DETOURS

Adam Monahan:

So Melinda, it's all right that you're a few minutes late because I've amused myself by going over a bunch of Titanic facts.

Melinda:

Yes.

I actually went to the Titanic Museum in Orlando yesterday, or no, Sunday for my birthday.

Adam Monahan:

Really?

Melinda:

It's my annual birthday party.

Adam Monahan:

This is Melinda, one of the most loyal and Twitter happy fans of GBH's Antiques Roadshow. If you're a longtime listener of the podcast, you might recognize her voice. This is your second appearance on the podcast. The first time around I had you talk about Rolexes, which you do not like.

Melinda:

No, no, I don't understand them. It's fancy for no sake.

Adam Monahan:

I think a light bulb went off in your head or something. It was shortly thereafter that Titanic facts started hitting my Twitter inbox, and I think you basically want me to focus a podcast on a subject you do like.

Melinda:

Yes. Yeah. I am obsessed with the Titanic. I do a daily Titanic fact on my Facebook page for all my friends, and I know there's been a lot of things on Antiques Roadshow that have come from the Titanic.

Adam Monahan:

Well, I basically am calling you to let you know we are doing a Titanic podcast.

Melinda:

Yes!

Adam Monahan:

The Titanic sank in 1912, but it's been capturing the attention of people like Melinda ever since. It has also generated huge paychecks for some lucky directors explorers, and notably for us owners of Titanic related objects, huge paychecks.

Soundbite from the show:

First class menu from the Titanic sold for more than a hundred thousand dollars over the weekend.

Adam Monahan:

A pocket watch that stopped when it hit the freezing water sold for $154,000. The band leader's violin sold for 1.7 million and a collection of jewelry that was salvaged from the wreck itself sold for $200 million.

Andrew Aldridge:

Those blue chip pieces, those pieces that are in the top 1%, they are very, very collectible.

Adam Monahan:

Andrew Aldridge is an auctioneer at a leading Titanic auction house and he sold the items we're talking about today, which appeared on our show back in 1999. The items came from a couple named Mabel and James Fenwick who were on the ship that rescued the Titanic survivors. The Fenwicks kept photographs, letters, a journal, all sorts of cool artifacts.

Andrew Aldridge:

But the one thing from that archive that really attracted attention was the biscuit.

Adam Monahan:

The biscuit.

Andrew Aldridge:

46,000 tons of steel is at the bottom of the North Atlantic, yet something as simple and fragile as a biscuit has survived the sinking.

Adam Monahan:

That's right. This amazing treasure, which survived the Titanic and appeared on our show nearly a century later, was a cracker, like a spread it with cheese, eat it with soup cracker. Like everything else related to the Titanic, it sold for a shipload of money. In this episode, we learn how one cracker managed to survive one of the most famous maritime disasters of all time. Also, why so many people are obsessed with this shipwreck when so many other shipwrecks have been forgotten. I am Adam Monahan, a producer with GBH's Antiques Roadshow, and this is Detours. Today, the unsinkable Titanic biscuit. This one's for you, Melinda.

Because this episode was inspired by my receiving Titanic fun facts, you're going to get a lot of them. Here's one to start. Second class passengers got American ice cream and first class got French ice cream, but everyone got the same tea, English breakfast, the only kind served on board.

Clearly the Titanic was a luxury ship among the biggest and best in the world when it was built in the early 1900s.

Daniel Stone:

There were dining rooms that were bigger than ever before. There was a gymnasium that included a pool. In 1912, this was revolutionary.

Adam Monahan:

This is Daniel Stone.

Daniel Stone:

I'm the author of Sinkable: A Story of Obsession, the Deep Sea and the Shipwreck of the Titanic, that chronicles the century long plus obsession with this shipwreck.

Adam Monahan:

The Titanic catered to the wealthiest members of high society, but not everyone had access to the swimming pool and Turkish baths.

