners in those days.
And these things just got bigger and faster and more opulent.
Straight competition.
It was a big market.
There was a lot of money.
There were lots of people who wanted to cross the Atlantic.
The real money was in the emigrant trade, taking basically third-class pastures, to a great extent Irish people across the Atlantic to work in America.
To start new lives.
It's really hard, isn't it, for us in this generation to think about why there would be a need to do, well, maybe with the current economic situation, maybe it isn't hard to understand why people would want to uproot.
But most of us in Liverpool have known people back in the family, I've got them, who decided to pack it all in because times were too hard and just get out of Liverpool and try their luck in America.
Yeah, yeah.
We all know people that have done it.
Or, I mean, in later years, it became Australia, didn't it?
New Zealand.
But it's exactly the same thing.
The people looking for a better life.
You can't blame them for that.
And the established route, the way that it was done, was to leave from Liverpool or Southampton.
The Irish in Queenstown, now what's it called, isn't it?
So don't.
Well, they'd call in Southern Ireland, wouldn't they?
These guys weren't a lot of people.
That's where most of the Irishmen boarded, or a lot of them boarded, was actually in Southern Ireland.
And then it's the long haul across the Atlantic.
Yeah, yeah, and these things were ships were the regulations were pretty tight, and White Star in particular had a reputation for being very good.
Their treatment of third-class passengers.
Third class on a White Star liner was as good as, if not better, than first class on some others.
So, I mean, if you were going to make the trip, then the White Star line was the one to use.
Because if you didn't make the trip by then, then you were not going to be too sure what kind of conditions you'd have to make that trip in.
That's right, yeah.
All right.
Whose idea was it to build something so big?
I suspect it was initially Lord Pirry, Harlan the Wolf, because he began to alter the yard, which would have required government agreement anyway.
But this is the famous Belfast shipyard, isn't it?
We put forward to J. Bruce Ismay, the boss of the White Starline.
Harlan and Wolf being the famous Belfast shipyard, and there's a parallel to it in Liverpool.
That's Camel Leds, who've just come back to life in the last few months.
Oh, were they?
I didn't know that.
Yeah, no, they're actually building ships there again now.
Big story on Merseyside a little while ago, and everybody celebrates that fact.
So there it is, this big project slated for Haaland, and there's a massive design team who have their massive design hall to work in, which is being restored, as you know, at this moment.
Tell me the story of how the ship is built, and if there are any problems with that process.
No, there was nothing new about the Titanic.
It was just big.
All the Olympic-class ships, there's three of them.
They weren't new technology.
The nearest thing to new technology was the central engine, the turbine.
And even that wasn't sort of cutting edge.
But there was no problem.
They were just a bigger version of what Harlan and Wolf had been building for years.
So this was just literally as a project, business as usual?
Yes, yeah.
And how come the ship got tagged with this title that everybody says, unsinkable?
Never was.
That's the joke.
I mean, the builders or owners never claimed that ship to be unsinkable.
So how did that get around?
How did that idea get around?
A shipbuilder, like the trade magazine, on describing the ship, actually put down there that the ship would be practically unsinkable.
So it was a journalist who did it.
Yes, it wasn't actually alive, but it's made practically unsinkable.
The shipbuilder would have known full well that you could not build a steel ship that was unsinkable.
I mean, steel doesn't float.
So the ship is built, and presumably you will know this.
Was it built to schedule?
Did it come in on time?
No, it was put back slightly, but that was because of an accident with Olympic, the first of the class, when it was, well, an accident, I would say, when it was rammed by HMS Hawke.
Of course, that had to come back into the yard for repair.
Therefore, Titanic was delayed.
But that brings the Olympic into the picture, doesn't it?
So the two ships, as far as I understand it, weren't they together for a while?
And there is a theory that because the two ships were more or less identical, but not entirely identical, that there may have been some kind of swap.
Well, as they were built, as they went down the slipway, they were identical.
They were built off the same set of drawings.
And there's only one set of drawings and builders' models for these ships.
And Olympic and Titanic avalanche were identical.
And what about this idea that the reason that the Olympic was the one that actually was sunk, was deliberately sunk, but was renamed the Titanic in secret, and there was some kind of insurance fraud or scam going on?
Yes, yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure of that now.
Well, absolutely sure of it.
That because of this accident with HMS Hawke, when Olympic got rammed in September 1911, she was so badly damaged that she was hauled back into the yard and found to be effectively beyond economic repair.
