Doomed by fire before ice?
Molony’s potential breakthrough can be traced to an attic in Wiltshire, in southwest England, where a previously unpublished album of photographs chronicling the ship’s construction and the preparations for its maiden voyage had been gathering dust for more than a century.
The photographs were discovered by a descendant of a director of the Belfast-based company Harland and Wolff that built the Titanic. About four years ago, a collaborator of Molony’s acquired the rare photographs of the ship, meticulously taken by Harland and Wolff’s engineering chief before it left a Belfast shipyard.
When the two men looked closely at the images, Molony said, they were shocked to discover a 9-metre-long diagonal black mark on the hull’s front starboard side, close to where the ship was pierced by the iceberg. An analysis by engineers at Imperial College London subsequently revealed that the mark was most likely caused by a fire in a coal bunker of the ship.
Molony called the photographs “the Titanic equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb”, because of the richness of historical detail they conveyed, including the mark highlighting the extent of the damage.
Experts said the theory was compelling but were divided over how important a role the fire may have played. Titanic
In an interview, Richard de Kerbrech, a marine engineer based on the Isle of Wight who has written two books on the Titanic disaster, said that the fire would have damaged the ship’s bulkhead, a wall of steel within the ship’s hull, and made it more vulnerable after it was pierced by an iceberg. An official British inquiry, in 1912, mentioned the fire, but the judge who presided over it, whom critics saw as sympathetic to shipping interests, played it down.
“This discovery is a revelation and could change our knowledge of the history of what happened,” de Kerbrech said.
Molony contends that the ship’s owners knew about the fire but chose to let it go, since delaying the ship’s journey would have been financially ruinous. At the time of departure, the ship was berthed so that the marks caused by the fire were facing the sea, away from the dock, and therefore concealed from passengers.
The Titanic disaster has long fanned conspiracy theories, among them that it was not the Titanic that sank on April 15, 1912, but, rather the Olympic, its sister ship; that the Titanic was torpedoed by a German U-boat; or that the ship was brought down by a sarcophagus containing an Egyptian priestess’ mummy. Popularised by Hollywood, the story of the Titanic continues to exert a hold on popular culture.
Now the political editor at the Irish Daily Mail, Molony – who has also written a book called The Irish Aboard Titanic – was drawn to the social divisions reflected on the ship, where firstclass cabins hosted millionaires while hundreds of workingclass passengers, many of them Irish, stayed below.
Molony said he believed the fire was played down, in part because death by iceberg was a more dramatic explanation.
“The ship was seen as a heroic unsinkable ship and, as a result, people focused on explanations that fed that narrative,” he said. Not everyone is convinced. David Hill, a former honorary secretary of the British Titanic Society, who has been studying the cause of the sinking since the ’50s, argued that while the damage caused by the fire may have hastened the disaster the blaze wasn’t the decisive factor.
“When the Titanic hit the iceberg close to midnight on April 14, 1912, it created a [90-metrelong] line of damage on the starboard section of the hull, including punctures and gashes, that opened up too many compartments to the sea, so that the weight of the water dragged the bow down so low that the ship eventually sank,” he said. “A fire may have accelerated this. But in my view, the Titanic would have sunk anyways.”
He added: “It amazes me how this ship still captures the global imagination. It was not the worst-ever catastrophe at sea. But it is the one everyone remembers.”