The Great Titanic Conspiracy

by Robin Gardiner

  Meanwhile the construction of White Star’s and the British Government’s new giant ships was moving steadily forward. As early as October 1908 models of the new ships were under construction in the Model Office in the Belfast shipyard of Harland & Wolff. There were two half models (ie, the hull was split in half from bow to stern, so that only one side of the ship was visible), which were respectively a quarter-inch-to-the-foot working model and an eight-inch-to-the-foot model. It was intended that the ships would be identical, so a single Olympic/Titanic model would suffice. (For the chequered careers of these shipbuilders’ models see Appendix 1.)

  The first of the White Star Line’s new super-liners, Olympic, went down the slipway and into the water on 20 October 1910. At almost 900 feet long, the huge ship was the largest man-made moving object on earth. (For a detailed description of the construction and layout of the ‘Olympic’ class liners see the author’s earlier works The Riddle of the Titanic and Titanic - The Ship That Never Sank). Even at this early stage it would have been clear to any observer, particularly those on the other side of the English Channel, that these new ‘Olympics’ were not designed to operate solely as passenger liners to challenge Cunard. Because of their watertight bulkhead arrangement, which did not include any longitudinal subdivision of the hull, they were doubtless designed as troopships right from the outset. They were constructed in such a way that they would remain on a relatively even keel no matter how badly they were damaged, allowing boats to be lowered from both sides of the boat deck. Another powerful indicator of these ships’ potential purpose lay in the lifeboat arrangement. As passenger liners they would be equipped with just 16 real lifeboats and four collapsible ones, but the specially built lifeboat davits were intended to handle at least 64 boats, and were capable of dealing with a great number more. (The original design drawings show this class of ship with 64 real wooden lifeboats.) These ships were designed to be loaded and unloaded quickly, possibly without benefit of a proper dock or quayside; survivability took a secondary place. The ability to load and unload a passenger ship quickly is not a prime consideration for designers of large passenger liners. However, for a troopship that might be embarking or disembarking large numbers of military personnel in hostile water, perhaps within sight of an enemy, speed would be of the essence.

  Even when operating as passenger vessels the new ships would be much too big to enter some of their normal ports of call, like Queenstown in Ireland and Cherbourg in France. In those circumstances fare-paying passengers would join or leave the ship in much smaller purpose-built vessels known as tenders. Troops would not always be afforded the luxury of a proper port or tender and would have to leave the ships by their own boats. This loading and unloading of men and materials, including horses, was something that was regularly practised by captains and crews of ships likely to be requisitioned by the military. Some captains, for example Captain Stanley Lord of the Leyland Line’s passenger cargo ship Californian, proved to be very much more adept at the operation than others. Lord was so good at it that if anyone wanted to evacuate a large vessel on the high seas he was an obvious choice either to command that vessel or to be on hand to receive its people. By coincidence, the Leyland Line was one of those that belonged to Morgan’s IMM company.

  Almost as if the owners, Marconi and the British Government didn’t care who knew about the possible military future role of the ‘Olympic’ class ships, they took no particular pains to hide it. Initially both Olympic and Titanic were allocated standard civilian wireless call signs; Olympic was allocated MKC and Titanic MUC. Then the call sign of the second vessel was altered to MGY, but the alteration was not immediately made public. In those early days of wireless communication there was no shortage of available call signs or any obvious need to reissue ones that had been used before. Nevertheless, MGY had been previously allocated to an American vessel, the troopship Yale.

  Chapter 4

  1911: Agadir and Egypt

  As the first decade of the 20th century drew to a close the political situation in Europe continued to deteriorate, as to some extent it did throughout the world. The British, who considered themselves to be fairly secure in their island fortress, looked on as Germany and France bickered with one another. They had fought each other 40 years earlier, a war that Germany had won easily, making the British take notice of this rising power. At the end of that relatively minor conflict France had been forced to cede the territories of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, something that had rankled ever since. Not that there was a whole lot that France could do about the situation as, since the Franco-German war of 1871, Germany had grown into the most powerful military force in Europe, with the possible exception of Britain, which had the resources of her empire to call upon should the need arise. Unfortunately for France there was no guarantee that Britain would come to her aid should the all-powerful German Army invade; after all, Britain and France were hereditary enemies who had been at each other’s throats for the better part of a thousand years. Anyway, at the time Britain had her own problems, most notably Ireland, to do more than keep an eye on the squabbling between her neighbours.

  Ireland, then as now, was a divided country, under British rule. The majority of the Irish population wanted independence and Home Rule, but there was a large faction very much in favour of remaining under the control and protection of Britain. Winston Churchill, at the time a member of the Liberal Party, had always been against Home Rule for Ireland, as had his father. However, following the election of January 1910, when the Liberals were returned with just two more seats than the Tories, and needed the support of the 82 Irish and 41 Labour seats to remain in power, he conveniently changed his mind. He told the Irish Nationalist leaders that it was the ambition of his life to bring in a Home Rule Bill for Ireland. It should have been apparent to all and sundry then that Churchill only had two major objectives, political power and personal renown.

