May 1912: The Titanic Inquiry

The Titanic sank on 15 April 1912, and the subsequent enquiry by the US Senate was obviously of great interest to our predecessors: every issue of the following month contains articles covering the proceedings. One aspect where we sympathise with the editorial staff of the day is their despair over the coverage of the disaster in the newspapers: it seems that sensationalism, over-simplified reporting and inaccurate leaks were as much of an issue a century ago as they are now.

This particular article, which can be read here, discusses a letter published in The Times by Sir William White, who was a reknowned naval architect and former Chief Constructor at the Admiralty, during which time he was chief designer on 245 warships; he was also a consulting architect on the liner Mauretania, the fastest ship in the world until the launching of Titanic’s sister-ship, Olympic.

White, who had overseen inquiries into several ship losses, had written to The Times concerning the energy dissipated when the Titanic struck the iceberg, and the questions that raised over the engineering of the ship. This, he had said, was likely to be the most important consequence of the enquiry, rather than the issue of provision of lifeboats, which had dominated discussions of the tragedy — as indeed it still does.