The Worst Idea Of All Time - Did Titanic Sink? 06: The Old Switch-a-Roo

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

Carlo pulls all the tantalising pieces of the story together to present a compelling alternative narrative of what really happened to Titanic. Tim wonders: Is Carlo out of his mind?With the fellas hard at work on the next chapter of TWIOAT, we present the first season of Did Titanic Sink?, the award-winning pod series from the Worst Idea Extended Universe. Join Tim Batt and Carlo Ritchie on their maiden voyage into the unknown.Enjoying DTS? Season two is releasing now on RNZ! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Select plans even include data overage protection so you can go all out without going over. Don't wait. Our Back to School offers are only available for a limited time. Go to fido.ca or a Fido store near you and save all semester long. Fido, at your side. This is a web series by Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa. introducing my friend Carlo Ricci, a noted comedy improviser and children's TV writer in Australia, to espouse the thing that has driven him for years, a conspiracy theory involving the RMS Titanic. Now I gotta be honest, I kinda started this journey to make fun of Carlo a little bit, and I managed to convince Carlo that it would be a great opportunity for him to tell everyone what really happened, but it's kind of backfired.

Carlo's spent so many years researching this and the facts he's thrown at me over the last five episodes have basically melted my brain. I'm mentally juggling facts about JP Morgan and the structural integrity of steamships and trying to remember what the psychologist told me about conspiratorial thinking. It's a lot. But today, it's time to give Carlo Ritchie the opportunity he so deserves to fully prosecute his case on what really happened. It's all been leading up to this. It's finally time to answer,

Did Titanic Sink? You ready, Tim? Carlo, this is it. This is your big shot. At the start of this, five whole episodes ago, if you can even remember that far back, I asked you a pretty simple question. Do you believe?

Did Titanic sink? You've taken me on a pretty fantastic journey and we've learned a lot of different details but today I want you to lay out the full narrative of what you think actually happened to the RMS Titanic. All right Tim, I think you deserve an answer. So let's start back in 1908. White Star Lines is losing a battle against German liners, against other British liners, about who will have the biggest ships on the sea. And so a plan is born that rather than competing for speed, they design three of the most opulent ships that have ever been built, basically setting up the modern idea of the cruise ship. These are places where people want to stay longer. Maybe they don't get you

across the North Atlantic as fast as some of these other companies' ships, but you're going to have a much better time on board. They're called the Olympic class liners, and there's going to be three of them. The RMS Olympic, the RMS Titanic, and the RMS Britannic. These three ships will cement White Star Lines at the forefront of shipping interests in the early 1900s. And three years later, the first of these ships is birthed, the RMS Olympic. This was the rock star ship of the time. Everyone wanted to be on the Olympic. It was the biggest ship in the world. It was the grandest ship in the world. No one had seen this kind of decadence on a ship before. Even just the menus were incredible. There was refrigeration. People could get fresh oysters on the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean.

This was the golden age of steam. Things were going terrifically for the first of these liners, the RMS Olympic. That is until it collides with another ship, the HMS Hawk. As the Olympic is sailing down this fairly narrow channel, about eight kilometres wide, it's sailing along beside another ship, the HMS Hawk, and as the Olympic tries to turn to starboard, it collides with the Hawk, which causes massive damage to both ships. Just to check, right side.

That's right, Tim, yes. The Hawk causes massive damage to the Olympic, and it in turn nearly sinks the Hawk. Both ships are hugely damaged, and that leads to a very costly legal battle for White Star lines that they ultimately lose, putting them up for the cost of the repairs of these ships, but also the legal fees of both ships' cases.

And it puts the Olympic out of commission. It's at this point that the ship's owners, the IMMC, which is owned by JP Morgan, realise that they're in a bit of financial trouble. They've massively borrowed against this ship, the Olympic, and also against its sister ship, the Olympic, and also against its sister ship, the RMS Titanic, which is currently being built. And right now they're taking huge parts off the Titanic in order to speed up the repair of the Olympic,

so they know both ships are going to be out of action much longer than they want. They've borrowed so much against the value of these ships that they're hugely financially over-leveraged, and their books are going further and further and further into the red it's at this point that i think a plan is hatched and the plan is this they will switch this badly damaged olympic with its sister ship the titanic two completely identical ships the only difference being one isn't completely mangled from a collision with another ship the hms hawk all they need to do is make sure that one of these

ships looks different to the other so that people can go, oh, well, I see, they're completely different ships. And so that February, Olympic throws a propeller blade and has to go back to Belfast for repairs. At that moment, rather than doing the proposed upgrade on the Titanic, they put that proposed upgrade onto the Olympic,