At which point, the White Starline have another ship, to all intents and purposes identical, waiting to go, basically.
So they patched up the Olympic and got her back to sea, working at reduced speed and everything else, because she was vibrating very badly because of her engines and being damaged and everything else.
But they got her back to sea for a couple of months while they completed a conversion of the second ship, Titanic, into an Olympic, then hauled Olympic back in, sent Titanic out as Olympic.
So you believe, this is your theory, which is now starting to gain a lot of prominence up and down the country, but this is your belief now, having looked at the documents, that that's what happened.
It was an insurance fraud.
They weren't going to get the money back on the Olympic, and we need to explore why they weren't going to get the money back on the damaged Olympic.
So the only way to get their money back, presumably, was to sink another ship.
Yeah, pretend it was another ship.
Why were they not going to get their money back on the Olympic?
Remind me of that?
Well, because on the Hawk, in the Hawke incident, the initial inquiry was by the Royal Navy, remembering that the Hawk is a Royal Naval ship.
So not surprisingly, they found the Olympic to be totally to blame for the collision.
Although in actual fact, Olympic Hawk actually rammed Olympic and went to quite a lot of trouble to do it.
So the Navy was responsible for this, but of course a naval inquiry is never ever going to say this, so you blame the other people, and if you blame the other people, then they can't claim on their insurance.
So presumably the size of the loss that they would have taken, this is the White Star line, would have taken on the loss of the Olympic and having to pay for that or the repairs to the Olympic or whatever would have been so great that it could have, what, bankrupted the line?
It was already, the shipbuilders were already in trouble.
The line was okay.
It was owned by J.P. Morgan, probably the wealthiest, most powerful man in the world.
But even so, Mr. Morgan wasn't prepared to lose a million and a half pounds.
which again you can't blame him for can you?
Especially when it was, The Navy lied at the inquiry, without a doubt.
We have photographic evidence to prove it.
So at that stage, once we have the inquiry, the inquiry's findings come out, fair or foul, and we think foul now, somebody somewhere makes a decision, all right, let's do this in secret.
Let's swap the two ships round.
Let's send out the one that we know is duffed, get rid of it, and let's get the money back.
But that's called murder, isn't it?
Barratry, I believe, is a technical name for it.
But it's still the most common insurance fraud there is, is to change the name of a ship and get rid of it as something else.
That is still the commonest type of maritime insurance fraud.
So we have this period of a few months where the Olympic having been rammed and being in really no good situation, but just about seaworthy, but that's all it is.
It's still sailing.
They're finishing the Titanic in Belfast.
Then the two ships come together and in secret, their names are changed and the two are swapped over.
Yeah.
How come nobody's ever talked about that?
Well, they did in Belfast.
Belfast, Liverpool, and Southampton.
It was basically common knowledge.
So it was what we would call today an urban myth.
But not a myth.
It was an urban secret.
It was the Official Secrets Act that stopped the newspapers doing anything.
It's anything that happened inside shipyards or dockyards was covered by the Official Secrets Act, which Winston Churchill changed in 1911 just to cover this situation.
And as a consequence, the newspapers never reported it.
But it was talked about in Belfast.
It still is talked about in Belfast.
I've had no end of people get in touch with me, some of them on the radio, funny enough, on talk shows.
But confirming that everybody knew.
I knew about the rumours flying around in Southampton because one of my parents used to live there.
So I spent quite a lot of time in Southampton and down that area, so we talked to people.
Excuse me.
And I would guess in those days when there were not emails and blogs and there wasn't as free a press as there is now, it was easier to keep a horrible secret than it would be today.
There was nothing to it at all.
They just didn't put it in the newspapers.
And if they had, who was going to listen to a lot of Irish workers from a shipyard?
I mean, the only opinions that mattered back in 1911, 1912, were those of the aristocracy and big businessmen.
Now, before you started to research this, had you heard that theory, or was that a notion that you came to having looked at the papers?
I just suddenly felt with it.
It was basically because as a ship was sinking, nobody made any effort to prolong its life, which I would have thought was the first thing you would do, isn't it?
I thought, well, why?
They must have wanted this thing to sink.
And if they wanted it to sink, why did they want it to sink?
At which point it dawns that the reason they wanted to sink was it wasn't the Titanic at all.
And that's the point I started looking for the evidence to show that these things had been switched.
