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 to away from the White Star 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.

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 pack, 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 Marconi wireless operator, Cyril Evans, to warn other ships in the area about the ice. Using Morse code, the newly-qualified Evans tapped out to the ''Titanic'' using a Spark-gap transmitter, "MGY 'Titanic'' 's call sign MWL 'Californian'' 's call sign 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! DD in morseI am working Cape Race." His response might have been different if the inexperienced Evans had followed Lord's order and sent an ice warning with the prefix ''MSG'' which meant "Masters' Service Gram". This meant that the ''Titanics Captain Edward Smith would have had to personally acknowledge receipt of the Californian message.

Phillips response was likely due to commercial pressure. He was also 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 casual message from the ''Californian'' was not imperative or news to him. Onboard the ''Californian'', Evans continued to listen to Phillips' routine passenger traffic to the Marconi telegraphy station at Cape Race until about 11:30 p.m.; he then turned off the ship's wireless set and went to his bunk. Ten minutes later the ''Titanic'' collided with the iceberg. 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

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 (not his cabin or bunk as dramatisations of the disaster always portray). He would be awakened twice during the night. The first time was to be told about the rockets. 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. The ''Titanic'' had began firing its first rockets about an hour after the iceberg collision when the lights of an unknown ship were seen. They were launched every six to seven minutes not once a minute which was maritime practice for a ship in distress. When Lord was told about the rockets he replied that they may be "company rockets"; distinct coloured signals which help ships of the same line identify each other. However, he never ordered wireless officer Evans to turn on his set or contact the ship to ask why they were firing signal rockets.

The ''Californias Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall and Quartermaster Rowe said they tried to contact the ship with Morse lamp but got no reply or saw any coherent signals. 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. Lord supporters attribute the visual distortions caused by cold-water mirages as a reason as to why the nearby ship was not identified as the ''Titanic''. After the ''Titanic'' had gone down at 2:20 a.m., Lord was informed by his officers that they thought the disappearance of lights from the mystery ship indicated it had steamed 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:

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 ''Californians 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.

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. 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. 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 ''Californians 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. 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 ''Titanic''s rockets had been sighted by the ''Californian''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. 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.Butler, Daniel Allen; Epilogue: Flotsam and Jetsam; "The Other Side of Night: The Carpathia, the Californian, and the night Titanic was Lost"

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. .
* 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''

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lord, Stanley
1877 births
1962 deaths
Sinking of RMS Titanic
Burials in Merseyside
People from Bolton
British Merchant Navy officers