Daniel Stone:

The Titanic was part of this great era that we often call the golden age of travel. In the 1880s and 1890s, steam travel aboard steamships became much more common. It was still mostly for rich people, but it was extending outward to become a bit more common for the masses. There were second and third class cabins that sat much lower in the ship, and I think this is the reason why we hear so many stories of someone in history who had this intersection with the Titanic, or who was on the Titanic, or their relative was, or they were supposed to be on the Titanic because it really captured this cross section of society at the time.

Adam Monahan:

Including animals, there were at least 12 dogs on board, plus roosters, hens and even a canary. The ship also had its own resident cat named Jenny, who was supposed to keep the rat population under control. Enough fun facts. Let's talk about the ship's construction.

Daniel Stone:

The Titanic was part of a trio of ships. The Olympic and the Britannic were built almost exactly like the Titanic in the years before and after, and these were deemed to be the greatest ships ever built. They were deemed to be unsinkable because of the way their compartments worked.

Adam Monahan:

In a big ship like the Titanic, the machinery, sleeping quarters, cargo, and everything else that's below the waterline is contained in what's called the hull. Earlier ship designs often had one big open hull, but the Titanic hull was separated into compartments.

Daniel Stone:

If water got into a certain part of the hull, for one reason or another, the compartment would be sealed off, and so long as not too many compartments were compromised, the ship would not sink.

Adam Monahan:

Even if three or four compartments flooded, the ship should have managed to stay afloat. This technology is the reason the Titanic was considered unsinkable. The RMS Titanic set sail from South Hampton, England on April 10th, 1912. Here's the auctioneer, Andrew Aldridge again.

Andrew Aldridge:

She went to Cherbourg, first of all, where she picked up a couple of very famous American passengers, J.J. Astor, the Unsinkable Molly Brown. Then from there she traveled to Queenstown in Southern Ireland. Queenstown, she picked up a lot of immigrant passengers and also most importantly, she took off the mail because the RMS bit of Titanic stands for Royal Mail Steamer.

Adam Monahan:

On April 11th, the Titanic started her journey across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, another object was making its way across the sea. For those who don't know, myself included, what exactly is an iceberg?

Daniel Stone:

Well, all icebergs in the North Atlantic start in Greenland. Glacier's form over thousands of years. They migrate toward the coast of Greenland, and as they get there, they start to calve off in these giant pieces. These pieces can be as big as a stadium, they're enormous and many of them follow these currents in the oceans. The Gulf Stream is the biggest current in the North Atlantic. There's also the Arctic current that generally flows south. As an iceberg comes off Greenland, it moves south into the central Atlantic and even further south. As it does, it starts to melt. Most icebergs melt in this process in a very particular way. They melt from the bottom and once they get top-heavy from so much melting, they flip and they keep flipping as they continue to melt until it's about the size of a basketball, and then the size of a baseball, and then nothing at all.

Adam Monahan:

Most icebergs last about a year or maybe two. By April 1912, the Titanic's iceberg was almost three years old, ancient by iceberg standards.

Daniel Stone:

It was in its final days. It had probably about three to four days left of ice before it no longer existed, and it had extended further south in the Atlantic than most icebergs ever get because most of them melt first. Had the Titanic been in that exact spot one minute before or two minutes after, it would've completely avoided the drift of this iceberg. But the timing was perfect for this collision.

Adam Monahan:

Why couldn't they avoid it?

Daniel Stone:

Well, this was in the middle of the night. It was dark. Some of the first officers were not paying close attention, and by the time the first officer saw it, it was too late to really avoid it. The only two options were to ram it head on or to try a turn. Rather than ramming straight into the iceberg, which people now think might have even saved the Titanic, the ship turns left and the iceberg punches about a dozen holes on the right side of the ship.

Adam Monahan:

The iceberg punched these holes right into those watertight compartments.

Daniel Stone:

Those holes allow in water and the ship leans forward, and that allows in more water. Eventually the ship is listing so far forward that it leans up in the water and the back half of the ship, the stern, breaks off and snaps back. The Titanic sank in two distinct pieces.

