Titanic: Ship of Dreams - 5. The Moment of Impact

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

First Officer Murdoch takes evasive action, attempting to swerve around the iceberg. As Titanic sustains multiple hull breaches, water starts flooding in. As chaos engulfs the engine room, Jimmy McGann and his pals do their best to shut down the engines. And the two wireless operators broadcast their first ever SOS… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Stephanie Barczewski, Julian Fellowes, Clifford Ismay, Tim Maltin, Stephen McGann, Susie Millar. Special thanks to Southampton Archives, Culture and Tourism for the use of the Eva Hart archive. Visit SeaCity Museum for an interactive experience of the Titanic story (seacitymuseum.co.uk) Written by Duncan Barrett | Produced by Miriam Baines and Duncan Barrett | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design & audio editing by Miri Latham | Assembly editing by Dorry Macaulay and Liam Cameron | Compositions by Oliver Baines and Dorry Macaulay | Mix & mastering: Cian Ryan-Morgan | Recording engineer: Joseph McGann | Nautical consultant: Aaron Todd. Get every episode of Titanic: Ship of Dreams two weeks early, as well as ad-free listening, by joining Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's D-A-Z-N dot com slash FIFA. It's 11.39 p.m. on April the 14th, 1912. The Atlantic Ocean, 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. RMS Titanic, all 47,000 tons of her, is plowing westwards at a speed of 22 knots. Up in the crow's nest, 90 feet above deck, lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee are scanning the horizon. They're approaching the end of their two-hour watch, and they can't wait to get back inside. The night is still and clear, but the temperature is only a few degrees above zero.

The sea ahead looks like black glass. The stars shine brilliantly overhead, but all around is nothing but darkness. The lookouts have no binoculars, only the naked eye, although in these conditions artificial magnification might not make much difference. It seems clear enough, but looks can be deceiving. In fact, the peculiar atmospheric conditions on this particular night are creating a cold-water mirage, scattering the light in unusual ways. The horizon isn't quite where it's supposed to be, and as a result, anything just below it is camouflaged behind an indistinct haze, including anything directly in the path of the ship. The two lookouts are still casting their eyes ahead of them, searching for anything out

of the ordinary, but all they can see is darkness, stretching into infinity. And then, almost imperceptibly, something begins emerging dead ahead. It's hard to make out at first, just a blank patch that looks somehow different from the space around it. The men squint, trying to make sense of what they're seeing. With every passing second, the strange object grows larger. Then suddenly they realize what it is.

Frederick Fleet reaches frantically for the bell in the crow's nest. He rings it three times. With his other hand, he lifts the receiver of the telephone that connects to the bridge. What did you see? comes a voice from the other end. By now there's no doubt in Fleet's mind. Iceberg, he replies. Right ahead. From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is Titanic Ship of Dreams.

Part 5 On the bridge, Titanic's first officer, William Murdoch, is in command. He's 39, a Scotsman, and a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve. Both his father and grandfather were captains before him. But Murdoch has never faced a challenge like this before. Now with the lives of more than 2,000 people in his hands, Titanic's first officer has just seconds to avoid disaster. Harder starboard, he calls out to the helmsman, throwing the engine telegraph into reverse. Slowly, the ship starts to turn.

Murdoch's plan was to do a maneuver called porting about the berg. Tim Moulton, author of 101 Things You Thought You Knew About the Titanic But Didn't. Everyone knows the famous order harder starboard and this was from sailing days when in fact the tiller of the helm would be put harder starboard which would actually move the bow to the port or left. So that's what Murdoch did to get the front to clear the berg. And he did that. The bow missed it. But Titanic isn't out of the woods yet. He then gave a less famous order, which is harder port.

And that's because, having swerved the bow away, it was then presenting her whole starboard side to the berg. With the helm hard apart now, Titanic's stern swings away from the iceberg. It looks like Murdoch's audacious maneuver is going to work. Titanic nearly missed the berg. It missed the part of the berg above the sea. Unfortunately for Murdoch, there was a very large, flat spur of ice that was a couple of meters below the surface. So, in fact, the harder port order, instead of, or as well as, clearing the stern, it actually had the effect of driving the bow of Titanic into the ongoing iceberg.