making it look very different from its sister ship, the Titanic, they put that proposed upgrade onto the Olympic, making it look very different from its sister ship, the Titanic. Then all it takes is a little bit of paint and you've got yourself the old switcheroo. The ship that was once the RMS Olympic is now rebranded the RMS Titanic and it sails out of Belfast on its way to Southampton where it will launch on its maiden voyage. And burning away in its hold is a coal fire. A coal fire that's been deliberately lit in compartment six. A very important compartment, Tim, because if that fire can rupture bulkhead five and pierce to the sea, watertight compartments six and five will fill with water, which is enough to very, very slowly sink that ship over a number of hours.

Now we return to Greenland. And on the 4th of January that year, something that nobody planned for happened, and that is the moon comes closer to the Earth than it has in 1,300 years, which ends up in this massive spring tide that sends huge icebergs out into the North Atlantic, more than there ever should be. Now we get to the story that we know from the film. On the 10th of April 1912, the Titanic leaves Southampton to huge fanfare, but admittedly not as much as the Olympic had. Yes, it's a big ship, but it's not the Olympic.

The Olympic was really everyone's heartthrob, and so the Titanic sails out. Then on the 14th of April, disaster strikes when the Titanic collides with an iceberg. This was not part of the plan. The Titanic could stay afloat with four of its watertight compartments full of water, but this iceberg manages to pierce five. And critically, one of these compartments that's pierced with water is the very compartment that the conspirators wanted to weaken with a deliberate fire. And so it starts to fill with water and then that watertight bulkhead collapses, sinking the Titanic much faster than it should have. And getting rid of some of the apparatus that the Titanic could use to buy themselves precious minutes, namely the pumps. There aren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic and with the limited time that they have to get them off,

not everyone will be saved. Meanwhile, between 20 and 30 miles away, the Californian is watching the ship sink. They don't know that it's the Titanic because of this superior mirage. The horizon is blurred by the meeting of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador currents. They see a ship in distress, but they can't really work out what they're seeing. It's sending up rockets, but they don't seem as high as they should. Everything is wrong with this picture. More importantly though, there are two ships lying out there, waiting in the darkness. What are they waiting for? For a ship to sink very slowly.

So as the sun comes up and the RMS Carpathia comes to the rescue, they see two ships right where the Titanic sank. These two ships don't identify themselves. They don't engage in any way. They just get out of there as fast as possible. Because as those first rays of the day shimmer down on an empty sea where a Titanic should be, they realize they've messed this whole plan up. Something has gone terribly wrong and a ship that should have taken 12 hours to sink is nowhere to be seen and in its place are a bunch of desperate survivors in lifeboats

with 1,500 people dead. None of their crew or passengers are ever called before any of the official inquiries. Even though there is documentary evidence to suggest they were somewhere near where the Titanic sank. And witnesses on the RMS Carpathia, who had no reason to lie. And witnesses on the Californian, which did have some reason to lie. Both of them ID these other ships, but for some reason they're never investigated.

And why does no one talk? Because this was never the plan. This was never the plan for the Titanic to hit an iceberg and sink. It's just that something went terribly wrong and everybody just kind of wiped their hands of it because, for all they knew, they weren't complicit in this terrible disaster. So, Tim, we asked the question,

did Titanic sink? And the answer is, yeah, probably it did. Wait, wait, do you mean like after this happened? What? No, I mean like on the 15th of April 1912. It probably is the Titanic that sank. Wait a minute, are you talking about the Olympic or the Titanic now? No, the real Titanic, like not the switched Titanic, the Titanic. Wait, are you you... Are you

saying the ships weren't switched? It's very crazy to switch two ships. Like, it would have taken a lot of work to switch two ships. Wait, it would take a lot of work to make a podcast series putting this theory forward. Are you saying you don't believe this thing that you've been describing over the course of the last five episodes?

Look, Tim, I'm 90%, maybe 95% sure that the real Titanic sank. But there's this tiny little part of me that really does think that it could happen. And I would like to hope that I've shown you enough evidence to think that, yeah, there is this seed of doubt. Carlo, why the hell have you spent so much time describing in excruciating detail

the method of which the ship could have been brought down involving a conspiracy theory that you don't believe in. Well, I told you before, Tim, if someone is keen to talk about Titanic, I will really go to any length. That's what this is about. You had to trick me to find someone to talk to about Titanic. I don't think I tricked you, Tim.