Adam Monahan:

The watertight compartments failed to save the ship, but they did serve one important function. They slowed the sinking process down.

Daniel Stone:

One unique thing about the Titanic is that it sank really slowly, almost about three hours from iceberg strike to the final gasp of the ship. In that three hours people panicked. They roamed around, they tried to load lifeboats. There weren't enough lifeboats, and so the others tried to find their way onto lifeboats secretly or other purposes of staying alive.

Adam Monahan:

The Titanic only had 20 lifeboats with room for about half the people on board. Who would take those spots was a topic of debate onboard the sinking ship. Maybe you've heard this old-fashioned line before that in a disaster, women and children should be rescued first. The reality, it turns out, is more complicated.

Daniel Stone:

Researchers have since looked into three centuries worth of shipping accidents where there were casualties and where there were survivors. What they found was that that men get rescued most commonly, women less, and children least of all.

Adam Monahan:

That was true for most shipwrecks of this time too, but not the Titanic.

Daniel Stone:

The Titanic was different because it sank so slowly. Had it sunk fast, it's reasonable to think that men would've elbowed their way to the front of these lines, gotten in the lifeboats and saved themselves. But because it happened slowly, there was time for people to argue. There was time for people to recognize that there was a custom of the sea and that women and children should be rescued. About 70% of all women and children on board made it to lifeboats and floated away from the sinking ship. Of course, those who didn't stayed on the wreck as long as they could and ended up, many of them, in the water.

Adam Monahan:

Those who didn't make it into lifeboats wound up clinging to deck chairs and other makeshift flotation devices or treading water in the frigid sea.

Daniel Stone:

This is a very traumatic few hours for these mostly women to see their husbands, their sons, their brothers die. To see the ship disappear in this ferocious break apart and then to float in the dark with other scared, cold and freezing people in subarctic weather and on top of very, very cold water, not knowing who or if anyone was coming to rescue them.

Adam Monahan:

As the ship sank, the crew tried frantically to get someone, anyone to come to their aid. They fired rockets into the air and crucially, they sent telegraph messages across the sea. The wireless telegraph was a pretty new invention at that point. It was developed at the end of the 19th century by an Irish Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi sold his system to lighthouses and ships, which needed a way to communicate quickly, and, you guessed it, wirelessly, but there were still some challenges.

Daniel Stone:

Telegraph messages would move quickly and move far, but they were constrained by the curvature of the earth. You could not send a telegraph message across an entire ocean. You could only send it to a ship that was close by. It sends out this broad, almost all points bulletin. "Anyone who could hear this message, please come to our rescue."

Adam Monahan:

Several ships heard the message, including the Olympic, the Mount Temple, and the Carpathia. Then all those ships' telegraph messages join the fray.

Daniel Stone:

Many ships are trying to communicate with each other. "Who is going at what speed? Who will be there first? What kind of supplies do you have? How much space do you have?"

Adam Monahan:

It turned into a gigantic game of high stakes telephone.

Daniel Stone:

There were reports that Titanic was fine and would soon be arriving in New York. No one knew what the real story was. Of course, that complicated any attempt at rescuing the survivors, certainly quickly.

Adam Monahan:

But someone was coming. The Carpathia had heard the Titanic's message and was raising toward the scene and onboard were James and Mabel Fenwick. Here's their grandson George.

George Fenwick:

Jim and Mabel Fenwick were married a few days before they sailed on the Carpathia. They sailed out of New York and they were going on the grand honeymoon trip around Europe for like two months and then sail home again from England.

Adam Monahan:

But on April 15th, their trip took an abrupt turn, literally.

George Fenwick:

They were awakened by crew coming down the passageway in the morning saying, "Okay, we're going to rescue survivors of the Titanic. It's sinking." They had kept them in their cabin so they could prepare the deck for survivors. Matter of fact, they were very cold apparently because all the energy, all the steam from the engine room was going to the engines to get them there in time, so there was no heat in their cabins for that night.