The explosive force of hitting the iceberg was a million foot tons a second. It was enough to lift the Washington Monument a foot in a second. So in other words, it was like a bomb going off. People have said that if Murdoch hadn't actually swerved, if you like, to nearly avoid the iceberg, that then there would have been a head-on collision. And it's true that this actually would have saved Titanic because it would have had the effect a bit like a car crash, if you like, with crumple zones. It would have the effect of concertina-ing in the first 100 feet of the ship. But the rest of the ship would have been completely intact. And in fact, the deceleration at 22 knots

in, say, the first 100 feet of crumpling would actually not have even thrown people out of their beds. So it would have been like a motor car of the day gradually coming to a stop. Professor Stephanie Baczewski, author of Titanic, A Night Remembered. If Murdoch had made what would have been a terrifying but probably correct decision to say we cannot possibly turn this ship in time, so we're just going to ram

into the iceberg head-on, the Titanic was designed to survive that kind of collision. He would have crumpled the bow. He probably would have killed 200 people in the front of the ship because the impact of something that big, of that ship hitting a big iceberg full-on, would have been absolutely devastating. You know, it just would have crushed the front of the ship because the impact of something that big, of that ship hitting a big iceberg full on would have been absolutely devastating. It just would have crushed the front of the ship and killed a lot of people in the process, but the ship would have survived. It's a classic trolley problem.

Do you risk the lives of everyone on board, gambling that you can save them all, or consign a small number to a certain death, knowing that their lives will buy the safety of everyone else. Now that would have very sadly killed all 80 of the firemen who were birthed down in the bow of the ship who were not on duty at the time. Fireman like my great uncle, Jimmy McGann. Murdoch takes the only real decision he can. He rolls the dice.

He jolly nearly succeeded. Now, of course, if he'd taken the decision to carry straight on and Titanic had survived and the first hundred feet had been smashed in, then he'd definitely have been sacked and people would just have thought he was a complete idiot and not trying to avoid the berg. So I think it's one of those situations where he did his best at the time and really he did what any sensible, experienced person would do. The impact in some ways is so slight and so fluky that if they'd just been able to turn like 10 more feet or something, they probably would have missed that iceberg entirely. Not blaming Murdoch, right?

Murdoch's had enough criticism heaped on his head, right? I've been to his hometown in Scotland and people there are quite sensitive about how Murdoch has been treated. So I don't want to add any criticism of Murdoch because I think he was in an impossible position, right? And I think he does the best he can. I mean, it's such a close-run thing that I think we want to look for these things that could have changed the story.

And I think there are a lot of things that could have changed the story, potentially. I think it's one of those things that everything has to add up to the wrong answer for what happened to happen. It was just a very precise set of circumstances and a big chain reaction of things. No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express.

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Visit your local Chevrolet dealer for details. William Murdoch is not even Titanic's captain. That position is held by Edward Smith, commodore of the White Star Fleet. After a glittering three-decade career with the company, he is on the cusp of a well-earned retirement. But Smith is resting in his cabin at the moment the ship hits the iceberg, having spent most of the evening dining in the à la carte restaurant with some of Titanic's wealthiest passengers. Author Clifford Ismay

Would Captain Smith have issued different orders? I think that's something we would never know. No captain can be on the bridge all of the time. He needs his personal time, his sleep time. Had Captain Smith actually been on the bridge at that particular point, who knows what difference it would have made. It takes less than a minute for Captain Smith to make it onto the bridge.

His cabin is conveniently located right next door. What was that? he asks Murdoch as soon as he arrives. An iceberg, sir, Murdoch replies. Captain Smith wastes no time following the Titanic's state-of-the-art safety protocols. Close the watertight doors, he orders. That way, if the ship's hull has been breached down below, any water coming in should be contained within a single compartment. Murdoch assures him the doors are already closed. Right now, though, no one knows

the extent of the damage the ship has received, or, crucially, how it's distributed. The total size of the hole that was open to the ocean is about the size of a doorframe, right? It's very, very small. It was only light damage, but the problem was that it was over 200 feet. She was designed to float with any two watertight compartments flooded, and she was designed to float even with her first four watertight compartments flooded. What she wasn't designed to float with was breaches in her first five compartments when the wreck was discovered you know i think everybody thought

