Articles with the Tag Captain E.J. Smith

A Captain’s Responsibilities

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A Captain’s Responsibilities: In Charge of a Floating Town

 

A ship’s captain such as Captain Edward John (‘E.J.’) Smith was responsible for what was, ultimately, a floating town. Plenty of things could happen on a single voyage.  One of many unusual incidents occurred about two years before the Titanic disaster.  Early in 1910, the White Star liner Adriatic was leaving her New York pier when one of the ship’s stewards heard a revolver shot. One of the second class staterooms was found to be locked from the inside.  The ship’s crew forced it open to find a passenger ‘lying on the deck with a bullet wound in the right temple’. Captain Smith wrote in the log:

The revolver was found lying close to the man’s right hand. The ship’s surgeon was called and pronounced life extinct.

Edward Ettridge, who had adopted the stage name ‘Ed Beppo’ for his English music hall performances, had shot himself in Alfred Burgess’ stateroom. He was, briefly and understandably, mistaken for Burgess. One of the ship’s officers had to call for a tug to take the body off the ship. Smith signed the entry in the ship’s log that Ettridge had died of a ‘bullet wound in right temple’, countersigned by Purser McElroy and Chief Surgeon William O’Loughlin. (The story is covered in ‘The “Big Four” of the White Star Fleet: Celtic, Cedric, Baltic & Adriatic’.)

On the same round voyage, which took Adriatic from Southampton to New York and back again, there were a number of crew who either deserted, ‘failed to join’ or ‘left by consent’ at Southampton. After the westbound crossing, Sixth Engineer Arthur Ward had to remain in New York due to ‘suspected appendicitis’. Then there was the case of a trimmer who had to be ‘fined five shillings for disobedience to lawful commands’. He admitted ‘refusing to obey orders, on the plea that the duty took him to the engine room, and that he signed articles to work in the stokehold only’. Another trimmer was reported ‘off duty owing to an injury to his right great toe, caused by a piece of coal falling on the foot’. And they had to take on additional victualling staff to make up for an unexpected number of extra passengers.

Two years later, Captain Smith, Purser McElroy and Chief Surgeon William O’Loughlin all perished in the Titanic disaster.

Above: Captain Edward John Smith (1850-1912).  (L’Illustration, April 1912/Author’s collection)

 

 

Captain Smith’s Titanic Quote

Captain Smith’s Titanic Quote

Captain Smith’s Titanic Quote

Titanic was headline news for weeks following the disaster.  On 16 April 1912, the New York Times included an article about Captain Smith and his career in their coverage.  Within that article were extracts from comments Smith had reportedly made on the conclusion of Adriatic‘s successful maiden voyage almost five years earlier, to the press in New York.  It is easy to see why a newspaper reporter would want to quote Smith’s comments.  He had spoken about his ‘uneventful’ career and the love of the ocean that he had had since childhood. Then, he went on to talk about the safety of modern passenger liners. Those comments had a sad irony given the recent disaster.  One common quotation, used by historians in the decades to come, was:

I will say that I cannot imagine any condition which could cause a ship to founder.  I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel.  Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.

Back in 2008, I began to worry that I had not been able to find Smith’s comments in newspaper coverage from that summer of 1907.  I found it somewhat uncomfortable that our source seemed to be only a post-disaster publication.  However, thanks to the effort of a number of researchers including the late Mark Baber, Smith biographer Gary Cooper, and Dr. Paul Lee, sources for the quotation were found from pre-disaster publications.  These included press reports dating from later in 1907 through to a report in The World’s Work in April 1909 (shown in an extract from a slide in my presentation to the British Titanic Society in April 2024, below).

 

By comparison, the New York Times’  report published on 16 April 1912 had some interesting differences in emphasis.  For example, rather than saying ‘modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that’, the pre-disaster quote was ‘modern shipbuilding has reduced that danger to a minimum’. The New York Times also summarised Smith’s preceding comments, paraphrasing him: ‘Captain Smith maintained that shipbuilding was such a perfect art nowadays that absolute disaster, involving the passengers on a great modern liner, was quite unthinkable. Whatever happened, he contended, there would be time before the vessel sank to save the lives of every person on board’.  The paraphrased summary was broadly accurate, but it omitted the comment ‘I will not assert that she is unsinkable’ [emphasized above].

All of Smith’s reported comments are important and they need to be understood in their full context.   It’s also important to recognise that even the pre-disaster quotations are from a secondary source and rely on a degree of assumption that what Smith said was reported with reasonable accuracy!

 

 

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Presentation from the Archives: ‘The Chairman & The Commander: J. Bruce Ismay and Captain “E. J.” Smith’

 

 

 

My ‘superb’ presentation in September 2020 at PRONI discussed both J. Bruce Ismay and Captain Smith.  Key topics include J. Bruce Ismay’s correspondence several weeks before the Titanic disaster, when he writes about his daughter’s wedding coming up in March 1912 and explains that he will sail on Titanic on 10 April 1912, expecting to return to Southampton on 27 April 1912; Captain Smith’s ‘uneventful’ career is discussed in some detail, including the Hawke collision on 20 September 1911.   

A talk focusing on two of the key personalities in the Titanic story: the White Star Line’s chairman, J. Bruce Ismay, and the Line’s senior captain, ‘E. J.’ Smith. Mark explores some of the history of these two men in the years leading up to 1912, including little known anecdotes and events – as well as some of the misconceptions surrounding them.