Reviews
"Well, I finally found the time to read the book you wrote, and just had to let you know how much I loved it. Since my Grandfather gave me the old book he had, "The Sinking Of The Titanic and Great Sea Disasters," a 1912 edition, I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about it, and have found your book to be the most factual and fascinating. The format you used was the most appropriate I've seen to date. Thanks for all the hard work you put into it. It shows."
Conrad S., St. Paul, MN
"Thanks again and I just wanted to say I purchased one of these a couple of weeks ago and started reading this book, and wanted to tell you its one of the best books I've read, so intense about all the facts you could not put the book down, fascinating reading the facts astound you. Thanks for writing such a wonderful book."
Sherry M., Phoenix, AZ
"Good Evening. I actually received my book a couple of days ago, but didn't want to write to you until I had the opportunity to read it. And read it I did . . . non-stop . . . start to finish . . . in one sitting. I learned so much, so easily. Your unique presentation of the "facts" swept me up and carried me away on a wave of varied emotions all through the book. Occasionally, jumping up and running out to my startled family with another piece of information I couldn't wait to share, saying "can you believe it?!" Everyone in the house wants to read it now, and I am talking teenagers here, who don't usually read anything unless it's the label on a new CD or Video Game! Thank you so much, and thank you for taking the time to autograph it especially to me. I'm going to show it to everyone!"
Mary B., Ontario, CA
"I received my book today and I am very pleased to have a signed first edition copy! I started reading and have put it down just so I could write a short note to you and let you know that you've written a fantastic piece of history. I'll cherish this book forever and this will make book #32 in my Titanic collection--the only one I have that is autographed."
John R., Peoria, IL
"If you are fascinated with Titanic, you must own this book! Meredith has written an easy to access book full of fascinating facts about Titanic. Some are strange, some funny, some sad, some just bizarre. My whole family loved this book. My 14-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter both found something different to talk about in this book. This is the kind of book series I want in our library, the kids can find information quickly and easily and I win all the Titanic trivia contests thanks to Mr. Meredith! This book is fantastic. Buy it!"
Ronald M., Greensboro, NC.
Author Interview
 What got you interested in the story of Titanic?
Lee Merideth: I discovered this story many years ago when I was in high school and read Walter Lord's A Night to Remember. I've been fascinated about it ever since, and always read whatever I could find on the subject.
What in particular interested you?
Lee Merideth: The tragedy of it. Someone once said that even poorly written history is better than any fiction because you are dealing with real people and all of their hopes, fears, dreams and fates.
Not to diverge, but your other passion is the American Civil War, right?
Lee Merideth: Yes. Since I was ten years old I have had a great interest in the Civil War. It's always amazed me how men could stand shoulder-to-shoulder and march to almost certain death or maiming. This same willingness by the men and women on board Titanic to stand and face almost certain death just astounds me. Many of the First Class male and female passengers had the opportunity to climb into a lifeboat that night but did not, either giving up their place to another or, in many cases, not wanting to be perceived as being one who survived when so many others would not.
Do their actions force you, as an author, to question how you would have acted in that situation?
Lee Merideth: Yes. I often try to put myself in their place. What would I have done if I was one John Jacob Astor, for example. He was one of the richest men in the world, and after he made sure his pregnant young wife was on a lifeboat, he stepped back and went down with the ship. Would I stand back, or would I use whatever influence I had to try to get on that boat? It's so much like those thousands of nameless soldiers who have lined up on countless battlefields around the world. Would I have had the guts to do that?
How well do you think James Cameron's Titanic portrayed the disaster?
Lee Merideth: Very well. The technical aspects of the movie were awesome, the sets and costumes and so forth. The ship breaking up was well done.
Do you remember your reaction when you first heard Hollywood was going to do a new Titanic movie?
