Stanley Lord

Stanley Phillip Lord (13 September 1877 – 24 January 1962) was the British captain of the SS Californian on the night the RMS Titanic sank on 15 April 1912. The ship, which was primarily a freighter that could carry a small number of passengers, has been named in sources as the unidentified ship that failed to come to the aid of the foundering Titanic. On the eve of the sinking, Captain Lord had stopped the Californian for night when it had entered an ice field Template:Convert to Template:Convert away from the Red Star Line liner's final position. Over the next few hours, crew members on Lord's ship reported seeing white rockets on the horizon, something Lord ascribed to company signals. The sinking of the Titanic resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 people.

Lord and Californian only became aware of the disaster the following morning when wireless signals were received from the SS Frankfurt. Despite remaining in the area to help recover bodies, Lord and the Californian were criticised for not rendering timely assistance to the Titanic. Both the United States and British inquiries concluded Lord was captain of the ship that was closest to the Titanic at the time of its sinking. However, neither suggested he should face any criminal charges. Subsequent authors have offered differing opinions on Lord that night, with some defending and others criticising him; resulting in two factions now labelled as "Lordites" or "Anti-Lordites".

The debate about Lord focuses on several factors, these include his response to the rockets, whether his ship and the Titanic (and its rockets) were visible to one another, the presence of one or more "Mystery Ships" between the Californian and the sinking liner, and whether or not Lord could have saved any additional lives while his ship was stuck in its own ice field.

Early life

Lord was born on 13 September 1877 in Bolton, Lancashire, England. He began his training at sea when he was thirteen, aboard the barque Naiad, in March 1891. He later obtained his Second Mate’s Certificate of competency and served as Second Officer on the barque Lurlei.

In February 1901, at the age of 23, Lord obtained his Master's Certificate, and three months later, obtained his Extra Master's Certificate. He entered the service of the West India and Pacific Steam Navigation Company in 1897. The company was taken over by the Leyland Line in 1900, but Lord continued service with the new company, and was awarded his first command in 1906.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Lord was given command of the SS Californian in 1911.

Sinking of RMS Titanic

Ice field

On the night of 14 April 1912, as the Californian approached a large ice field, Captain Lord decided to stop around 10:21 p.m. (ship's time) and wait out the night. Before turning in for the night, he ordered his sole wireless operator, Cyril Evans, to warn other ships in the area about the ice. Using Morse code, Evans tapped out to the Titanic using a Spark-gap transmitter, "I say old man, we are stopped and surrounded by ice." However, as the Californian was so close to the Titanic his message was so loud in the ears of Titanic First Wireless Operator Jack Phillips, he angrily responded "Keep out! Shut up! I am working Cape Race."

Phillips response was likely due to commercial pressure. He was an employee of Marconi, which made its money sending private messages to and from commercial shipping. Earlier in the day the wireless equipment aboard the Titanic had broken down and Phillips, along with Second Wireless Operator Harold Bride, had spent the better part of the day repairing it. This delay had resulted in a backlog of outgoing messages that now needed to be sent. Phillips was likely exhausted after such a long day. Additionally, the Titanic had already received several ice warnings from other ships which had already been passed up to the bridge, including an earlier one from Californian. Hence, this latest message from the Californian was not news to him. Onboard the Californian, Evans, the wireless operator, listened to Phillips sending routine traffic reports to Cape Race relaying station until about 11:30 p.m.; he then turned off the ship's wireless set and went to his bunk. A consequence of the Titanic disaster was that all commercial shipping would be required to keep a 24hr watch at their wireless transmitters.

Mystery ship

Over the course of the night, officers and crew on the Californian witnessed eight white rockets fired into the sky above an unknown ship in the distance. At 12:15am Captain Lord, still in uniform, went to the chart room on the ship's bridge deck to lie down after being on duty for 17 hours<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> (not his cabin or bunk as dramatisations of the disaster always portray). He was awakened twice during the night and told about the rockets, to which he replied that they may be "company rockets"; distinct coloured signals which help ships of the same company identify each other. However, Lord never ordered wireless officer Evans to turn on his set or contact the ship to ask why they were firing signal rockets.