I think I opened you up to a possibility and you were keen to discuss it and I was very keen to tell to about Titanic. I don't think I tricked you, Tim. I think I opened you up to a possibility and you were keen to discuss it and I was very keen to tell you about it. I mean, you don't know what it's like. I've spent years of my life researching this thing, going to the place where it was built and no one wants to talk to me about it. If I'm not talking about

the Titanic, I'm bored. And if I'm talking about the Titanic, the other person is bored I am trapped in a prison of my own making and the only escape from that is to create a compelling story it's gonna pull listeners along with me you've constructed this prison and then put me inside the cell and then tricked me into bringing other people into the jail with me yeah but you know threes company Tim for a man obsessed with the ethics

of how the RMS Titanic was investigated, man, this is pretty unscrupulous. I don't know if it is unscrupulous, Tim. I mean, look at all we've got to learn. You know, this fire you would have never heard of, the bulkheads, the way that the Titanic was built, all these things, they're such fascinating information, and you know a lot more about this ship than you ever would. I mean, only a couple of months that the Titanic was built, all these things, they're such fascinating information, and you know a lot more about this ship than you ever would.

I mean, only a couple of months after the Titanic was launched, another ship was launched called the SS Imperator. It was the biggest ship in the world. No one's ever heard of it, Tim. This is the point. We would not know about the Titanic unless it sank, so why not make that story just that bit more captivating? I'm impressed. So I guess make that story just that bit more captivating? I'm impressed.

So I guess, was it a waste of time? In retrospect, I have learned a lot of stuff. It's always nice to hang out with you, Carlo, even when you are kind of lying to my face for about five hours in a row. Hey, thanks, Tim. It was just really fun to talk to you about the Titanic. And even if it wasn't switched,

it's still pretty cool to learn about things like Greenland, right? Well, listen, if this podcast and me sitting here for a little while with you is the vessel for you to talk through some of these things that gives you so much joy to discuss, then I am more than happy to be a receptacle for it. Yeah, look, Tim, it's been so much fun being here. And like you said a couple episodes ago, it's just nice to follow the road of my heart. Hi, it's Fido. Start the semester with a new phone and a plan full of data

without breaking your budget. We have everything you need for an A-plus year. Come check out our special back-to-school offers. They'll leave you with more cash in your pocket for the stuff you love. Select plans even include data overage protection, so you can go all out without going over. Don't wait. Our back-to-school offers are only available for a limited time.

Go to Fido.ca or a Fido store near you and save all semester long. Fido. At your side. So here we are, listener. I'm not exactly sure how to feel right now. At the start of this journey, I thought it would be really funny to bring Carlo on and basically mock him over the course of six episodes of a podcast. I mean, the guy told me the Titanic didn't sink. And the Titanic didn't sink.

And the Titanic sinking has got to be one of the most universally understood facts about the early 20th century. Little kids know that the Titanic sank. But over the course of the series, I've been completely outgunned. I didn't know that a ship's watertight bulkheads worked like an ice tray. And I certainly didn't know that if you struck an Olympic class liner in the boiler room between bulkheads 4 and 5 you could bring down the whole ship. I hadn't even heard of the RMS Olympic before I let Carlo start to spin this yarn. And despite the fact that I've done school research projects on the Titanic as a kid, and seen the movie twice now, at no point did anyone tell me the ship had a huge coal

fire burning when it left port. Maybe my own biases about how I see the world and what I think the hyper wealthy are capable of allow me to get sucked in too easily. Maybe that's the moral of this whole project. We all think we're walking around like rational beings, able to weigh the information coming into our heads appropriately, but if someone can tell a good story that hits on our prejudice, we get taken down like an unsinkable ship in the Atlantic. On the other hand, I do truly believe that Carlo's onto something here.

He had receipts for every seemingly absurd claim he made. Up until the bit about conspiracy to commit insurance fraud, all of this is built from very solid facts, documented physical evidence of the wreck and actual first hand accounts of the sinking from people who were there. Carlos just used these pieces of history to build a slightly different narrative of what might have happened. And now I'm in the weird position of probably believing his conspiracy theory more than he does. But before we end this, there's one more special guest I want to bring on, and I'm

very excited to get her to meet Carlo. It is now my great pleasure and honor to welcome to this final episode of the first season? Probably the only season. Of Did Titanic Sink? Dr. Abby Howell's PhD. Hi, Dr. Abby. That's actually the first time I've ever been introduced with my title. Really?

Yeah It is pretty fresh right? It's pretty fresh yeah But you know what it makes the four years of agony worth it We probably shouldn't state what your PhD was in It's in theatre studies But as I understand Abby you're just like me You're like an amateur historian who's obsessed about the Titanic right?

