The fire was known about, but it was played down.
She should never have been put to sea.
That’s how the journalist Sennon Moly sums up what he saw on the outside of the Titanic’s hull in old shipyard photos that turned up in an attic in Wiltshire.
And on the morning after she sank, the chief steward of the Prince of Albert photographed an iceberg with red paint smeared along its base.
More than 2,000 people boarded the Titanic, and her photos are the last glimpse we have of them alive.
Children laughing on the decks, quiet lounges, proud crewmen, and calm faces with no idea what was coming.
And the closer you look, the more they give away.
Charles Loller, the officer who survived the freezing water, said it felt like a thousand knives being driven into his body.
Hold on for the picture that shook experts a hundred years later.
And the last image is the hardest one to look at.
I’m Ambrose Wild.
And that smear of red paint is where this countdown starts.
Number 40.
The iceberg with paint on it.
The steward on the Prince Adelbert, a German liner, took his picture on the morning of 15 April 1,912, just hours after the Titanic went down.
He wrote that one side of the Berg carried red paint as if a vessel had scraped along it.
That photo hung on the wall of a New York law office from 1913 to 2002, and when it went up for auction in 2015, it sold for more than $32,000.
It isn’t the only candidate, though.
On 12th April, Captain WF Wood of the SSonian photographed what he called a Blueberg and noted its position close to where the Titanic would go down 2 days later.
And Captain William Decarter of the cable ship Minia took a third picture, which the researcher Grant Big thinks is the likeliest match.
Three photos, and nobody can say for certain which one is the killer.
Number 39, the life jackets.
The Titanic carried around 3,560 cork life belts, enough for everyone aboard and then some.
Today, by one careful count, only about 14 authenticated ones are known to survive.
And the one worn by Mabel Frankotelli recently sold at auction for $96,000.
They were simple things, slabs of cork sewn into canvas and tied on with tapes.
Survivors said that some people who jumped from high on the deck wearing them were knocked out by the fall.
But for almost everyone else, the life belt only kept them floating while the cold did its work.
The people in the water died within minutes from cold shock and hypothermia held up by the very thing that was meant to save them.
Number 38, the boat deck.
Father Francis Brown, a young Jesuit who sailed only as far as Ireland, photographed passengers strolling along the boat deck with the lifeboats sitting quietly above them.
There were 20 boats in all, room for about 1,178 people on a ship carrying more than 2,200.
And here’s what makes that picture sting.
The rules from the Board of Trade only asked for 16 boats on any ship over 10,000 tons.
So the Titanic was actually carrying more than the law required.
Her Davids could have handled 64 boats.
Alexander Carile, one of her designers, had pushed for 48.
In May 1911, he signed off on 16.
So the empty deck space in Brown’s picture wasn’t an oversight.
It was a decision.
Number 37.
The first goodbye.
When the Titanic pulled away from the dock at Southampton on 10 April, crowds lined the key to wave her off.
Within minutes, the voyage nearly ended right there.
As the giant ship moved past, the water she pushed aside dragged a moriner, the SS New York, off her birth.
Her steel mooring ropes snapped, and her stern swung toward the Titanic until the two ships were about 4 feet apart.
A tug hauled the New York clear, and the Titanic’s departure was held up by about an hour.
Brown caught the moment on film.
People on the dock called it a lucky escape.
Nobody thought of it as a warning.
Number 36.
The boy in his top.
One of Brown’s most famous pictures shows a six-year-old named Douglas Speden spinning a top on the deck.
It’s such a small happy moment.
Days later, Douglas survived the sinking along with his parents.
But the photograph carries a second story.
In August 1915 at Grindstone Neck in Winter Harbor, Maine, Douglas was hit by a car.
He died 2 days later.
He was 9 years old.
Number 35, the first class smoking room.
This was where the men went after dinner.
Some of them were still playing cards when the ship struck.
And this room holds one of the loneliest sightings of that night.
A steward named John Stewart reportedly saw Thomas Andrews, the ship’s chief designer, standing alone in there at around 2:05 in the morning, arms folded, his life belt, lying on a table.
Walter Lord later wrote that Andrews was staring at a painting of Plymouth Harbor above the fireplace.