there was going to be a gaping hole in the side of the ship right well it's not it's a line really more than it's a hole it's maybe you know six inches wide that runs down the side of the ship. Screenwriter Julian Fellowes. It didn't occur to anyone that a gash that long would be made in the side of a ship. What they thought is that it would collide in some way. I mean, there wasn't a ship that could have done that damage. Only an iceberg could do it. The bird just slightly nicked into the fifth watertight compartment which if you like was the achilles heel it was the thing which meant that titanic would sink to the bottom

the impact of the iceberg has been felt very differently in different parts of the ship many of the passengers have slept right through it, and those who are awake at the point of impact don't realize the damage the iceberg has caused. To Kate Boss on EDEC, it sounds like the scrape of an ice skate. To bedroom steward Alfred Kessinger, like a rowing boat being dragged over gravel. Predictably, Titanic's very own Cassandra, Esther Hart, takes things more seriously. She's been refusing to sleep at night ever since she came on board. And right now, she's convinced the bump she just felt must spell disaster. Had she been asleep, it wouldn't have wakened her.

It didn't waken anybody else in the cabins round about there at all, but she was wide awake, and she felt this bump. She said it was just like a train pulling into a station. It just jerked. It was very slight, but she said she knew that it was this dreadful something, and she awakened my father. She awakened me, and my father said no if he oughtn't going up on deck again.

But she literally pulled him out of bed and made him go up. My father came back very quickly, because he could get up to the boat deck in the lift very quickly from where our cabin was. And he came back, and he picked me up and wrapped his blanket tightly around me as if I were a baby. And my mother said nothing to him. And I used to say to her sometimes, years afterwards,

I can't understand why you didn't say to him, what was it? And she said, I didn't have to say what was it. I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was this dreadful something that I had to live with for months. And there was nothing more I could say. So he put his very thick coat on her, and put another on himself, and without any words at all, we went out of the cabin, and into the lift, and up onto the

boat deck. Now, if we hadn't done that at that time, I pretty much doubt I'd be talking to you today. While the Hart family's neighbours on Titanic's port side are fast asleep in their bunks, in other parts of the ship the iceberg's impact is felt more strongly. Millionaire Molly Brown is thrown to the floor of her first-class cabin on E-Day. 21-year-old Gretchen Longley wakes to find ice coming through a porthole. Virginia Clark, a young mother from Montana, stares in amazement as a white mountain seems to glide past her cabin. And down in boiler room six, the violence of the impact is unmistakable. As soon as Titanic made contact with the iceberg, the forward right hand, if you like, as you're

looking going ahead, part of the boiler rooms just exploded or looked like they exploded. And suddenly fountains of water started spurting out from between the seams in the plates. So this would have been extremely shocking and worrying to those men who were trimming and the firemen and the stokers down there. And in fact, some of them felt that they must have run aground on Newfoundland because they couldn't imagine anything else that would do that much damage. I think some of them would have been quite surprised to know that all of that damage was caused just by ice. Even if they weren't on duty at the time,

trimmers like my great uncle Jimmy McGann would know that something bad had happened to the ship. Everyone down below would have been aware of the collision immediately because as well as half the people were on duty and half of them were sleeping, but their sleeping quarters were low down in the ship, right in the bow. So they would all have been immediately woken up by the loud crash of the iceberg hitting Titanic. We don't know whether or not Jimmy was working

at the time of the impact. But either way, he was almost certainly at his post within a matter of minutes. My brother Stephen has researched our great uncle's story. He could have been in an engine room, he could have been having a kip, but very quickly there was an alarm and they said, look, there's been an incident, we need everyone downstairs.

There was water ingress starting to happen from near the front and then pouring into the other compartments as you went down. As the bunker filled with water, it did eventually collapse under the weight of the water and that caused a rush to come in. For Titanic's firemen, the priority right now is shutting down the ship's engines. From the bridge, Captain Smith has ordered a dead stop. But for a ship as powerful as Titanic, that's no easy matter. Immediately that water was seen to be pouring into the engine rooms, the order was given in the boiler rooms to shut the dampers. And basically this was a way, as quickly as possible, of stopping the boilers from exploding. So what they wanted to do was actually rake the coal out and really if you like put the fire out

straight away so that you didn't have cold water meeting steam and create cracks and explosions it was not a trivial thing an engine had to be carefully fired up and more particularly where the titanus concerned, carefully tamped down at the end. What we would find hard to understand nowadays is once you start a many hundred degrees centigrade, hey, you know, that thing can explode if it gets cold water on it. It's dangerous, it can blow up. With pressure in the boilers reaching dangerous levels, a series of safety valves has been activated, pushing large amounts of steam up and out of Titanic's giant funnels.