Lee Merideth: (Laughing). Yes. I recall hearing it and also that the story was going to be built around a love story. I thought to myself, "well, Hollywood is going to ruin another good movie." Even after hearing some early reviews, I did not think I would enjoy the movie that much. But, I went to see it and was captivated by it. I thought it was well done in virtually every aspect. It was an enjoyable movie that struck several emotional chords.
Do ever get asked whether Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater were real people?
Lee Merideth: Amazingly, yes. I get asked that quite often. And no, they were not real. I guess it shows how powerful Hollywood movies are in shaping history in the minds of people. However, I should say that they are composite people in that much of what they did or said has been documented as having actually happened.
Like what, for example?
Lee Merideth: Remember the scene on the dock where Cal, Rose's fiance, makes the comment that "God himself could not sink this ship." That comment was really made by a crewman to a passenger on the dock in Southampton. There were about a dozen newlyweds on the ship, many of whom were lost. Who knows? There quite possibly could have been a similar relationship as Jack and Rose enjoyed on screen and we don't know about it. If something like that actually did transpire, though, it almost certainly would not have happened among passengers of different classes.
Which characters were based on real people?
Lee Merideth: All of the ships officers, the band, many of the passengers were based upon real people and events. What some of the people did is based upon conjecture, though. No one really knows what happened to Captain Smith, for example. Enough evidence puts him in the pilot house when the ship went down to make his demise in the movie plausible. However, there were about a dozen survivors who say they saw him in the water, but each survivor saw him after the ship sank and in different locations. Pretty good observations in the pitch-black night, I'd say.
Let's go back a second to something you said earlier. Why don't you think passengers of different classes could have gotten together?
Lee Merideth: In the early 1900s, we were approaching the end of the Victorian Era, where people were class conscious and Third Class (or working class) people aspired to move up to the Second Class (or professional), and Second Class seldom had a chance to move up to First Class. Money and social stature meant everything, and most people didn't have enough of either. It would be hard to imagine a Third Class working man ever coming into contact with a First Class woman in a setting that could lead to a romantic encounter. Most First Class women wouldn't even allow it.
Second, the various classes were physically separated while on the ship. The ship was designed to keep classes apart. Walls, locked doors and locked gates prevented the flow of Third Class passengers into the Second Class areas of the ship. Second Class passengers weren't physically prevented from going into the First Class areas, but these passengers knew where the boundaries were and seldom crossed them.
Titanic and most of the ships of the time were designed to limit this access, and although it was possible for Third Class passengers to make it up to the boat deck, and once the ship started to sink the doors and gates were opened, just getting to the boat deck was a challenge because it was a long, winding trip down corridors, up and down stairs in a totally unfamiliar part of the ship just to get to the boat deck. A view of the deck plan shows how difficult this was. So although the physical barriers were removed, it was almost impossible for find your way out of the Third Class areas.
Were people in the Third Class restrained from getting up to the boat deck?
Lee Merideth: To the best of our knowledge and for the most part, no. There were some third class passengers on the early lifeboats, mostly men who figured out how to get up to the boat deck by climbing up the loading cranes or whatever. At least one crew member led a whole group of Third Class passengers out of the lower decks up to the boat deck, then went back for another group. He was the only one who did so, though. It wasn't until most of the lifeboats were launched that anyone other than Captain Smith, Bruce Ismay, and Thomas Andrews had any idea the ship was going to actually sink. The rest of the officers did not know for sure, although some may have guessed as much. Certainly no one told them the ship would sink. So no one made any effort to get the third class people up out of their part of the ship.
Also, again dealing with Third Class passengers, most had gone through life having someone else telling them what to do and when to do it. Few could, our would, make any decisions for themselves under those circumstances. There are numerous accounts of these passengers milling about and unwilling to do something until someone in a position of authority told them to do it. Unfortunately, there wasn't anyone in a position of authority to tell them much of anything.
Your book mentioned something I had never read before about the Café Parisian. . .