The man who knew the ship better than anyone had already worked out how this would end, and by that account, he stayed right there.
Number 34, the Rivets.
Photos from the Harland and Wolfyard in Belfast show men swarming over the hull, driving in some of the roughly 3 million rivets that held her together.
Most of the middle of the hull was closed up with steel rivets put in by hydraulic machines, but up at the curved bow and stern, where the machines couldn’t reach, the work was done by hand with rot iron rivets.
Tests on rivets raised from the wreck found that some carried too much slag, which made them brittle, and the iceberg struck the bow.
It’s still argued over, but those shipyard photos show the exact seams where the sea may have found its way in.
Number 33, the captain and the purser.
Brown snapped Captain Edward Smith standing beside the purser, Hugh Mroy, on the run from Southampton to Queenstown.
It’s one of the last pictures ever taken of Smith.
Both men died.
On the night of the 14th, the ship was making about 22 knots on a flat, calm sea with no moon, the kind of night that hides ice instead of showing it.
After the collision, Andrews went below, saw the water coming in, and told Smith the truth.
She would stay afloat for maybe 1 and a half to two hours.
Keep Molan’s shipyard photos in mind, though.
We’ll come back to what the hull looked like before she ever sailed.
Number 32, the warning bell.
[snorts] The bronze bell from the crow’s nest was brought up from the wreck in 1987, and in photos it still looks almost polished.
At 11:39 that night, lookout Frederick Fleet saw a dark shape ahead.
He rang that bell three times and picked up the phone to the bridge.
Iceberg right ahead.
From that sighting to the impact, by one estimate, there were about 37 seconds.
That was time enough to start swinging the bow, but the ship was still going to hit.
Those three strikes were the first alarm of the night.
Number 31, the band.
Eight musicians played on the Titanic in two separate groups, and they weren’t White Star crew at all.
They’d been booked by a Liverpool agency, C W and FN Black, and they traveled as secondclass passengers.
As the ship went down, they played to keep people calm.
The popular belief is that the last tune was nearer, My God to thee.
The radio operator, Harold Bride, remembered a piece called Autumn.
And here’s the part that still makes people angry.
Two weeks after the sinking, the agency sent the father of the violinist, Jock Hume, a bill for five shillings and four p for his son’s uniform.
He didn’t pay it.
Number 30, the engineers.
There’s a photo of the Titanic’s engineering crew lined up in front of the machinery they ran, and it’s hard to look at for long.
Not one man from Chief Engineer Joseph Bell’s department survived.
The list ran to 24 engineers, six electrical engineers, two boiler makers, a plumber, and a cler.
They stayed below keeping the boilers lit and the dynamos turning, which is why the lights stayed on while the boats were loaded.
On 22 April, 1,914, about 100,000 people gathered in a Southampton park to watch a memorial to them unveiled.
Think about that crowd.
That’s how many people felt they owed those men something.
Number 29, the gym.
In the photo, it looks like a playroom for the rich.
Rowing machines, stationary bicycles, a punch ball, and two electric machines, a camel, and a horse that rocked you about as if you were riding.
The man who ran it was T.
W.
McCauley, who showed passengers how everything worked.
When the ship was sinking, he told a survivor he wouldn’t wear a life belt because it would only slow him down when he tried to swim for his life.
He never got the chance to find out.
McCauley died that night.
Number 28.
The officers.
The group portrait of the Titanic’s senior officers looks like a picture of total confidence, but that lineup was shuffled at the very last minute.
Henry Wild was brought over from her sister ship Olympic as chief officer which pushed William Murdoch and Charles Loller each down a rank and one officer David Blair was taken off the ship altogether.
When Blair walked down the gangway at Southampton on 9 April, it seems he took a key from the crow’s nest with him by accident.
That key sold at auction in 2007 for £90,000.
Up in the crow’s nest, Frederick Fleet would later tell the inquiry that a pair of binoculars would have let him see the iceberg sooner.
Number 27, the reading and writing room.
It was a bright, quiet room meant mostly for the women in first class, where you could sit by a tall window and write letters home.
Then came the cleanup.
Two days after the sinking, the cable ship Mai Bennett sailed out of Halifax and recovered 306 bodies.