On deck, the noise of the exhaust being vented is deafening. There was a roar of steam coming up from each of the funnels and it actually meant that the officers couldn't actually hear any orders being given. So they were working in sign language because so much steam was being blown off so fast and so noisily overhead and this was in order to prevent the boilers from exploding. As Titanic gradually slows down, Captain Smith and his officers are doing their best to assess the damage the ship has sustained.

They've been joined on the bridge by a visitor, White Star Chairman Bruce Ismay. Ismay is still wearing his pajamas, with a warm coat thrown over the top. On his feet are a pair of comfortable slippers, but his mood is far from relaxed. Do you think the ship is seriously damaged? Ismay asks Captain Smith. I'm afraid so, the captain tells him. Although at this point, what exactly constitutes serious damage isn't clear. At dinner before the collision, both Captain Smith and, in fact, Thomas Andrews, who was one of the designers of Titanic, were, if you like,

showing off to passengers by saying that Titanic could be cut into three pieces and each piece would float. So they really believed that she wouldn't sink. They also believed that an iceberg probably wouldn't cause a catastrophic failure of the hull. So I think they were as surprised as the rest of the passengers and I think their main concern would have been does this mean a delay in getting into New York? So they then sent Andrews down to assess the damage. It took Andrews quite a long time to go through the different areas and time how fast the water was coming in

and then get the plans out and work out what that meant for the ship. While Thomas Andrews is down below compiling his damage report, up on deck Captain Smith and his officers are following Titanic's emergency protocols. And that means preparing for the worst possible outcome, however unlikely it may seem. At five minutes to midnight, Smith gives the order to uncover the lifeboats. By now, anxious passengers are beginning to appear on deck, wondering why the ship has stopped in the middle of the night. The scene they encounter is one of breathtaking beauty. Titanic is floating, perfectly still now, on a sea of polished obsidian. Overhead, the stars shine so brightly that passengers can read the time on their

wristwatches. It's all because of the unusual atmospheric conditions the ship has sailed into. The same conditions that camouflaged the iceberg 20 minutes earlier. Now layers of hot and cold air are creating a strange optical effect above the ship. When you get very, very cold air, you get this thing that's called heliostasis, which is a posh way of saying still air. And that's because air is denser and heavier when it's colder. So what happens is that you get very cold air very near the surface and it gets warmer and warmer like a sort of layer cake. So what you had was very stratified air. It had the effect of switching on and off the stars.

So as you're looking at the stars, the light beams were just oscillating a little bit in these layers of air that you're looking obliquely through to see the stars and so some survivors actually said the stars were flashing so much it was almost as if they were flashing morse code signals of distress to everyone about the calamity that was happening below and of course the absolutely fatal part of that is that the morse lamp signals between the nearby potential rescue ship, the Californian and the Titanic, that flashing caused by the stratified air actually scrambled the sense out of the morsel lamp signals. So this is the kind of tragic situation that was caused by the very, very unusual

seeing conditions that night. And that's why I say that in a way first of all the titan disaster was ultimately caused by the weather and really that she was sunk by a perfect storm of calm uh oh excuse me why are you walking so close behind me well you're a tall guy you throw a decent shadow and i'm walking in it to keep out of this bright sun. It hurts my eyes. Okay, well, you know what?

Specsavers, you can get two pairs of glasses from $149. And, oh, you'll like this. One can be a pair of prescription sunglasses. Sounds great! Where's the nearest store? Not far. Come on. Let's hurry, then. To my count.

One, two, one, two, one, two, one. Visit specsavers.ca for details. Right now, nobody on board knows the so-called unsinkable ship is doomed. But for those on deck, it's an eerie experience. Susie Miller.