Yes absolutely My qualifications are I'm on the autism spectrum and the Titanic is one of my special interests. With all of this passion and prior knowledge, and you can tell us straight, what did you think of the series? Oh, Carlo, you had me completely convinced. Nah, psych! I got some questions.

Okay, well, let's flip the tables. Normally, we ask our guests some questions, but if you've got anything that you want to throw at Carlo, ask Carlo, go right ahead. All right, Carlo. The jewel in the crown for a lot of people that really believe that it was the Olympic that was sunk and said the titanic is the portholes which i'm not sure i've heard you mention what's your opinion on the portholes and the difference between the titanic and the olympic one of the two of you have to explain what this is because i have

no idea yes the olympic i believe had 14 irregular holes and um titanic had 16 regular holes 16 yes a lot of um olympic believers seem to really hang their hat on these portholes. And apparently there's like images and stuff of the Titanic pulling away, but it only had 14 portholes. One of the reasons I didn't want to talk about it, that of all of the other evidence to me feels very much about like the quality of evidence that we have. And a lot of it is like oh this photo

shows that there's 14 portholes but the arguments against it is normally well it's very hard to tell in this angle of photograph or the quality of the photograph isn't enough to actually show us so i am just not convinced by the quality of evidence being brought up in favour of that. I'm not wholly a fan of the evidence. It feels too easily refuted just by that fact. Pun intended. Because the porthole is Carlo. Very nice. Oh, you know.

Hey, you know, we love the Titanic, but we're comedians as well. It's important to remember because some people have forgotten that through the series. Yes, I respect that answer as well because I feel like the most compelling evidence is I've got to agree with Courtney and Angela that it's incredibly easy to believe that a corporate fat cat would waste human life in favor of gaining more money.

That's the most believable part of this whole thing. Absolutely, that happens every day. That's what hooked me in as well, to be honest. I was like, that I believe. I don't know about all this other stuff. that happens every day there's what hooked me in as well to be honest i was like that i believe i don't know about all this other stuff especially because very much in the zeitgeist when the titanic disaster happened only i think it's a year before maybe two years before the republic sank which was a ship that had a huge number of passengers i think it may have even had more

passengers than the titanic and everybody got off safe because it just sank so slowly. And so the conventional thinking with modern steamships was, you know, even in the worst case scenario, almost everybody should get off. Do you want to hear my reasons that I think that it's untrue, that I'm unconvinced? We'd love to. Okay. In your mind, had they done any restoration on the Olympic?

Like, are they sending out a damaged vessel? The short answer is yes, I would think. As part of this conspiracy, yes. I think it's completely re-outfitted. It hasn't been wholly repaired. Like, the damage to the Olympic would still be very much present in the so-called Titanic. Okay, well, if it's seaworthy enough to be sent out with

passengers on it, surely it would be easier to just recoup the cost via sending it out and getting passengers to pay for tickets. Because, you know, the top first class ticket, they would roughly translate to about $100,000 per cabin, right? In today's money. Totally. Yes. Yes. I contend it's a very good point i i think it goes down to the time it will take to recoup this like there's only so many crossings they can do in a year and only so many crossings they can do in a decade like to actually start to get close to making that money back is going to take an extraordinary long time you know decades to recoup that money just on ticket sales.

Whereas this is a really quick way that they can make that money back. Because, as I said, the Olympic, which was the Titanic, now disguised as the Olympic, it can get back into work. A year later, the Britannic can get back into work. Suddenly we've got these two ships making that income and we've just got back nearly all of the cost of building one of them abby i want to ask you a question please how did you feel as a listener who has joined me on the journey of carlo weaving this tale and putting the pieces of evidence together to create this compelling case and then throw it all away at the end to reveal that he doesn't even fully believe it my goodness i i must say i have loved the podcast so much uh may i tell you about my listening experience i would love to hear okay

the first i listened to episode one and i was on a train from edinburgh to london and i booked a first class ticket because i'm classy and i was going through the english countryside and i was listening to the titanic podcast and i honestly had the thought life could not be better. So sweet. So I loved listening to it. There was stuff that I didn't know that you brought up. So it was a learning experience for me. What was new?

