Edward Wilding had probably been looking forward to 17 April 1912.
It was expected that Titanic would have docked in New York on the conclusion of a successful maiden voyage. Perhaps he was anticipating news from Thomas Andrews concerning any of the observations he had made about the new ship’s progress. (A year earlier, Andrews had made 56 notes concerning Olympic’s maiden voyage.)
Instead, he was digesting the news that Titanic had foundered with a heavy loss of life, including his colleague Thomas Andrews and the other members of Harland & Wolff’s ‘guarantee group’. There was little time to try and process the news before he found himself in court that day, testifying as part of the appeal hearings following the Olympic-Hawke collision. The channel in the vicinity of the collision had been swept and wreckage from Hawke recovered. The White Star Line were hoping to use its location as evidence pinpointing the location of the collision, as part of their appeal against the December 1911 verdict (which allocated blame to Olympic but absolved her of liability on the basis of the defence that she was compulsory pilotage when the collision occurred).
He was asked about the damage to Olympic and the collision repairs. Harland & Wolff had sold the damaged hull plating to a scrapyard and ‘nearly all of it’ had subsequently been recovered for examination.
Wilding thought that the main wreckage now recovered from the bottom of the channel had fallen from Hawke ‘at the conclusion of the third cut, and just as the next blade [of Olympic’s starboard propeller] was beginning the fourth cut on the body of the Hawke’. His evidence emphasized the enormous stresses on Olympic’s structure and starboard engine as the collision occurred:
I find some difficulty in saying that it absolutely did jam, but there was no question that the plating, when the vessel arrived in Belfast, was driven hard in, and the frames doubled up inside by pressure of the fore foot on the boss plating, and that the boss plating and framing had been driven down on a big loose coupling which was beneath them, and that the [Olympic’s starboard] engine, in its effort to go round, or to continue going round, when the pressure came on it, had torn and done very considerable damage to the framing inside the structure of the Olympic; and it is quite in my mind conceivable – although, of course, it is not certain – that that was sufficient to bring up the engine momentarily. Then, as the pressure of the Hawke’s fore foot was lifted off by her movement over the big propeller casting, that the engine was sufficiently free to be enabled to go on again. I do not think many people who have not been there, realise the enormous power that there is got from the steam pressure in these engines; they move comparatively slowly even when at full power, and the power behind them is, I think I am correct in stating, larger than the power behind the biggest rolling mills in the world. That is, the biggest mills that are used anywhere for the rolling of steel plates, as distinct from the forging of armour plates; consequently, the power that is available for doing damage is enormous, so that it is almost impossible to say that the comparatively modest damage, such as the damage on the boss plating, did bring up the propeller. But, allowing for the fact that the weight of the Hawke, the whole weight of the forward end…, was sitting momentarily on the loose coupling, it is at least conceivable that it was brought up there… I may say that as far as we could tell – we made some estimate of it – the starboard engine of the Olympic, when running at 64 revolutions, was probably giving something like 12,000 horsepower…
Wilding faced a whole series of daunting tasks in those weeks. He would go on to give exhaustive information and testimony before the British Wreck Commissioner’s court, providing information about all the fundamental aspects of Titanic’s design…