Adam Monahan:

The Carpathia arrived at the wreck site at around 3:30 in the morning, an hour after the Titanic sank below the waves.

George Fenwick:

They went up on deck and that's when Mabel started snapping pictures with their Brownie.

Adam Monahan:

Mabel photographed the blurry ice filled wreck site, the S.S Birma, another ship that was diverted to rescue survivors and an iceberg that many think is the one that the Titanic hit. Crew began pulling survivors on board and retrieving bodies from the water. Over the course of four and a half hours, they rescued 705 people and three dogs.

Daniel Stone:

Once the Carpathia was picking up the Titanic survivors, they were focused on humanitarian aid. They weren't focused on communication. It took almost a full day after they got the survivors on board to telegraph all of the names of the people. In that day, you could imagine being a relative of someone who was on the Titanic or supposed to be on the Titanic, not knowing if the ship had really sunk, exactly how it had sunk, how many people were living and who they were.

Adam Monahan:

The Carpathia was now carrying twice as many people as it had when it left New York. James and Mabel Fenwick found themselves sharing their honeymoon suite with traumatized survivors. Among them was Lawrence Beasley, a 34-year-old science teacher from England who had boarded the Titanic as a second class passenger and managed to get a spot on lifeboat. 13. Beasley later described the experience in a book writing, "We could not see each other in the darkness. We felt again for the lantern beneath our feet, along the sides, I do not think there was a light in the boat. We felt also for food and water and found none and came to the conclusion that none had been put in. But here we were mistaken." I have a letter from second Officer Lightoller in which he assures me that he and fourth Officer Pitman examined every lifeboat from the Titanic as they lay on the Carpathia's deck afterwards and found biscuits and water in each.

Ding, ding, ding. It's the biscuits. One of those lifeboat biscuits made it into the hands of James and Mabel Fenwick.

Andrew Aldridge:

It was a Spillers and Bakers pilot biscuit.

Adam Monahan:

Andrew, the auctioneer.

Andrew Aldridge:

This was a hardtack biscuit. To bite one of these things, you'd have probably been in great danger. It was like saltwater taffy breaking a filling. You wouldn't have wanted to eat it unless you had to.

Adam Monahan:

Lucky for us, James and Mabel didn't eat it. Instead, they saved it and passed it down to their son, George's dad. Lucky for them, hard tack biscuits like this one are made to last a really, really long time. Our biscuit is made of flour and water, and even after more than a century, it looks like any regular cracker. The family knew that the biscuit, the photos, and the journal were special family artifacts, but they didn't realize anyone else would care for many decades. Here's George.

George Fenwick:

Back in the nineties, there were two gentlemen who were going to write a book about the Titanic, and they were neighbors of my father's. My father just wrote him a note and said, "By the way, I've got this history with the Titanic if you're interested." He lived about 10 minutes away, so he called my father. They got together, he was thrilled. They held the presses. They wrote a whole chapter about Jim and Mabel Fenwick and the photographs and their whole story of picking up the survivors. That's how the whole thing started that we said, "Oh, there's some interest here." Because before that, it was just stuff in a box. My grandparents were on their honeymoon trip-

Adam Monahan:

In 1999, George and his mom brought that stuff in a box to our Roadshow event in Baltimore, Maryland.

George Fenwick:

This is a hard tack biscuit from a Titanic lifeboat.

Wes Cowan:

Yeah, that's really pretty remarkable. We've had a lot of Titanic stuff here.

Adam Monahan:

That's George with our appraiser, Wes Cowan.

Wes Cowan:

Was there when the film came out, but what you've got is the original-

George Fenwick:

At the end he said, "Well, I think the whole package is probably worth 50 to $75,000, but it's hard to tell in this marketplace, they're unique items, but that's what I suspect." I turned to him and I said, "So I shouldn't eat the biscuit?" He said, "Don't eat the biscuit," fade to black.