And from there, of course, the thing, once you know what you're looking for, it all starts to fall into place.
All right, before we unpick the actual journey itself and tell the story, which is fascinating in itself, the things that happened and the things that didn't happen on that journey on those few days, tell me what pieces of evidence that you had from all this documentation that you've looked at that points the finger most to this being the case?
In other words, a swap for insurance purposes?
Well, the photographs are conclusive, as good as fingerprints.
I mean, two in particular.
One showing Olympic in 1911.
Her power plating is laid out in a particular way with the joints, staggered joints, as these 30-foot-long plates overlap each other.
Now, a photograph of Titanic, which can't be any ship other than Titanic because you can actually read the name and she's only half built, taken in, again, late 1911, early 1912, shows that plating to be different on Titanic's hull.
Obviously, you used what plates you had as you riveted this thing together.
They weren't that identical in that sort of detail.
Now, a photograph taken in 1912 of supposedly Olympic in the dry dock being refitted as she was altered and brought up to different specification because of the Titanic disaster shows the bow plating to actually be that of Titanic, not of Olympic at all.
So this is the nearest thing that you could get to what we call a smoking gun?
No, that wasn't a smoking gun.
The propeller on the wreck is actually carrying Titanic's build number.
We know from the record that that propeller was actually fitted to Olympic, not to Titanic at all.
So it was a propeller that was made for the Titanic, but because of these repairs that had to be done to Olympic, was put on Olympic.
That's right.
Wow.
And it's still there.
And to cap it all, we now know from the documentation that the ship was the wrong size.
It was what?
It was the wrong size.
It was the wrong size.
This is going to get complicated, Howard.
The capacity of a ship is the gross register tonnage.
It's not a measure of weight at all, gross register tonnage.
It's actually a measure of capacity.
And it's that capacity that sets all the harbour dues and everything else.
The Board of Trade had to know all this thing as a ship was built so they could calculate what harbour costs would be and everything else.
Well, supposedly Titanic was altered in the last week before she left the yard and had her A deck enclosed, the top promenade deck, well the one below the boat deck.
That enclosure fits exactly with the fact that the B deck cabins that should be there on Titanic were not there.
That the deck was, in fact, a promenade deck, which is also borne out by eyewitness accounts.
Now, that's listed on our documentation.
Absolute proof that the ship we're looking at was a thousand tons, a thousand gross registered tons larger than she should have been.
And did that extra weight contribute to what happened on the night that she sank?
Sorry?
Did that extra weight contribute to what happened on the night that she sank?
It wasn't weight, it's capacity.
That's the thing that confuses everybody.
Sure, no, it's displacement, isn't it?
Yeah.
No, it's not even displacement.
Okay.
So 100 cubic feet equals one gross registered tonne.
So it's cubic feet's room.
A room is, for sake of argument, one gross register tonne.
So as you said, literally at the beginning, this thing was the wrong size to be the Titanic.
It was.
Its gross register tonnages were adrift, and it's there in the documentation.
It's very complicated.
You actually need to see this written down and see the calculations.
But that's all been done.
That was done by an insurance investigator who came to me with it.
I hadn't spotted it.
It's been there under our nose since 1912 and I hadn't seen it.
And because of that complication factor and because people in previous generations were not as inclined to ask questions as we are today, as you say, that's remained unremarked until now.
Yeah, how many people know that gross registry tonnage is not a measure of weight?
It's tons.
Tunns are weight, aren't they?
But this isn't, I mean, this isn't, this is capacity.
Not weight at all.
And it's been, as it's, it's on the documentation, on Titanics registration documents.
This thing is listed.
Right, Robin Gardner, we've set the scene now.
We have a ship that is not the ship that you think it is.
Greatly touted in the media, greatly praised in the press, practically unsinkable.
One trade publication called it.
She is prepared to set sail for America.
Everything seems to be above board.
Literally, everything seems to be fine.
But then this ship is destined, as we know, to a terrible, terrible fate.
But not just an accident, apparently.
We're talking to Robin Gardner.
This is City Talk 105.9.
I'm Howard Hughes.
And we'll talk some more in just a second.
Robin Gardner, we are talking about the Titanic.
And I think now that we've set the scene and what we're saying is that this ship that set sail and eventually sank with the loss of so many lives tragically, around 1,000 people died on there that night, thereabouts, roughly.
The ship that we think is the Titanic is not the Titanic.
It's another ship that was damaged and could not be the subject of an insurance claim.