Just out of interest. So my knowledge is you have a huge practical knowledge of the boat, which I don't have. I didn't know a huge amount about the court case and the sort of testimony as well as um i didn't know the hugest amount about the correspondence that happened um yeah to hear you throw it away and then i was like to be honest a little annoyed because i had prepared all these really good arguments and i was really to be like hey fuck you carlo come at me and i was like i I sort of, to be honest, quite arrogantly considered myself to be the final boss of the podcast

that you had to convince. As a fellow intense fanatic of this topic as well, though, can you understand the motivation that Carlo had, which was to essentially figure out a way to trap me in a room, to tell me about Titanic and to engage me in his Titanic chatter for multiple days absolutely I relate to that because I feel like that's what I do all the time with my comedy shows because my other interest is the tutors and I spend a lot of time in my comedy show telling the audience about the tutors and I often have the thought of like

wow people have paid to see me do this is the dream carlo i'd like to open up the floor to you if you would like to ask abby dr howes any questions or yeah dr howes i would love i have two questions for you my first is who's your favorite passenger or crew member on the titanic and why i was gonna ask you, Carlo. Can you answer it after me? Yeah, please. Okay. I feel like you've got to respect, I'm pronouncing his name incorrectly, I'm sure,

but Charles Joggin, who was the chief baker on board the Titanic. He was supposed to man one of the life rafts, but he saw that there was already a crew member on board and he thought, I don't want to take an extra seat so someone else can take that and then he had a very relatable instinct which was i'm gonna get fucked up so he went this guy back into the kitchen yeah he went back into the kitchen just knocked back a bunch of alcohol and then he's the last person on board the titanic because he um managed to climb up to the top and get himself on the opposite side of the rails. And then he said he rode it down like an elevator and stepped off the Titanic into the water.

But the alcohol kind of helped him survive. Yeah, they found him in the water, right? He was just swimming around. He'd been swimming for 40 minutes or something. Yeah. And his hair wasn't even wet and then he managed to like there was one uh life raft that was like kind of capsized and he managed to sort of attach himself to that yeah and then he got pulled into another life

life raft but yeah he was so drunk he said later i didn't even know it was cold so i feel like he's kind of the legend of the Titanic in many ways. That's incredible. Yeah, yeah. So he's pretty cool, I think. And he's real quite casual about the whole thing too, doesn't he? Yeah. Calla, who was your favourite character from the event?

Normally I say Thomas Andrews is the most interesting passenger to me, who was the architect of the ship, who tried to save a bunch of people through a lot of rafts. And I just find his story so interesting and compelling. He's normally my number one, but because we talked about him a lot in the podcast, the other person is Masabumi Hosono, who was the only Japanese passenger and he survived the disaster. When Hisono got back to Japan,

he just became this national figure of disgrace and they just absolutely pilloried him, constantly having this event that he survived being thrown back in his face. It was just such a source of national shame. And he was too proud while he was alive to reveal these this correspondence that he'd kept with one of the other survivors and i think it was his his children or his grandson revealed all of these letters from other survivors and apparently he was like so brave and stoic during this event and he helped so many people get into lifeboats. And it was just this moment where the lifeboat was pretty much full, and they're like, come in, you get into this lifeboat.

And he was actually like a bit of a hero. But he was so proud. He was like, I'll never show these letters to anybody. And so they were eventually revealed, and his name was cleared in Japan. But it's just a really interesting story to me. Well, Abby, in your opinion, did Titanic sink? Yes, I think it did sink. I don't think it was the Olympic.

But I definitely heard you out completely. And I'm not completely against conspiracy theories. Also, I kind of believe in ghosts too. So it's like a little bit of talk. Those are two quite different things. It's all coming out. Well, Abby Abby thank you so much for joining us on

this episode and for your kind words about the podcast and thanks for being a part of this project. Thank you so much for having me. Did Titanic Sink is

written and produced by myself Tim Batt and Carlo Ritchie. The executive producers are Tim Watkin and Justin Gregory. Katie Gossett is the associate producer for RNZ.

All episodes were directed by Chelsea Preston-Crayford. With audio engineering by Blair Stagpull. And original music by Eilish Wilson, Hikurangi Scarverian-Kar and Phoebe Johnson. With special guest Dr Abbey Howells, PhD. Inquiry transcripts courtesy of the Titanic Inquiry Project. Marconiogram transcripts courtesy of Sean Collin. Thank you. November 18. Details and ticket links are in the show notes. Hi, it's Fido. Start the semester with a new phone and a plan full of data without breaking your budget. We have everything you need for an A-plus year. Come check out our special back-to-school offers. They'll leave you with more cash in your pocket for the stuff you love. Select plans even

include data overage protection so you can go all out without going over. Don't wait. Our back-to-school offers are only available for a limited time. Go to Fido.ca or a Fido store near you and save all semester long. Fido, at your side.