Wes Cowan:

I'd advise you to copyright the photographs and make sure that you retain those copyrights-

George Fenwick:

And not to eat the biscuit?

Wes Cowan:

And don't eat the biscuit.

Adam Monahan:

Soon after their appraisal, George's mom gave him the memorabilia.

George Fenwick:

I took the biscuit and the diary and I put them in a safe deposit box. I kept worrying every time I'd go in there that one day I'd find a bag full of crumbs instead of a nice hard tack biscuit.

Adam Monahan:

After the break, the biscuit makes its way to the auction block and we find out why the Titanic is still so famous, and it's not the reason I thought. How many shipwrecks are there?

Daniel Stone:

That's a good question. That's the first question I asked when starting writing about shipwrecks, how many are we talking? For many of us, we could maybe name a few dozen famous ships in history, the Titanic, the Lusitania, maybe the Queen Elizabeth, but there are many more that we don't know of. Once we account for all ships throughout all human history, in every body of water, the number is actually much higher. UNESCO finally put a number on it about 10 years ago, 3 million shipwrecks they estimate in the world, but they say that's mostly a guess. It's a rough estimate, and the number could be significantly higher.

Adam Monahan:

Wow. In all that, why the Titanic? Why is the Titanic so famous?

Daniel Stone:

This question of why the Titanic is so famous is this great mystery of history that I think I've figured out. Many of the factors that we think make the Titanic so famous were, in fact, not that remarkable. A ship that was the biggest in the world, many ships had been the biggest in their time throughout the 19th century. A ship that sank on its maiden voyage, other ships had sank on maiden voyages too. Ships that hit icebergs were so common in the 1880s and 1890s that actually by the early 20th century, iceberg strikes had declined. This was great news for the shipping industry and ships that killed mostly rich people or just a lot of people in general were also not uncommon. But what was different is the share of people who died versus people who lived.

Adam Monahan:

This is what sets the Titanic apart.

Daniel Stone:

In most wrecks, everyone dies or everyone is rescued. The Titanic, 1500 people died, but about 700 people lived, and many of them were young women and children who ended up living another 50 to 60 years telling and retelling the story of that night.

Adam Monahan:

Those survivors had a lot of new avenues to tell that story, including film.

Daniel Stone:

The first movie about the Titanic actually came about four weeks after the ship sank. It wasn't a great movie, but it chronicled and put a timestamp on this disaster as notable. That allowed for people to continue to tell their stories to interested audiences long enough and in great enough detail that when movies really developed and became in color and with sound, that there was room and appetite for even more movies about the Titanic. Probably the biggest one, the most famous one, came in 1958 from a book written by Walter Lord called A Night To Remember.

Movie soundbite:

I name this ship Titanic. May God bless her and all who sail her.

Daniel Stone:

Anyone who grew up in the forties or fifties heard about A Night to Remember. It was constantly on TV. Everybody saw it, and that, of course allowed the ship to be still living in the sixties, seventies and eighties.

Adam Monahan:

Then in 1985, the ship was found, further solidifying its cultural relevance.

Andrew Aldridge:

My eighth birthday cake was a Titanic.

Adam Monahan:

Auctioneer, Andrew Aldridge.

Andrew Aldridge:

It's been in the blood for a long, long time.

Adam Monahan:

Then in 1997, it got in everyone's blood with a movie and a song that no one could ignore.

Celine Dion:

Every night in my dreams. I see you.

Adam Monahan:

At the time, Andrew wasn't in the antiques business yet, but his dad was.

Andrew Aldridge:

Interestingly, in 1997, so this was just before Jim Cameron's movie, he was asked during a charity valuation day to appraise two menus. These were menus from the Titanic. These were menus from her launch, which was on May the 31st, 1911.

Adam Monahan:

The Titanic market was not nearly as hot then as it is now. The record for Titanic launch menus at the time was just a couple thousand pounds, basically nothing. When Andrew's dad sold these menus, he blew that number out of the water.