So the owners, the White Star Line, couldn't get the money back on the ship.
Very, very badly damaged.
What do they decide to do?
Okay, let's patch up this duff ship, the Olympic, call it the Titanic, send it out, let it have an accident, then we get our money back.
That's where we are.
In a nutshell, yep.
Okay, let's quickly, because these things are a matter of record, and we've seen the movies, and they more or less tell a reasonably accurate story of what happened.
Tell me the story of the voyage.
But the story is much more complicated than that, as we know.
Well, yes, I mean, working backwards from that, I don't believe the ship ever did strike an iceberg.
Really?
I mean, the damage is all wrong.
The damage to the ship is not consistent with collision with an iceberg.
All right.
Well, the accepted idea of what happened is the ship set sail, is heading out in calm conditions on a slightly south route because there are iceberg warnings around, and the icebergs are thought to be north of where the ship was actually going.
She should have been, according to White Star standing orders, 60 miles further south than she actually was.
She took a thing called the autumn southern route.
She should have been on the outward southern route.
So she was even on the wrong route.
That's right.
She was 60 miles further north than she should have been.
She was aiming directly for the icebergs.
Now, how could that have happened?
Captain Smith knew exactly where he wanted to be.
So do we think the captain was in on this?
It must have been.
After all, Athel, Captain Smith dictates the ship's course, speed, and everything else.
Robin, that's amazing.
We never, when we talked about this last year, I don't think we got into this.
That is amazing.
So the captain was part of the plot.
Yes, I don't believe there was ever any plot to kill 1,500 people, which is what happened.
I mean, that was the plan was to take them all off.
And whether we're actually going to sink the ship or just haul it into Halifax, which is another possibility for repair, as Titanic, so the insurance would have paid, that would have worked as well.
But if somebody had thought we can get everybody off, they must have known that there were not enough lifeboats, which we're always told for the number of people who were on board the ship.
Well, that's right.
But they were not expecting the ship to sink uncontrollably.
There would have been no great hurry to get the people off.
They could have just loaded up the lifeboats, taken the people to another ship, turned around, come back, take them the next lot, and a ferry service effectively.
without any problems.
I mean, that would have...
So the ship is at the bottom of the ocean.
With technology as it was then, they were never ever going to bring it up or find out what really happened.
And the White Star Line would get the cash.
Yeah, which is exactly what they did.
They actually did very well out of it.
One way and another.
The insurance companies, the ship was valued at $1.5 million, and the insurance companies paid out almost three times that.
All right, there's Captain Smith.
It is an uneventful voyage up to that point on that night.
The ocean is clear, but that's also a problem because now they say the ocean being clear made it difficult to see icebergs, funnily enough.
It's easier to see icebergs when the ocean is a little choppy.
Yeah, that's true.
A flat, calm sea is not the ideal condition if you're moving into an area with icebergs because you haven't got the waves breaking Against the bottom of the bergs.
So, in the darkness, you can't see anything there because there's no sea wash against it.
That's right, yeah, it doesn't help at all.
And there was no moon, so you've got an absolutely black night.
And also, the lookout doesn't have binoculars.
No, but then I think that's a red herring.
The Royal Navy to this day does not allow their lookouts to use binoculars until they've sighted something.
I mean, the Navy's expression for it is the mark one eyeball.
And that's what the lookout uses, his eyes.
Once he's spotted something, then he uses binoculars to zoom in on it.
But because the field of view from binoculars is so limited, there's too much danger of missing something that's actually out there.
Anyway, the lookouts on the Titanic did see the iceberg in plenty of time.
So what happened?
Do you think?
Fred Fleet supposedly spotted ice ahead of the ship at 11.15.
It's 25 minutes before she struck.
He tried to contact the bridge and couldn't, by the telephone, and ringing the bell on the crow's nest bell to raise the alarm.
He could get no response from the bridge at all.
He actually believed there was nobody on the bridge.
He sent his mate down, Reggie Lee, to go to the bridge and wake them up and tell them in person.
I mean, Lee actually got to the bottom of the mast and suddenly thought, Fred sent me down here because this mast will be over the side if we hit this thing.
So he went back up.
He didn't actually go to the bridge.
But he tried for 25 minutes before he got a response from the bridge.
And the ship was travelling at about 22 knots.
So she'd covered 11 miles in that distance.
So by that stage, what happened was inevitable?
Or not, you think?