Rockets were launched from the Titanic about an hour after the collision with the iceberg when the lights of an unknown ship were seen. Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall and Quartermaster Rowe also tried to contact the ship with Morse lamp but got no reply. Lord supporters attribute visual distortions caused by cold-water mirages to Captain Lord's belief that the nearby ship was not the Titanic.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Although the Californian reported not seeing any coherent signals, they did try to use a signal lamp to contact the mystery ship but did not get a response. The Californian's officers eventually decided that what they were looking at were the flickering lights on the masthead of a ship that has also stopped because of the ice. Around the time the Titanic had gone down at 2:20 a.m., the sudden disappearance of lights was interpreted by the Californian as the mystery ship steaming away.

At 5:30 a.m., on the morning of 15 April 1912, Evans heard the first reports from the SS Frankfurt that the Titanic had sank. After being notified, Captain Lord immediately ordered the Californian to make steam and head to the last known location of the liner. By 8:45 a.m, his ship had pulled up alongside the Carpathia. It then remained in the area to search for additional bodies after the Carpathia returned to New York with the survivors.

Inquiry

The following is from Captain Lord's testimony in the US Inquiry on 26 April:<ref>United States Senate Inquiry | Day 8 - Testimony of Captain Stanley Lord (SS Californian)titanicinquiry.org</ref>

Lord made no effort to awaken the wireless operator and send a message that way, which might have been far more effective in obtaining information from the Titanic.

Personal life

Lord was married and had a son. His son, Stanley Tutton Lord (1908–1994), worked as a banker in Liverpool; he never married or had children. He died from natural causes in 1994. He rarely spoke of his father, except to say he believed in his innocence. In 1965 he wrote a preface to a book by Peter Padfield, The Titanic and the Californian, which supported the case that Lord had been judged unfairly.

Lord's wife, Mabel, died in 1957. He died on 24 January 1962, aged 84, almost half a century after the sinking of the Titanic. He is buried in Rake Lane Cemetery, Wallasey, Wirral.

Legacy

While Lord was never tried or convicted of any offence, he was still viewed publicly as a pariah after the Titanic disaster. His attempts to fight for his exoneration gained him nothing, and the events of the night of 14–15 April 1912 would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Lord was dismissed by the Leyland Line in August 1912. So far as any negligence of the SS Californian's officers and crew was concerned, the conclusions of both the American and British inquiries seemed to disapprove of Lord's actions, but stopped short of recommending charges. While both inquiries censured Lord, they did not make any recommendations for an official investigation to ascertain if he was guilty of offences under the Merchant Shipping Acts. Lord was not allowed to be represented at either the U.S. or British inquiry.Template:Cn

In February 1913, with help from a Leyland director who believed he had been unfairly treated, Lord was hired by the Nitrate Producers Steamship Co., where he remained until March 1927, resigning for health reasons. In 1958, Lord contacted the Mercantile Marine Service Association in Liverpool to clear his name. The association's general secretary, Mr. Leslie Harrison, took up the case for him and petitioned the Board of Trade on his behalf for a re-examination of the facts, but there had been no finding by the time of Lord's death in 1962. In 1965, largely because Lord had offered no new evidence, his petition was rejected, but in the same year Peter Padfield's book The Titanic and the Californian was published, defending Lord's reputation, with a preface by his son Stanley Tutton Lord.<ref>Eugene L. Rasor, The Titanic: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography (2001), p. 53</ref> This was followed by a second petition, in 1968, which was also rejected.

In 1957, Lord's wife died. It was a devastating loss to him and precipitated a decline in his health. In 1958 the film A Night To Remember was released, based on a 1955 book of the same title by Walter Lord (no relation). Stanley Lord, now 81 years old, never saw the film, but purportedly read the Liverpool Echo newspaper reviews of the film. Lord was very disappointed, and it brought back memories of the Titanic tragedy, and was upset over his negative portrayal by the Australian-British actor Russell Napier, which depicted him as a captain in his forties, in a warm cabin in bed asleep when Titanic was sinking. In reality, Lord was 34 years old at the time and was asleep in the chart room with his uniform on at the time of the disaster. Lord's son Stanley Tutton Lord saw the film and was upset about how his father was treated after the Titanic tragedy. In 1959, Stanley helped fight to get his father's name cleared from the records of the Titanic disaster. He continued his attempts after his father died in 1962, up until he died in 1994.Template:Cn Stanley Tutton Lord was seen in an interview from Titanic: The Legend Lives On, part 2 of Titanic: The Complete Story documentary in 1994 just before his death. Stanley Tutton was only 4 years old when the Titanic tragedy happened, and he told stories about how his father's life was affected by the tragedy up to when the 1958 Hollywood film was released in theaters. In 1996, just two years after Stanley Tutton passed away, the TV series Titanic was released on TV. It had a scene of the Californian ship that had stopped for the night, because of field ice. The crew on board the Californian saw a passenger ship that had also stopped from the ice. The Californian crew called Captain Lord on the phone and told him about a ship that had stopped for the night, and had also tried Morse lamping the ship to know who it was. Captain Lord in the low-budget TV series was depicted in his late 60s and was sleeping in his cabin just like in the 1958 film A Night To Remember 38 years earlier.