Andrew Aldridge:

They sold for over 10,000 pounds. Breaking the record several fold and if you like, as a company, that was the genesis for where we are today.

Adam Monahan:

Since then, Aldridge and Sons Auctions has established itself as the leading auctioneer of Titanic memorabilia.

Andrew Aldridge:

We hold the highest price for any piece of Titanic memorabilia, which was the Titanic violin. We sold that in 2013. That made north of $2 million.

Adam Monahan:

When our guest, George was going to sell his Titanic memorabilia, Aldridge and Sons was the place to go. George consigned about 40 items in total, including his grandfather's diary, letters from Titanic survivors, his grandmother's photos and negatives, and of course the biscuit. What did you think this would sell for? What did you predict?

Andrew Aldridge:

I think that the record price at that point for a biscuit was something like $5,000. I thought eight to 12,000 pounds, somewhere around there. Ended up making 15K.

Adam Monahan:

Wow. 15,000 pounds, which is the equivalent of almost $23,000. Do you have an idea of what you think you would... If that biscuit were to come up at your auction house, again, what you'd put as a presale estimate?

Andrew Aldridge:

I think it would certainly have appreciated in value. The thing with Titanic items is the market is going up all the time because there is an ever decreasing supply and an ever-increasing group of highly, highly motivated individuals who want to own this material. Prices are going up. What tends to happen is the people that buy the items in my Titanic auctions, they're not buying for profit. They're buying because they're invested in the subject. As a consequence, these things, once they go into a collection, they tend to stay in that collection for a generation plus 25, 30 years. The collectors, when they have an opportunity to go for them, they go all in because they know with these items deep down, "I might not get another chance for 20 years. If I'm going to go for this, I'm going in two footed, I've got to buy it."

Adam Monahan:

The more time passes, the more people are willing to pay for items connected to the ship.

Daniel Stone:

It's like this star that people are drawn to moths to a flame. There's something fascinating about it. There's a sense of drama, and there's still a sense of mystery that even though we know and have chewed over this story so many times, we still don't really know what happened.

Adam Monahan:

That story of obsession is the reason that somebody pays $23,000 for a biscuit.

Daniel Stone:

Yes, correct. It's also the same thing why people earlier this year spent a quarter million dollars to go down and see it. There's not that much to see down there that even resembles what the Titanic once looked like. But it is one of the most famous sites on earth, one of the greatest stories in human history, and people just want to be near it.

Adam Monahan:

Dan, this episode was born out of the fact that there's a Roadshow viewer who tweets at me with Titanic facts, and she's bugged me enough that I've finally given in and decided to do this episode. What are your favorite Titanic facts?

Daniel Stone:

Let me think of a couple. Probably my favorite Titanic fact is how much longer it has, and this is an area of great debate. People think it had 30 years, about 30 years ago. People think it has 30 years left starting now, and some people think it'll be there forever. But what's deemed to be there the longest and what will be there long after all of us are gone are the boots, the boots of the passengers filled with tannins that resist bacterial corrosion. The boots will be there for hundreds or thousands more years.

Adam Monahan:

Perhaps, thanks to books, movies, the internet and public television shows about antiques, people's obsession with the Titanic may last as long as those leather boots on the ocean floor.

Will Dailey:

I know love is not a walk in the park. It's a once in a century storm.

Adam Monahan:

Detours is a production of GBH in Boston and distributed by PRX. This episode was written and produced by Galen Bebe, edited, mixed and sound, designed by Ian Coss. Our assistant producer is Sarah Horatius. Jocelyn Gonzalez is the director of PRX Productions. Devin Maverick Robbins is the managing producer of podcasts for GBH and Marsha Bemko is the executive producer of Detours. I'm your host and co-executive producer, Adam Monahan. Our theme music is Once in a Century Storm by Will Dailey from the album National Throat. Thank you all for listening. Have a good one.