It shouldn't have happened.
I mean, at 11 miles distance to spot the iceberg, I mean, she could have avoided it with no problems whatsoever.
And do you believe it was the collision with the iceberg that sank the ship?
No, I don't think she ever did strike the iceberg.
I think she ran into another ship, but that's neither in or there really in as much as so the damage to the Let's just hold up there, Robert.
How could that have happened and not been documented?
If she ran into another ship, surely we'd have known about that.
Yeah, there is documentation.
Again, if Lloyd's registry lists a ship that we know to have been in the area that vanished just at that time.
Just disappeared.
And when you say a ship, is that a cargo vessel?
What kind of ship?
I don't really know.
It was just a cargo ship.
It wasn't a line or anything.
But it was not a particularly big ship, but then it wouldn't need to be.
So by the time the Titanic came close to this iceberg...
I think she went close to the iceberg.
She already had a problem.
Yeah.
Yeah, she had all sorts of problems.
But do you think this was part of the plan?
No, not to run a ship down.
The idea was just to go close to an iceberg, suddenly put the engines into full astern, the main engines, the wing propellers, which would have set up huge vibration, which they could then tell the passengers meant they had just scraped along the side of an iceberg, and they would have to evacuate the ship.
Now, at that point, there is no damage to the ship whatsoever.
So they've got all the time in the world.
Come the dawn, everybody gets taken off, taken to either the California and the Mount Temple, Carpathia, whatever ships come up, basically.
Once everybody's off, open the sea cocks and start the pumps up in reverse, which they would have done, which is one way of finding out whether this actually happened, is to check the pumps on the ship and let her sink.
Or take her in tow, which was a story actually put out and reported in the newspapers that the ship had been taken in tow and was being taken to Halifax.
So how come it didn't happen that way, Robin?
How come it didn't happen that way?
Because they struck something else and the ship sank.
And that completely threw them.
It's the best laid plans of most men.
So the plan was going well up to that point, and there was a collision with another ship that disappeared, and everything went literally out of the window.
Yeah.
And they were so hide-bound by what they'd got in mind, it took them a while to recover.
I mean, Captain Smith didn't even order the pump started for 40 minutes.
So we are often told about Captain Smith panicking and going slightly crazy because of the scale of what had happened.
Possibly the reason for that was because this scam had gone so badly wrong.
That's right.
He'd been involved in no end of accidents, Captain Smith.
I mean, talk about accident-prone, he's ridiculous, his record.
But he's not the sort of man that was going to panic about a minor problem at all.
But this wasn't a minor problem.
The ship was sinking.
And he knew he hadn't got enough lifeboats.
So he knew everybody was going to die, or a lot of people were going to die.
Him included.
And well, in a way, he had to die, not only because of this thing that the captain is always supposed to go down with the ship, but also if he lived, the story could have got out.
Well, yes.
It's not.
It is 99% certain that he went down with the ship.
You mean there is a percentage of doubt?
There's a very slim outside chance that Captain Smith and others that supposedly went down with the ship didn't.
And if they didn't, what happened to them?
They were taken to America.
And there they stayed.
They never came back.
Only one person that we know of that supposedly went down with the ship ever turned up back in Liverpool.
And that was Thomas Hart, I believe his name was.
He's part of the crew.
He wasn't picked up by Carpathia, which is supposedly the only ship to have picked up any survivors.
Yet a month after the event, he turned up in Southampton, in Liverpool.
That is very, very strange, isn't it?
Isn't it just?
And did he have anything to say about what he'd been through?
His papers had been stolen and somebody else had gone aboard the ship as him.
Now, that's not believable because the area he came from, it wasn't Liverpool, Southampton, sorry, and the area he came from, there were at least a dozen other stokers.
He was a stoker, or engine room staff.
At least a dozen others from the engine room that would have known him personally aboard the ship.
So there was no way that somebody could have said, oh, Thomas Hart.
So if ever there's a man with something to hide, there he is.
Yes.
Yeah, and he vanished.
I mean, a lot of other people from the Titanic vanished.
Nobody could find Harold Bride, the wireless operator, for years and years and years, not till he died, effectively.
We couldn't get in touch with him because he vanished off the face of the earth.
So this whole affair absolutely stinks.
Doesn't it, Just?
In the meanwhile.
It does exactly what it does.
And in the meanwhile, so many people had to lose their lives in this, and there's how many years is it now?