The discovery in 1985 of the remains of the Titanic on the sea bed made it clear that the S.O.S. position given after the iceberg collision by the Titanic's fourth officer, Joseph Boxhall, was wrong by thirteen miles. At both of the 1912 inquiries, there had been some conflict about the true position of the ship when it sank. The conclusions of the inquiries discounted the evidence of uncertainty about the position of the Titanic. At the time, some assumed that the position that Lord had given for his ship was incorrect and that he was much closer to the Titanic than he claimed to be. While the entries in the Californian's scrap log (used for recording information before it was written up officially in the ship's logbook) referring to the night in question had mysteriously gone missing, sometimes seen as overwhelming proof that Lord deliberately destroyed evidence to cover his crime of ignoring a distress call, destroying the scrap log records was normal company practice.<ref>RMS "TITANIC" Reappraisal of Evidence Relating to SS "CALIFORNIAN", 1992 Marine Accident Investigation Branch report, London 1992, HMSO, p. 8.</ref> While modifying the official ship's log or removing pages is a serious violation of maritime law, this was not the case. A re-appraisal by the British government, instigated informally in 1988 and published in 1992 by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB), further implicated the consequences of Lord's inaction. Among its conclusions were that although the Californian was probably out of visual sight, the TitanicTemplate:'s rockets had been sighted by the CalifornianTemplate:'s crew. Another conclusion stated that it was unrealistic to assume that Lord could have rushed towards the signals and that with the Titanic reporting an incorrect position, the Californian would have arrived at about the same time as the Carpathia and fulfilled a similar role – rescuing those who had escaped.<ref>MAIB 1992 report p. 18</ref> The report was critical of the behaviour of the other officers of the Californian in reaction to the signals. What has never been satisfactorily resolved was why Lord did not simply wake his radio operator and listen for any distress signals.

Daniel Allen Butler, in his 2009 book The Other Side of Night: The Carpathia, the Californian, and the Night Titanic Was Lost, makes a case that Lord's personality and temperament — his behaviour at both inquiries, his threats towards his crew, his frequent changing of his story, the absence of the scrap log, and odd remarks made by Lord in Boston in a newspaper interview – point to Lord's having some sort of mental illness. His lack of compassion — never once expressing grief at the loss of the Titanic or sorrow for those who had lost family when it sank is, according to Butler, compatible with sociopathy.<ref>Butler, Daniel Allen; Epilogue: Flotsam and Jetsam; "The Other Side of Night: The Carpathia, the Californian, and the night Titanic was Lost" Template:Page needed</ref>

Portrayals

• Frederick Tozere (1956) Kraft Television Theatre; A Night to Remember
• Russell Napier (1958) A Night to Remember (British film)
• Matthew Walker (1996) Titanic (miniseries)

References

Citations

Bibliography

• Biography of Captain Stanley Lord – from Encyclopedia Titanica
• Peter Padfield, The Titanic and the Californian (1965)
• Reade, Leslie (1993). The Ship That Stood Still. New York: Norton and Company. Template:ISBN.
• Lee, Paul The Titanic and the Indifferent Stranger, 14 February 2012
• Maltin, Tim "A Very Deceiving Night", Malt House Books, 15 April 2012
• "A TITANIC MYTH"..Leslie Harrison
• Dyer, David (2016) "The Midnight Watch", Atlantic Books, 2016

External links

• Titanic and the Mystery Ship
• Stanley Lord's testimony at the US inquiry into the Titanic sinking
• Stanley Lord's testimony at the British inquiry into the Titanic sinking
• Titanic In Lancashire Museum Project