  Following his miraculous conversion to the Irish Home Rule cause, Churchill was invited to speak in Belfast. He would address the people of Ulster at Belfast’s Celtic football ground. The police warned him that he was not popular with the general population, that revolvers were being taken out of pawn, and that thousands of bolts and rivets had been stolen from railway yards. To insure the politician’s safety 10,000 troops were massed in Belfast. The speech went off without incident, at least partly because of the pouring rain, which helped dampen the crowd’s ardour and kept many of them away. Immediately after the meeting Churchill was quickly driven to the station, where a special train carried him to Larne before the Ulster Unionists learned that he had fled.

  The Unionists in the British Government were so alienated by the Irish ‘Home Rule Bill’ (the military hierarchy later threatened to resign) that many who prided themselves on their patriotism began to plot against the elected body. There had long been organised gun-running into Ireland for the benefit of both the Unionists and the Irish Liberation Army, but the scale of this increased dramatically. Not least among those engaged in supplying arms to the Irish factions were the Americans, one of whom was a close associate of J. P. Morgan, Thomas Fortune Ryan. Ryan was also heavily involved in stripping the Belgian Congo of whatever raw materials and minerals were available, much of it destined for Morgan’s steel companies. There can be no doubt that the British authorities were aware of what was going on but, in view of the likelihood of a European war, a direct confrontation with Morgan or his associates was to be avoided if at all possible.

  To make bad matters worse, the situation in Britain, as far as labour relations was concerned, was also in a parlous state. On 20 June 1911 (two days before the Coronation of King George V), seamen at Southampton went on strike. They were quickly followed by seamen and dock workers at Liverpool, Cardiff and Hull. On 1 August the London Docks warehouses went up in flames, 20,000 men were on strike, and 20 ocean liners were unable to sail as a result. It looked to Winston Churchill, who, as Home Secretary, was responsible for keeping law and orde
r, like the beginnings of a general strike. There was clearly the danger of a railway strike. In August the crisis came, and there was talk of revolution and civil war in the air. Churchill decided that troops were needed as, he estimated, there were 50 places in the country where violence might erupt at any moment, but he ordered the troops to fire over the rioters’ heads.

  On 13 August the rioting began in earnest, in Liverpool. The ‘Riot Act’ was read and troops were used in an effort to restore order. Initially the troops did only fire over the heads of the crowds, but inevitably there were casualties. When two officers and 32 men escorting a Liverpool prison van were attacked, the soldiers fired and one civilian was killed. At Llanelli, in Wales, there were more riots, and two men were killed when troops repelled an attack on a train.

  Even King George V took an interest. He didn’t like the half-hearted way the troops were being used and thought that the military should be given a free hand to restore order, and the mobs should be made to fear them. Not surprisingly the situation continued to worsen. On 18 August two-thirds of the nation’s railway workers went on strike. Churchill saw it as a potential disaster; nothing like it had ever happened before. Already there had been at least six attacks on stations, many signal boxes had been damaged, trains had been stoned, telegraph and signal wires had been cut, and there had been nine attempts to wreck trains. On 19 August Churchill, still in his capacity as Home Secretary, gave the military authorities instructions that amounted to martial law.

  ‘General Officers commanding the various military areas are instructed to use their own discretion as to whether troops are, or are not, to be sent to any particular point. The Army regulation which requires a requisition from a civil authority is suspended.’

  In the meanwhile he was deploying 50,000 men as a vast strike-breaking force. Over the next couple of days Churchill issued a series of disastrous bulletins that exasperated the unions. With the benefit of hindsight it appears that he was trying to bring about a confrontation between the unions and the authorities, just as Margaret Thatcher was to try in the 1980s. This characteristic disregard for the wellbeing of others was almost a hallmark of Churchill’s early career and was never far below the surface later. Fortunately the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, realising that such a confrontation could ‘bring open warfare in the streets’, stepped in and used his remarkable powers as a negotiator to settle the rail strike in just two days. It was all over by 20 August. ‘I’m very sorry to hear it,’ Churchill told him. ‘It would have been better to have gone on and given these men a good thrashing.’

  In the House of Commons on 22 August there was an outcry against Churchill led by Labour Party leaders Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie: ‘The Department which has played the most diabolical part in all the unrest was the Home Office.’ Keir Hardie charged Churchill with unlawfully instituting martial law and using armed force to intimidate the workers and support the railway companies.

  There was a lot happening in the rest of the world in 1911 to give the British Government further cause for unease, despite its preoccupation with domestic matters. Not only did the Japanese, still flushed with their successes against the Russians six years before, launch their first dreadnought battleship, but civil war erupted in China, finally putting an end to the feudal system of government there and making the country at once an emergent power to be considered.

  There was no possible way that Britain could maintain a standing army of sufficient power to contain the threat posed by all of her possible enemies at any one time. She would perforce be obliged to deal with them piecemeal. Although the Russian armed forces amounted to more than 13 million men, France to more than 4½ million, and Italy 4 million, still the most obvious threat to Britain, in 1911, came from Germany and Austria, which had more than 14½ million men under arms. The only, and obvious, thing for the British to do was prepare for a war in Europe while also establishing the facilities necessary to fight in the Far East or Africa should the need arise, which hopefully it would not.