It's nearly a century, very nearly a century, and we still don't have a definitive conclusion, and nobody has ever really been blamed.
No, no, we still don't know how many people died.
We don't know how many people that were aboard the ship.
Now, there's another thing that came out of a conversation that you and I had at the end of last year, and that is that, in fact, there were ways to stop the ship sinking as fast as she did, because the Titanic went down in, what, a couple of hours?
Two hours, 40 minutes, yeah.
But she could have been kept afloat, you think?
How?
Yeah, well, the standard practice in those days was to hang a sail or stretch a sail over the damaged area.
I mean, all ships carried sails, they did up to and including the Queen Mary.
But put a sail over the side, and the water would, flowing into the ship, would carry into the breach and partially seal the hole.
So it's like putting an elastoplast there, but the pressure of water holds it in place.
That's right, yeah.
And this is done.
I've got a series of photographs here.
Two, one white star ship, Republic, and I think it's Florida.
I think she was Italian.
But Republic was rammed by Florida.
Republic did eventually sink, but it stayed afloat for about three days.
And both ships with these huge plasters on them effectively.
Say Florida with the first sort of 40 feet of her bow folded up like a concertina.
And Republic with a huge hole in her side.
So Robin, why didn't this happen with the Titanic?
Ah, well, that's a good question.
As I say, that's one of the things that triggered me off.
Why didn't they do these things?
Why didn't they make any attempt to prolong the life of the ship?
They were so taken aback, I think, by what had happened.
Well, yes, indeed.
It sounds like panic, doesn't it?
It sounds like absolute panic, because here you often hear about people who plan to commit robberies or burglaries or do whatever.
It doesn't go the way that they planned it.
Somebody gets hurt or something goes wrong, and everybody then, unless they keep their heads completely, they flip and they run around like headless chickens for a while.
They fall to pieces and nothing gets done at all.
That's exactly what happened here, I think.
And there was an inquiry after all of those people died and after the tragedy back in London.
And the captain, of course, there were some not very nice things said about him.
A few people had criticisms leveled at them.
But how come, if this scam that went wrong is so clear and so obvious, how come there were no pointers to it in the inquiry?
Well, it wasn't obvious at the time, but I believe there was a government involvement anyway.
Why would the government be involved?
Purely financially.
I mean, they were responsible effectively for the thing in the first place by allowing the Hawke incident to have gone off as it did.
But there is evidence to show that there was government cargo aboard Titanic in the shape of gold, which has been kept secret all these years.
So presumably the gold is still down there?
Nobody's had it, or have they?
Good question.
Or was the gold taken off?
Do you think the gold was taken off, Robin?
I think the gold was taken off before the ship ever left Southampton.
And not by the British government either.
Which was just, this thing just gets worse and worse.
And who would take that gold away?
Who would be pocketing that?
There was only one man that could have actually disposed of that amount of gold without raising a lot of suspicion.
Or one organisation, and that's J.P. Morgan and Company.
And was J.P. Morgan due to travel on the Titanic?
Well, he said he was, but he never had any intention of doing so.
He was in France with his girlfriend.
And I suspect that when his statuary, he collected these old statues, some Egyptian stuff and all the rest of it, I suspect when that was supposedly removed from the ship, it wasn't that that was removed at all, but the gold.
But we don't know that for sure, and that's just a hypothesis, really.
Now, the only problem with a lot of this is, even though most of the principal players, almost all of the principal players, of course, are dead now because of the passage of time, they would be.
But surely, over the generations, some clearer picture of what happened would have emerged from somebody who was involved in this, perhaps somebody from J.P. Morgan's family, close to J.P. Morgan, or somebody else.
Morgan's won't tell you anything at all, but they're merchant bankers.
Merchant bankers don't tell you anything, do they?
Well, as we've seen, as we've seen, Robin, lately.
So you think that it has been possible over these years, these decades and decades, to keep this thing watertight, quite literally?
Easily, as I said, it was suppressed by the government.
Both inquiries, both the American and the British inquiries, were fast.
I mean, on the British inquiry, as soon as any of the barristers there looked like asking a question that might reveal the truth, the chairman, Lord Mersey, stepped in and took over the questioning and headed them off every single time.
Now, you have to read the transcripts of these inquiries to actually find this, but it's there.
The American inquiry, they just never asked any questions.
William Walden Smith, the senator that ran that, just never asked any relevant questions.
