A TITANIC
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DEFENDING
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THE CASE FOR
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"I think I’ve had a dirty deal. They wanted a goat, that was my opinion. There’s always this stigma — was Lord to blame, or was he not to blame?"
So, in 1959, at the of 82, Captain Stanley Lord of the Californian looked back on those tragic events in 1912 which left him officially condemned in the eyes of the world as the man who could have saved all 1,500 of those who perished in the Titanic disaster, but who failed to do so, allegedly because of his laziness, incompetence, cowardice or even drunkenness, as some critics have hinted.
The opening section of A Titanic Myth is an account, based on Stanley Lord’s contemporary papers and later reminiscences, of how he went to sea in sail when only thirteen years old, to become captain of a passenger-cargo liner at the exceptionally early age of twenty-eight;
it describes the week of that fateful night, seven years later on 14th April 1912, when as captain of the Californian he was nineteen miles away when the Titanic went down after colliding with an iceberg on her maiden voyage;
how a series of apparent coincidences then led to his being officially blamed by both the British and United States inquiries for the heavy loss of life;
and how, after nearly fifty years had passed, a spectacular renewal of public interest in the disaster compelled him to re-open the case.
In 1958 Leslie Harrison, as General Secretary of the Mercantile Marine Service Association, became responsible for the renewed attempt to clear Captain Lord’s name.
The later part of the book records the hostility he encountered, and the stubborn refusal by the British Board of Trade to reopen Captain Lord’s case, choosing to stand by the findings of Lord Mersey’s judicial inquiry of 1912 which condemned Captain Lord without right of appeal.
11 is the story of those unusual coincidences which led to Captain Lord’s tragic dilemma and it raises a point of principle of direct concern to every public spirited man or woman.
2nd Revised Edition: Examines the evidence against Captain Stanley Lord of the Californian who was blamed for not saving the survivors of the Titanic. The Case For Captain Lord : Leslie Harrison, who spent most of the latter half of his life fighting for principle against the injustice against Capt Lord wrote the two little booklets when Lord Mersey’s decision was overturned and Captain Lord was, for all intent and purposes, exonerated. His work complete, Mr Harrison died in 1997 as the last booklet was published. |
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