116 of them were buried at sea and 190 were brought back to the city.
Cable ship crews also pulled carved wood and a deck chair from the water.
Today, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax keeps pieces of that wreckwood, some of the last pieces of the ship’s woodwork, ever to reach land.
Number 26.
Third class.
There aren’t many photos of the people in Steidge, and that tells you something already.
Most of them were families and immigrants headed for a new life in America.
The British inquiry counted 76 thirdass passengers.
Only 178 were saved, about one in four.
For the men down there, it was far worse.
Just 75 of 462 adult men in third class came home.
[snorts] Part of the reason was the layout of the ship itself.
American immigration rules required steerage to be kept apart from the other classes and some of the gates between the decks were locked and guarded.
When the ship began to sink, those barriers were still there.
And the next photo is the one this whole countdown has been building toward.
Number 25, the photo in the attic.
Here it is.
For more than a century, an album of photographs sat gathering dust in an attic in Wiltshire in Southwest England.
It belonged to the family of a Harland and Wolf director, and the pictures had been taken by the shipyard’s engineering chief as the Titanic was being finished in Belfast.
They were the kind of photos nobody looks at twice.
A ship at the dock being fitted out, getting ready for her maiden voyage.
But when Sennon Molany and his team looked closely at the starboard side of the hull, they saw something that shouldn’t be there.
A black mark running diagonally across the plates for about 30 ft, and it sat close to where the iceberg would later tear into her.
Engineers at Imperial College London looked at it and concluded it was most likely caused by a fire burning in one of the coal bunkers on the other side of that steel.
The fire itself was already known.
Crew members had talked about it.
What the photos added was a mark you could see from outside, right where the damage came.
For Molany, it was a perfect storm of factors coming together.
Fire, ice, and criminal negligence.
In January 2017, Channel 4 aired his documentary Titanic: The New Evidence.
And that’s the picture that left the experts shaken.
A ship that was supposedly in perfect shape may have been carrying a wound on her side before she ever met the ice.
Not everyone agrees the fire made the difference.
Some historians think she’d have sunk anyway, but that attic photo gave the argument something you can actually see on the hull.
Number 24, the firstass dining saloon.
Photos show row after row of tables and a description from 1,912 called it by far the largest room a float.
It could seat 532 people at once.
Some sources put the number even higher.
The richest man connected to the ship never ate there.
J P Morgan, the financier behind the ship, had planned to sail on the maiden voyage and canled at the last minute.
The guests who did sit down to dinner on 14th April were eating their final meal in that room.
The dishes and the chairs are on the seabed now.
Number 23.
Captain Smith and the drill.
That didn’t happen.
There are photos of Smith in his dress uniform, the white beard, the calm face of a man who’d done this a hundred times.
And there’s one gap in the record that people still argue over.
A lifeboat drill was posted for that Sunday morning, 14th April.
It never took place.
The only drill of the whole voyage had been held at Southampton before departure using just two boats, numbers 11 and 13, and it lasted about half an hour.
Why the Sunday drill was dropped, nobody can say for sure.
But that night, the crew had to load the boats in the dark without ever having practiced it at sea.
Number 22, the elevators.
First class passengers on the Titanic didn’t need the stairs.
There were three lifts next to the grand staircase, all wood paneling and brass.
And in second class, there was something no ocean liner had ever offered that class of passenger before, an elevator of their own.
In photos, the lift cages looked like the height of modern living.
When the bow went down, all that machinery stopped being any use at all.
The electricity that ran them came from the same dynamos the engineers stayed below to keep turning.
Number 21, the funnels.
Pictures of the Titanic always show four towering funnels pouring out smoke, and that was the point.
Only three of them were real.
The fourth was mostly for show, though it did help ventilate the kitchens and the smoking rooms.
Feeding the real ones took more than 600 tons of coal a day.
In the spring of 1,912, a national coal strike had left Britain short.
So Whitar took coal from other ships tied up at Southampton to fill her bunkers.
And one of those bunkers, as you’ve already seen, was on fire.
Number 20, the Davids.
A close look at the lifeboat gear shows how solid it was.
And this is one of the most painful details of the whole night.