Great-granddaughter of Titanic deck engineer Tommy Miller. I've done that crossing. I did it in 2012 as part of the Memorial Cruise. Just getting a handle on how huge the Atlantic Ocean is. It's amazing now, you know, you can fly across the Atlantic in five hours, but you know, when you're bobbing around on this vast ocean in a ship, you just realize sort of how vulnerable you are and how the sea has all the power and for him i'm sure some of those thoughts were going through his mind because he'd never been in a situation quite like that before soon after midnight titanic's band have set up outside the

entrance to the covered promenade on A-Deck. They are doing their best to keep passengers' spirits up with cheerful ragtime tunes, though the music is almost drowned out by the noise of the engine exhaust venting overhead. Nearby, John Jacob Astor IV, the richest man on board, is deep in conversation with Captain Smith. The captain tells Astor that he and his pregnant wife Madeline should put on their life jackets. It's possible they may have to abandon ship. Meanwhile, six decks below, Thomas Andrews is assessing the damage from the iceberg. Already the ship has taken on more than 7,000 tons of water. She's starting to tilt downwards at the head, just a couple of degrees so far, but it'll get worse. On the ship's lower decks,

already things aren't looking good. The squash court has turned into a swimming pool in the mail room tens of thousands of letters and parcels are floating away but as long as the damage is limited to no more than four of the ship's sealed compartments andrews is confident titanic will stay afloat and then he makes a truly horrifying discovery. A fifth compartment has been breached, and a sixth slightly nicked as well. There's no doubt about it now. Titanic is doomed. From the moment she scraped the iceberg, her fate was a mathematical certainty.

And Thomas Andrews is the only man on board who knows the truth. Just imagine what it was like to be Thomas Andrews, who's built this ship, and then he realizes what's about to happen. You know, he knows that the ship is doomed from the moment that he sees the sort of extent of the damage. The impact on Thomas Andrews of realizing that his creation that he had put blood, sweat and tears into over the last several years was actually definitely going to sink, I think would have been absolutely devastating. It's quite interesting because everyone's trying to calm the passengers. And of course, he is too. But a stewardess is seen walking around without her life jacket on. And he says to her, why aren't you wearing your life jacket? And she says, oh, Mr. Andrews, I don't want the passengers to think

I'm afraid. And then he says to her with a sort of look, he says to her, if you value your life, you will wear your life belt. Andrews races back to the bridge, taking the steps of the grand staircase three at a time. By 12.25 a.m., he's talking Captain Smith through his calculations. It's just three quarters of an hour since Titanic hit the iceberg.

To those waiting on the upper decks, the ship still appears unscathed. Below them, on the forehead well deck, third class passengers are playing football with large chunks of ice. But Captain Smith trusts Andrew's judgment. No one knows Titanic like he does. And Andrew's is unwavering. Titanic will founder. The only question is how long they have left. His best guess?

About an hour and a half. This news would have been an utter devastating shock to Captain Smith and Bruce Ismay, and I don't think they could quite believe it. And so now they've got the question of, you know, what to do, how to try to get people off the ship. They are also immediately aware that there are not enough lifeboats on the ship, right? It had more lifeboats than it was required to have, actually, by law at the time. That's not enough to hold the passengers on the Titanic. Captain Smith exits the bridge and heads straight to the wireless room. Here he finds Titanic's senior Marconi operator,

Jack Phillips, at his post. Send a call for assistance, the captain tells him tersely. Phillips begins tapping out the distress signal. C.Q.D. The traditional three-letter code doesn't, strictly speaking, stand for anything. It's a bastardization of a French phrase. Sécurité, danger. C, que, des. In combination with Titanic's call sign, M-G-Y, it should leave other ships in no doubt of the situation. For years, CQD had been a distress signal. It had been the more standard.

But recently, they were moving it to be SOS. And the reason for SOS was because it was very easy to hear. Even if you weren't very well trained, you could hear the dots and dashes of SOS quite clearly. Philip's distress call is just eight letters. C-Q-D-D-E-M-G-Y. The D-E again is French. Deux. A distress call from the Titanic. As luck would have it, it's picked up almost immediately by a French liner, the Provence. But she is 250 miles away,

too far to make it in time. After five minutes, Captain Smith returns for an update. What are you sending? he asks Phillips. CQD, the young man replies. At this point, Phillips' assistant, Harold Bride, chips in. Send SOS, he says. It's the new call. And it may be your last chance to send it. In the next episode, Titanic's still slumbering passengers are woken and told that the ship is sinking.

But many of them refuse to board the lifeboats. Wireless operators Phillips and Bride continue their attempts to summon help. And a rescue ship, the SS Carpathia, sets a course for Titanic's position. That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Titanic Ship of Dreams right now, without waiting, by subscribing to Noisa+. Just hit the link in the episode description to find out more.