I mean, he asked some amazing questions like he did ask Charles Leitoller, a senior surviving officer from the Titanic.
What's an iceberg made of?
Leitaler was the man who was supposed to be the hero, wasn't he, of the night?
Yes, yes.
Again, that's the heroes of the night, if you actually read the eyewitness accounts, all went down with the ship.
Leitoller and the rest of them, I think they were responsible for a large loss of life.
Not intentionally.
Again, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Lytola was a terrible bad man, because he wasn't.
He was a good officer, but again, he'd never been in this position before.
And these people were struggling.
I mean, a ship that size, all those people, and they're trying to keep order and get people off the ship, then it could have been done a lot more efficiently.
Now, Robin, it is a long time ago.
It's a fascinating story, and I'm dying to read your book when it comes out.
We'll talk about the details of it in just a second.
How many people died?
Remind me the exact total of people who died.
1,500.
1,500 people died that night.
Even though it is a long time ago, for their sake, do you think anything needs to happen or be done now?
The truth needs to come out.
It's the same with all these things.
All we want is the truth.
I don't doubt that I've got bits of this story wrong because we're putting it together after all this time.
But I do know that the story we've been fed for the last biggest part of 100 years is a lie.
And that's a good point to rest it, Robin.
I want to talk to you again about this.
I find you fascinating talking about this, Robin.
I've talked to other people about the Titanic over the years, but nobody like you.
So thank you.
What's the title of the book?
Working title at the moment.
I don't know.
I won't know until later today, funnily enough.
Or supposedly later today, depending on my agent, of course.
But it's supposed to, I think it's coming out as the Titanic conspiracy.
All right, well, what people need to do, I guess, as the weeks go by and the months go by is search you by name.
And your name is Robin Gardiner with an I, Gardiner.
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
The book won't be out, I don't suppose, until probably next spring.
You've had to really fight to get this book there, haven't you?
No, not really.
If I was to be honest, it's everybody's been dragging their feet, me included, really.
How long did it take to write?
This one, it took me about two years.
Most of the research was done, although it's coming up for the...
I mean, that's what you do with the book.
The publishers then editor goes through, picks out any bits that he doesn't understand, and comes back to you and says, what does this mean?
So you go through, well, I've got to make some changes because more evidence has come to light in the time it's been off with the publishers.
And just finally, you said something to me when we were setting this up, and you said it to me on the radio last November, and it fascinated me when you said it.
You said, I'll be glad to have all this done.
It's like this is a thing that's been eating away at you.
You have to get it out.
You've got to get that book out there.
And once it's out there, you can breathe a sigh of relief.
That's what I felt from talking to you.
Yeah, well, that's right.
I would like to.
It's quite a famous sort of axiom that the Titanic, once she gets hold of you, will never let you go.
Once you get an interest in it, it's very, very difficult to just walk away and say, hmm, no, that's not right.
I mean, you obviously have an interest in it, Howard.
I do.
You see a book on the Titanic in a bookshop?
What do you do?
Well, I've got to pick it up and at least look at it.
That's right.
And everybody that gets involved with Titanic is the same.
And isn't that strange?
It's like we said at the beginning of this conversation, the people that I know who are interested in this, there's one lady I know in particular.
She's a semi-retired radio producer.
And she is the least likely person to be interested in this.
She is a person who's very much into classical music.
And I mentioned the Titanic to her a few weeks ago, and she is utterly consumed by the story of the Titanic.
she is another one of these completists.
She's got to have She's got to have and see everything about it.
It's amazing how it has that kind of pull.
And how many years is it this year now?
What's that?
97 is it?
97.
97 years this year.
Robin Gardiner, we will talk again.
Thank you very, very much.
This man's name is Robin Gardner.
If people want to know about you, Robin, can they find you on the internet?
They can find me in the phone book.
Well, it's a lot of people we're talking about, Robin.
You may not want that.
But I know there are things written about you on the internet.
So Robin Gardiner, word search him and you will see this man and his work.
And the work of being accessible, Howard.
I mean, because that's how information comes.
Families have records of odd things, odd little pieces of information.
Well, that's true.
Well, let's say this, Robin, let's say this now, then if anybody wants to add anything to what you have said, they can either get in touch with me at the radio station or me through my unexplained website and we can take it from there.
Yeah, well, there is a Titanic Conspiracy website as well, which is my agent runs that one.
Okay, and what's that address?
TitanicConspiracy.com, I think.