Lee Merideth: Yes. That was one incident where national origin and ethnic background came into play. There were almost 100 employees of a private organization called the Café Parisian. These people were from France and Italy. It seems that several of the British seamen, concerned that the "lowlife continentals" as the French and Italian workers were referred to, took it upon themselves to lock them up in their cabins fairly early so they wouldn't storm the lifeboats, as it was feared they would do. There was only one survivor out of about 100 of these employees, and he happened to be outside his cabin when the doors were locked.
Besides social stature, were there other reasons why the classes segregated?
Lee Merideth: Most of the Third Class passengers were from eastern or southern European countries. Traveling to America on a ship like Titanic was a once-in-a-lifetime event (no pun intended!). Few had ever eaten as well or as much, had beds to sleep on, access to electricity or even used indoor plumbing. Many of these people had various contagious or infectious diseases. On a week-long voyage across the Atlantic, no one wanted to see the First or Second Class passengers become infected. The United States government felt the same way, so it was a government requirement that the classes be physically separated to reduce the spread of disease.
Why were there so few lifeboats?
Lee Merideth: Although Titanic was an American-owned vessel, it was governed by the British Board of Trade regulations in place at that time, which required that passenger liners have lifeboat capacity based upon the number of cubic feet of space allocated to passengers and not how many people would actually be on the ship. By 1912 these regulations were almost thirty years old, and when they were written, they were for a ship that weighed no more than 10,000 tons, which was the largest ship anyone could envision at the time. The regulations hadn't been updated even as ships got larger. So, based upon the cubic feet of space allocated to passengers on Titanic and 10,000 tons being the maximum size, the total lifeboat requirement for Titanic was only 16 boats, which is what Titanic carried. However, White Star line did add the four collapsible boats, although their value was, and is, little understood. Two of the four were stored on the top deck of the ship where they couldn't easily be launched.
Didn't the original design of the ship call for more lifeboats?
Lee Merideth: Yes. The original specifications called for 64 lifeboats, but this was rejected immediately. As built, there were lifeboat davits capable of holding 32 lifeboats, but it was decided that the extra boats would clutter the decks too much, so only 16 lifeboats, all that were legally required, were put on the ship. Interestingly, within days of the sinking, enough lifeboats and deck space was found on all passenger ships to have lifeboat capacity for every person on the ship.
Another interesting fact is that the lifeboats weren't even considered a requirement by Titanic's passengers! No one believed the ship could sink, let alone would sink. Thus, they believed the lifeboats would be used to help save people on other ships that were in danger of sinking!
Why was Titanic advertised as "unsinkable"?
Lee Merideth: It wasn't. Nobody ever associated with the design, construction or operation of Titanic ever called the ship unsinkable. That single word that many of us attach to the Titanic disaster came from a British magazine, which called Titanic "practically unsinkable" because of the newly-developed watertight compartments, double bottom, and other safety features. However, the public picked up on the "unsinkable" portion and attached it to the ship.
But the ship was designed with safety in mind?
Lee Merideth: And comfort! She was the largest ship ever built. The designers and builders were also striving for the safest ship. Even in their wildest dreams there was nothing the designers could imagine that could collide with Titanic that could cause her to sink. With her watertight compartments, no other ship--even her sister ship Olympic--could ram it in such a way to cause enough flooding to sink her. Or so they believed. Fire was always a concern, but most ship accidents were caused by collision with another ship, and in the forty years prior to 1912 there had only been four fatalities among the millions of people who had traveled across the Atlantic. For some time, North Atlantic steamship travel in the early 1900s was as safe as any mode of transportation we have today. No one seems to have considered the possibility of a collision with an iceberg.
Let's back to the lifeboats for a moment. Why were so many launched less than full?
Lee Merideth: Titanic's lifeboats, all 20 of them (including the collapsibles), were capable of carrying 1,176 people. The fourteen large ones were capable of carrying 65 each. Only two of the lifeboats were launched filled to capacity, and some of them, including one of the smaller 35 passenger emergency boats, only had 12 people.
