The Titanic Tragedy and Who to Blame

The Titanic Tragedy And Who to Blame By Edward Greed The Lifeboat Situation A main mistake that caused deaths was the boarding of the lifeboats. The first class passengers were boarded first and it is rumoured that either the crew or the travellers decided it would be too cramped to fill them and some didn’t return to collect more survivors due to the fear of being overwhelmed by bodies. Design Faults There were many short cuts and price avoidances that were neglected when the Titanic was built, for example the compartments were supposed to be water tight due to strong steel rivets but the designers replaced them to create a more ‘luxury looking ship’. Another design flaw was the amount of lifeboats that were placed on deck. They reduced the amount so that the deck became ‘more attractive’ But there are also a great deal of people that are strongly blamed for the disaster for various reasons. Captain Smith and his Crew The captain's first and most fatal error was to not heed a warning of an approaching iceberg. Instead he decided to proceed at speed towards it . It is believed that he did this due to the pressure a man called Bruce Ismay put upon him to proceed in the voyage.The people running the Titanic were generally unorganised and had not faced any drills or practice experiences before the voyage. They can also be blamed for the illogical loading of the Titanic’s lifeboats as they didn’t prevent this inadequate situation, therefore failing to stop adding numerous deaths. Captain Stanley Lord and The Lookouts There were lots of other people who knew of the disaster directly before it occured like the captain of the Californian, Stanley Lord. He decided to ignore the distress signals the Titanic sent because he assumed they were having a party and did not have his radio operator on to hear the messages sent by the Titanic. If he had come it would have been possible to save everyone on board the Titanic by transferring them to his ship before it sank. There are a couple of reasons why the look outs failed in their jobs but not all of them were directly their fault. Firstly, they were not alerting the other crew of the problems building around them but they couldn’t have known of the iceberg themselves because of the lack of binoculars/telescopes. These necessities were forgotten by David Blair (who was transferred to a separate ship before departure) because he accidentally took the key for the binoculars with him to his other ship. Thomas Andrews and The Harland and Wolff Ship Builders Thomas Andrews was the ship designer for the Titanic and is criticized greatly for the modifications he brought or didn’t bring upon the ship. One of his most known mistakes was the fragility of the ship altogether, but there were numerous reasons for this. There should have been larger bulkheads (the ship’s side walls) so that the Titanic could withstand more force upon its hull, but he decided make them shorter so that the first class cabins were more spacious. He was also involved with the lack of lifeboats positioned on deck because he shouldn’t have let Bruce Ismay - the owner of the White Star Line - persuade him to decrease the number to twenty. In my opinion the man to blame for most of the actions that caused the Titanic tragedy is Bruce Ismay. First of all, he was Bruce Ismay the main reason why the amount of lifeboats on the Titanic became so little, which obviously caused numerous deaths. Then there was the incident with him commanding that Captain Smith should ignore the warnings of the oncoming iceberg. And finally, he reduced the amount of lives that could have been saved on the lifeboats by disrupting the queue that led to them..

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