The first boat away, Lifeboat 7, had room for 65 people.
It left with about 28.
Officers were afraid a fully loaded boat might buckle and break apart as it was lowered.
But at the inquiry, the naval architect Edward Wilding said the boats had been tested with the weight of 70 men.
That test result was never passed on to the crew, so boats went down half empty to protect Davids that could have taken the weight.
Number 19, the barber shop.
It looks ordinary in its photo.
A few chairs and basins and a counter where passengers could buy souvenirs.
The ship’s barber was August Wikman, and he was one of the lucky ones.
When the ship went down, he ended up in the water clinging to a bundle of about a dozen deck chairs tied together.
He hung on until he reached a lifeboat, and he survived the night.
Number 18, the flag.
In harbor photos, you can see the white star house flag, a red swallowtail pennant with a white star flying above the ship.
And the letters in front of her name meant something.
RMS stood for Royal Mail ship.
The Titanic carried mail under contract for the Royal Mail and for the United States Post Office, too.
Hold on to that because the mail on that ship has its own story, and we’ll get to the men who guarded it.
Number 17, the kitchens.
The galley photos show where meals for more than 2,000 people were cooked every day.
The chef, Charles Proctctor, was one of the best paid men aboard after Captain Smith.
He died and his body was never identified.
But the chief baker, Charles Joffen, has one of the strangest survival stories of the night.
He had a drink, by his own account, half a tumbler of lure, then rode the stern down as if it were an elevator.
He claimed he was in the water for about 2 hours before he reached the overturned collapsible bee and was picked up by a lifeboat.
Historians doubt he was fully in the water that long.
Either way, he lived.
Number 16, Lolla.
There’s a formal portrait of Charles Loller in uniform, steady and serious.
By the end of that night, he’d be the most senior crew member to survive.
As the ship went under, the water pulled him against a grating and pinned him there.
Then a blast of hot air from below blew him back up to the surface.
He reached the upturned collapsible bee and held on to a rope at the front of it until help came.
Later he looked back on the inquiries with real bitterness.
He said he felt more like a legal doormat than a mailboat officer.
Number 15, the swimming pool.
It sat down on F deck filled with heated seaater, a luxury hardly any ship could offer in 1912.
Colonel Archerald Gracie wrote that on the morning of 14th April, he was up before breakfast, warmed up for half an hour with the squash professional Fred Wright and then took a swim in that 6-ft deep tank.
Wright died in the sinking.
Gracie spent the night clinging to the overturned collapsible bee and lived.
He spent his last months writing about what he’d seen and he died on 4 December 1,912 at the age of 54.
Number 14, the first class suites.
The best parlor suites on the ship cost £870 for a single crossing.
J Bruce Isme, the head of White Star, had a three- room suite on B deck.
Photos of those rooms show polished wood and fine furniture, more like a grand hotel than a ship.
Within hours of the collision, they were filling with water like everything else.
Isme lived.
Many of the first class men who’d booked rooms like these did not.
Number 13, the Davidits up close.
Another surviving photo shows the curved steel arms of the well-initing at the edge of the deck.
They were built to swing out several boats each, one after another.
On the night itself, there were only the 20 boats to send, and even those went out short.
That’s why this photo hurts.
The equipment for saving far more people was bolted to the deck, and the boats to go with it had been cut back in 1911.
Number 12, the crow’s nest.
There’s a photo looking up the mast to the little steel basket where the lookout sat.
That night, Frederick Fleet was up there staring into the cold with no moon to light the water.
Fleet spotted the berg, rang the bell, and phoned the bridge, and after that, there was nothing more he could do.
He told the inquiry that with binoculars, he might have seen it sooner.
A few extra seconds might have given the bridge time to turn her.
Number 11, the Turkish bath.
It’s one of the rooms people forget the Titanic even had.
For four shillings or a dollar, first class passengers could use a set of steam rooms.
And the cooling room in the photos looks like something from a palace.
Blue and green tiles, carved teak, bronze lamps, a crimson ceiling with gilded beams, and fake port holes hidden behind carved curtains.
It was built for slow, idle afternoons, and 5 days after she left Southampton, it went down with the rest of her.