Oh, excellent.
Let's be honest with you.
Robin Gardner, good to talk to you again.
Thank you very, very much.
Take care.
Go well.
Thanks a lot, Howard.
And that's as broadcast on City Talk Radio in Liverpool, an interview with Robin Gardner and the book They Think will be out within the next few months and it will be called They Think but it may change but it looks like it will be called The Titanic Conspiracy.
I found Robin fascinating but I'd love to get your thoughts about him.
Anything you want to email me about, unexplainedh at yahoo.co.uk is my email address.
Thank you to Graham Mullins, my webmaster, for his work on this show as ever.
Graham, thank you.
Thank you to Martin for the new version of the theme tune.
You're loving it.
I'm getting lots of good response about Martin's new theme tune.
Martin, thank you.
And as promised, here are the Pocket Gods and the song that they recently released about me.
They've given me special permission to use it here on the website.
So now, The Pocket Gods and Howard Hughes.
Take care.
Across the UK and around the world on the internet, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Across the UK and around the world on the internet, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
The Unexplained So we're doing this show now.
It is July 2007 and it is the 60th anniversary of Roswell.
If you've ever bought a newspaper in a UK circuit, and if it's a dull weekend where there's not major crime or celebrities doing something, it's one of those weekends, perhaps it's mid-summer.
You can bet your bottom dollar that the newspaper will either rediscover crop circles, and we've had a few of those this summer, big ones, or they'll find something about ufology.
They'll find somebody who's making a claim.
But have you noticed a big, big change in the way these things are being done?
When I first started reading newspapers in my teens about ufology, UFO stories, they were usually about people who were cast as waggons.
The people who believed that there were aliens from outer space visiting this planet.
They look like this.
Here's a sketch that this person's done.
And the assumption being, it's the first person, Nups.
That is not happening anymore for a whole variety of reasons.
People are starting for very, very good reasons, and those reasons are evidential.
In other words, the evidence is there.
People are starting to buy into this like they never did before.
And one little story, something that we'll talk about a little bit later in this program, but a couple of months ago, there was a UFO sighting a pilot near the little island of Jersey.
Actually, Guernsey, which is the sister island to Jersey, Island Channel Islands, which are closer to France than Britain, but they're British territory.
Okay.
Little plane full of passengers, flying there.
The pilot looks across and he sees something that he later realizes has to be a mile wide in the sky.
We have heard these things before, but it's not often that the pilot actually goes on the local television news in Guernsey, New Jersey, and admits it, and says, I was scared, I needed, and this is a quote, a cup of tea, when I got that plane done to calm down for all the things.
Now that guy went public in the past, a lot of these people, especially wearing uniforms doing public jobs, did not admit what they seen.
This man did.
I have to say subsequently I tried to interview him.
And by that stage, I think he'd done so many local interviews.
He didn't want to do it.
His airline didn't seem to be interested in doing it.
So that is where I thought the story stopped.
Not so.
That was about two months ago.
Few days ago I'm picking up one of the UK cocoa, one of the big nationals here, and guess what?
The story appears again.
UFO, mile wide, seen near the China Islands by a pilot, Credible Witness.
And this time they made mention of a second pilot too.
Very interesting in the way that the news is done.
And I've been working in news all my career.
Sometimes a story will appear, and perhaps, if the organization thinks it can get away with it, they'll put another spin on the story, try and find a new line to it, or maybe just do it as it was done before.
Represent it, repackage it, and put it out there again.
That seems to have happened for me.
But these stories, they never really make the massive, big headlines that you think they're going to.
Sometimes I'll see a UFO story and I'll think that one's going to change everybody's perceptions of that one's fun page things and it never really quite happens.
But it is interesting the way these stories are being presented these days in a completely different way.
We're not talking about nutcases of wackos and weird people.
We're talking about people who actually are credible and do professional jobs and are not expecting this kind of thing and have never dabbled in ufology and have never played with region sort of anything like that.
We're talking about credible people.
Isn't that interesting?
Well the 60th anniversary of Roswell is the time of the Roswell Festival, which is a regular event there, but of course this one has to be special because of those 60 years since the incident where something they say crashed and aliens were ejected from it and all the evidence was covered up or was it?
More about this is coming out all the time and this year particularly there are some confessions from a man who was part of it all, who's died, but put down a sworn affidavit before his death to be opened after his death.
So now should he give more interest than I was able to tell you at the time.
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