  The Kaiser’s speech of 1911 when he proclaimed his country’s right to a ‘Place in the Sun’ not only threatened European domination but hinted at German expansion in South Africa as well. The British, with more overseas possessions to consider than anyone else, took notice. The Germans were well placed to threaten Britain. They had a very strong mercantile fleet with Blue Riband-class transatlantic liners and a navy that, although vastly inferior to that of Britain’s, was the second most powerful in the world. With a budding U-boat arm equipped with wireless, the German Navy was in a position to threaten Britain’s merchant fleet, a point that some in the Admiralty appreciated even if others didn’t consider the submarine a serious weapon of war. Moreover, the Germans had the vital staging posts, at Cameroon, Togoland and Tanganyika, and the infrastructure was in place in South West Africa, a rallying ground for disgruntled Boers, to allow invasion of British South Africa, or so the British believed. In reality Germany’s colonial ambitions were more directed towards North Africa, where they would hopefully not come up against the British. Following the Italian’s lead, the Germans began to make tentative imperialist manoeuvres in North Africa, most notably at Agadir, bringing Europe to the brink of war three years before it finally happened and setting in motion a train of events that would inexorably lead to the sinking of the Titanic.

  The major colonial powers had been dividing the world between themselves for years. For example, Britain gave France a free hand in North Africa in exchange for the same treatment in Egypt. France quickly gained control of Algeria, then turned her attention towards Morocco. Germany, which had until then stayed out of the scramble for North Africa, now began to show some interest in the area. When a French expedition was sent to occupy Fez in 1911, the Kaiser responded, on 1 July, by sending a warship, the Panther, to Agadir, ostensibly to protect the interests of German merchants there. This example of gunboat diplomacy set alarm bells ringing through the chancelleries of Europe, focusing attention on Germany’s growing sea power and ambitions; she did not respond to repeated requests for an explanation from the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.

  The question at the time was, as far as the other world powers were concerned, if there was a war between Germany and France, what would Britain’s position be? For a while no solid indication came from the Foreign Office. Then, on 21 July, Lloyd George used the annual dinner at the Mansion House, given by the Lord Mayor of London to the bankers in the City, to make Britain’s intentions clear in his speech. This was the key passage:

  ‘... if a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated where her interests were vitally affected, as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of Nations ... then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.’

  The warning was clear: if Germany went to war, she would find Britain against her. To drive the point home, a British warship was dispatched to Agadir, to lie practically alongside the Panther.

  The Kaiser’s sabre-rattling at Agadir in 1911 was a serious crisis, which led to a World Power Conference. France managed to keep its hold on Morocco only by handing some of its West African possessions to Germany, such as Cameroon and Togoland. Germany’s possession of these areas considerably increased the threat to Britain’s South African holdings, which in turn would have caused no little alarm to British leaders like Winston Churchill. Churchill, it should be remembered, had personal experience of Britain’s struggle to wrest control of South Africa from the Boers little more than ten years earlier. Worse still, the Agadir incident had convinced Churchill that war with Germany was not only inevitable but imminent.

  The incident was a serious enough threat to the peace of Europe that the British Government began to make preparations to meet a possible invasion. In 1911 the normal complement of t
roops on the Isle of Wight was about 800, but in September of that year War Department contractors on the island were asked whether they would be ready to supply food for about 4,000 troops should they be called upon to do so.

  There were rapid, concerted reactions by bankers, as the Agadir crisis snowballed from 1 July 1911, to get gold out of the threatened war zone in Europe and across the Atlantic to the safety of the United States. To allay public fears that war might be imminent, many of these gold shipments were made in secret. Nevertheless, the flow of gold would continue right up until war finally broke out in 1914, and for some time afterwards.

  20 September 1911, a critical date in the Titanic story, falls well within the time frame of the panic over what was happening in North Africa. J. P. Morgan, together with many others, was more than a little alarmed at the Agadir crisis and began to ship large quantities of antiques and museum pieces back to America where they would be safe. As Morgan owned quite a lot of what was on exhibition at the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum, these began to look a little bare, which did nothing to endear the financier to the museum authorities. Quite naturally much of what J. P. Morgan wanted to move across the Atlantic was carried aboard his own ships, and often the most valuable objects went aboard what he believed was the cream of those vessels, Olympic.

  As a result of Morgan’s defeatist attitude, as the British Government saw it, in removing his treasures, it began to make life difficult for him. Customs officers closely inspected everything he sent aboard ship. As Morgan’s organisation was shipping not only his own artefacts but almost certainly large quantities of contraband such as industrial diamonds and cobalt gleaned from the Belgian Congo, this Customs attention was rather more than an inconvenience. It didn’t take the financier long to make his displeasure known to the British. The latter, in their turn, realising that war was all but inevitable and that they would need Morgan’s financial muscle, began to look for alternative means of curbing the magnate.