But why?
Lee Merideth: Two of Titanic's senior officers, Murdoch and Lightoller were responsible for launching the boats, one officer stationed on each side of the ship. Although both knew the ship had collided with an iceberg, neither Murdoch or Lightoller was aware the ship was going to sink. Early boats were launched with high numbers of crew members because each boat captain was told to row around and either pick up people out of the water or to go to the forward cargo doors and people would be loaded into the lifeboats from there. It was felt this was safer than trying to load the boats full and then trying to lower them into the water. Neither officer knew if the boats would actually hold the weight of a full load, although the boats had been tested for this in Belfast.
So, as it turned out, the boats were supposed to row around to the cargo doors, but the doors were never opened, and the crewmen assigned to do it didn't survive.
Did the lights visible from the other ship, the "mystery" ship, have a role in this at all?
Lee Merideth: Possibly. The lights were seen by many survivors off in the distance, about five miles at the most. While Lightoller was telling his early boats to row around and pick up people from the cargo door, he was also telling them to fill up, row off to the ship in the distance, unload passengers and row back. That is why there were so many crewmen on the early boats.
Is it true many of the passengers had the chance to get off, but did not want to?
Lee Merideth: Yes. Some boats were launched without full loads because there wasn't anyone else to load onto them. Most of the boats were launched before most of the people really got concerned about the ship sinking. There are many reports of Lightoller and Murdoch either begging people to get into the boats or, in some cases, not being able to find anyone. Remember, it was 30 degrees outside and a lot of people didn't want to get into a small, open boat in the middle of the night and row around the North Atlantic Ocean. And who could blame them! It seemed they were safer where they were. If you were on a cruise to Alaska and someone rousted you out of bed at midnight and told you to get into an open lifeboat and it was freezing outside, you probably would question their wisdom, too.
The water temperature was so cold, though, that once the ship sank, those people, even those with life vests, didn't stand a chance. . .
Lee Merideth: That's right. The water temperature was 28 degrees. To get an idea how cold that was, fill a large bowl of water with ice cubes, let it set for awhile, then stick your hand in it and hold it in for one minute. Imagine your whole body in that. Experts say that the average person will succumb to hypothermia in less than 20 minutes at this temperature. And, anyone who managed to get onto a floating object did so after having been in the water, so most of them froze to death within a few minutes. The only exceptions were the survivors on the upturned collapsible lifeboat B who stood on the bottom of the boat. They were packed together and used what little body temperature they generated to help keep each other warm. Even then, over half of the people who had been on the boat at one time or another died during the night and slipped off into the sea.
Did the lifeboats save anyone?
Lee Merideth: Several people were pulled out of the water by the lifeboats, but most of them died.
How long did these survivors float around in the lifeboats?
Lee Merideth: Another of the great ironies of the Titanic disaster is that the first passengers were rescued only one hour and fifty minutes after the ship sank. Most of the survivors were rescued within a few hours, and the entire rescue effort was finished eight hours after the ship struck the iceberg.
Could anything have been done to prevent the ship from sinking, or to keep it afloat long enough to rescue all of the people?
Lee Merideth: Not with the technology available in the early 1900s, and maybe not with today's technology. Once the ship struck the iceberg, too much of it was opened to water. The watertight compartments weren't really watertight because water could just flow over the top of them into the next compartment. The flaw was so obvious and yet so fatal. The front of the ship was just pulled further down into the water and nothing could have been done to prevent that or even slow it down.
Thanks, Lee, for sharing your thoughts with us. You have penned a remarkable book. How can readers get in touch with you to get a signed copy or have you take to their group?
Lee Merideth: Well, they can call me at 408-944-0352, or write to me at Box 64142, Sunnyvale, CA 94088. Thanks. I enjoyed it very much.
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