Number 10, the officer’s mess.
The officers ate together in their own room away from the passengers, and the photos show a plain table and tidy chairs.
Remember that last minute reshuffle?
Henry Wild, the newcomer, sat at that table as chief officer.
Murdoch and Lolla, who’d expected to hold the top two jobs, sat there one rank lower than they’d planned.
Wild and Murdoch both died that night.
Of the three, only Lola lived.
Number nine, the propellers.
One of the most famous shipyard photos shows workmen standing under the Titanic’s propellers, tiny next to the blades.
There were three of them.
The two wing propellers were 23 1/2 ft across, and the center one, 17 ft, was driven by a turbine.
In the photo, the men look proud.
They had every reason to be.
Months later, those same blades were lifted clear of the water as the stern rose into the night sky.
Number eight, the launch.
On 31 May 1,911, about 100,000 people crowded the shores in Belfast to watch the bare hull slide into the river Lagon.
Workers had greased the slipway with 22 tons of soap and tallow so she’d move smoothly, and the whole launch took barely a minute.
She didn’t have her funnels or her engines yet.
Those came over the next 10 months of fitting out.
When those attic photos were taken, number seven, the secondass dining saloon down on D-Days fixed to the floor.
One of the passengers who ate there was a man named Lawrence Beasley.
He got away in lifeboat 13 and by June 1912 he’d published his own book, The Loss of the SS Titanic, one of the first eyewitness accounts in print.
Number six, the Maronei room, a small radio room photographed by Brown, where two young operators worked for the Maronei company, not for White Star.
Jack Phillips sent the old distress call, CQD.
Harold bride said to him, “Send SOS.
It’s the new call.
They kept sending as the water rose.
The Carpathia picked up the call about 5’8 nautical miles away and turned toward them at full speed.
Philillips died that night.
Bride survived on collapsible bee, the same upturned boat that saved Lighto and Gracie.
Number five, the last view.
On 11 April, Father Brown stepped off the Titanic at Queenstown in Ireland and took a picture of her steaming away.
It may be the last photograph ever taken of the ship above water.
His uncle, a bishop, had given him the ticket for that first short leg of the voyage.
So Brown went home to Ireland, and his photographs went with him.
Number four, the mail room.
Down near the bottom of the ship, five postal clarks, three Americans, and two Britons worked through 3,364 sacks of mail, including about 200 sacks of registered mail.
When the ship struck, they were reportedly marking a birthday.
One of the American clarks, Oscar Scott Woody, was celebrating his.
As the mail room flooded, they worked to haul the registered sacks up to higher decks.
None of the five survived.
Number three, the boats coming in.
A Carpathia passenger named Louis Ogden photographed the Titanic’s lifeboats rowing toward his ship at dawn.
They’re the only known photos of the rescue itself.
In them, the boats look small and quiet on a calm sea.
The Carpathia’s captain, Arthur Rostron, was later awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for that rescue.
For the people in those boats, that was the first moment they knew they were going to live.
Number two, the waiting crowds.
In the days after the sinking, people packed the streets outside the White Star offices in New York and Southampton, waiting for the lists of survivors to go up.
In Southampton, families kept a vigil around the clock at the office on Canute Road.
Of the crew on board, 699 had come from that city, and 549 people from Southampton died.
Nearly all of them crew.
In some parts of the city, almost every street lost someone.
The photos show people standing shoulderto-shoulder reading names, waiting for one that never came.
Number one, the orphans.
The last photo is of two little boys, three-year-old Michelle and 2-year-old Edmund Navertil.
Their father had taken them aboard without their mother’s knowledge, traveling under a false name, Louisie Hoffman.
He got them into a lifeboat and stayed behind.
His body was recovered and buried in Halifax.
The boys reached New York with nobody to claim them.
Newspapers printed their photograph everywhere.
Their mother Marcel saw it in France, sailed to New York, and got them back on 16 May 1,912.
Michelle lived until 2001, the last male survivor of the Titanic.
The whole countdown began with an iceberg in a photograph.
It ends with a mother who recognized her sons in one.
I’m Ambrose Wild.
And if photos like these are your kind of history, there are more stories hiding in old pictures.
