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Stanley Phillip Lord (13 September 1877 – 24 January 1962) was the British captain of the SS Californian on the night the RMS Titanic sank on 15 April 1912. The ship, which was primarily a freighter that could carry a small number of passengers, has been named in sources as the unidentified ship that failed to come to the aid of the foundering Titanic. On the eve of the sinking, Captain Lord had stopped the Californian for night when it had entered an ice field to away from the White Star liner's final position. Over the next few hours, crew members on Lord's ship reported seeing Flares on the horizon, something Lord ascribed to company signals. The sinking of the Titanic resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 people.
Lord and Californian only became aware of the disaster the following morning when wireless signals were received from the SS Frankfurt. Despite remaining in the area to help recover bodies, Lord and the Californian were criticised for not rendering timely assistance to the Titanic. Both the United States and British inquiries concluded Lord was captain of the ship that was closest to the Titanic at the time of its sinking. However, neither suggested he should face any criminal charges. Subsequent authors have offered differing opinions on Lord that night, with some defending and others criticising him; resulting in two factions now labelled as "Lordites" or "Anti-Lordites".
The debate about Lord focuses on several factors, these include his response to the rockets, whether his ship and the Titanic (and its rockets) were visible to one another, the presence of one or more "Mystery Ships" between the Californian and the sinking liner, and whether or not Lord could have saved any additional lives while his ship was stuck in its own ice field.
In February 1901, at the age of 23, Lord obtained his Master's Certificate, and three months later, obtained his Extra Master's Certificate. He entered the service of the West India and Pacific Steam Navigation Company in 1897. The company was taken over by the Leyland Line in 1900, but Lord continued service with the new company, and was awarded his first command in 1906.
Lord was given command of the SS Californian in 1911.
Phillips response was likely due to commercial pressure. He was also an employee of Marconi, which made its money sending private messages to and from commercial shipping. Earlier in the day the wireless equipment aboard the Titanic had broken down and Phillips, along with Second Wireless Operator Harold Bride, had spent the better part of the day repairing it. This delay had resulted in a backlog of outgoing messages that now needed to be sent. Phillips was likely exhausted after such a long day. Additionally, the Titanic had already received several ice warnings from other ships which had already been passed up to the bridge, including an earlier one from Californian. Hence, this casual message from the Californian was not imperative or news to him. Onboard the Californian, Evans continued to listen to Phillips' routine passenger traffic to the Marconi telegraphy station at Cape Race until about 11:30 p.m.; he then turned off the ship's wireless set and went to his bunk. Ten minutes later the Titanic collided with the iceberg. A consequence of the Titanic disaster was that all commercial shipping would be required to keep a round-the-clock watch at their wireless transmitters.
The Titanic's Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall and Quartermaster Rowe said they tried to contact the mystery ship with Morse lamp but got no reply or saw any coherent signals. Meanwhile the Californian 's officers decided they were looking at the flickering lights on the masthead of a ship that had also stopped because of the ice. Lord supporters attribute the visual distortions caused by cold-water mirages as a reason as to why the nearby ship was not identified as the Titanic. After the Titanic had gone down at 2:20 a.m., Lord was informed by his officers that they thought the disappearance of lights from the mystery ship indicated it had steamed away.
At 5:30 a.m., on the morning of 15 April 1912, Evans heard the first reports from the SS Frankfurt that the Titanic had sunk. After being notified, Captain Lord immediately ordered the Californian to make steam and head to the last known location of the liner. By 8:45 a.m., his ship had pulled up alongside the RMS Carpathia. It then remained in the area to search for additional bodies after the Carpathia returned to New York with the survivors.
Lord made no effort to awaken the wireless operator and send a message that way, which might have been far more effective in obtaining information from the Titanic.
Lord's wife, Mabel, died in 1957. He died on 24 January 1962, aged 84, almost half a century after the sinking of the Titanic. He is buried in Rake Lane Cemetery, Wallasey, Wirral Peninsula.
Lord was dismissed by the Leyland Line in August 1912. So far as any negligence of the SS Californian's officers and crew was concerned, the conclusions of both the American and British inquiries seemed to disapprove of Lord's actions, but stopped short of recommending charges. While both inquiries censured Lord, they did not make any recommendations for an official investigation to ascertain if he was guilty of offences under the Merchant Shipping Acts. Lord was not allowed to be represented at either the U.S. or British inquiry.
In February 1913, with help from a Leyland director who believed he had been unfairly treated, Lord was hired by the Nitrate Producers Steamship Co., where he remained until March 1927, resigning for health reasons. In 1958, Lord contacted the Mercantile Marine Service Association in Liverpool to clear his name. The association's general secretary, Mr. Leslie Harrison, took up the case for him and petitioned the Board of Trade on his behalf for a re-examination of the facts, but there had been no finding by the time of Lord's death in 1962. In 1965, largely because Lord had offered no new evidence, his petition was rejected, but in the same year Peter Padfield's book The Titanic and the Californian was published, defending Lord's reputation, with a preface by his son Stanley Tutton Lord.Eugene L. Rasor, The Titanic: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography (2001), p. 53 This was followed by a second petition, in 1968, which was also rejected.
In 1957, Lord's wife died. It was a devastating loss to him and precipitated a decline in his health. In 1958 the film A Night To Remember was released, based on a 1955 book of the same title by Walter Lord (no relation). Stanley Lord, now 81 years old, never saw the film, but purportedly read the Liverpool Echo newspaper reviews of the film. Lord was very disappointed, and it brought back memories of the Titanic tragedy, and was upset over his negative portrayal by the Australian-British actor Russell Napier, which depicted him as a captain in his forties, in a warm cabin in bed asleep when Titanic was sinking. In reality, Lord was 34 years old at the time and was asleep in the chart room with his uniform on at the time of the disaster. Lord's son Stanley Tutton Lord saw the film and was upset about how his father was treated after the Titanic tragedy. In 1959, Stanley helped fight to get his father's name cleared from the records of the Titanic disaster. He continued his attempts after his father died in 1962, up until he died in 1994. Stanley Tutton Lord was seen in an interview from Titanic: The Legend Lives On, part 2 of documentary in 1994 just before his death. Stanley Tutton was only 4 years old when the Titanic tragedy happened, and he told stories about how his father's life was affected by the tragedy up to when the 1958 Hollywood film was released in theaters. In 1996, just two years after Stanley Tutton died, the TV series Titanic was released on TV. It had a scene of the Californian ship that had stopped for the night, because of field ice. The crew on board the Californian saw a passenger ship that had also stopped from the ice. The Californian crew called Captain Lord on the phone and told him about a ship that had stopped for the night, and had also tried Morse lamping the ship to know who it was. Captain Lord in the low-budget TV series was depicted in his late 60s and was sleeping in his cabin just like in the 1958 film A Night To Remember 38 years earlier.
The discovery in 1985 of the remains of the Titanic on the sea bed made it clear that the S.O.S. position given after the iceberg collision by the Titanic's fourth officer, Joseph Boxhall, was wrong by thirteen miles. At both of the 1912 inquiries, there had been some conflict about the true position of the ship when it sank. The conclusions of the inquiries discounted the evidence of uncertainty about the position of the Titanic. At the time, some assumed that the position that Lord had given for his ship was incorrect and that he was much closer to the Titanic than he claimed to be. While the entries in the Californian's scrap log (used for recording information before it was written up officially in the ship's logbook) referring to the night in question had mysteriously gone missing, sometimes seen as overwhelming proof that Lord deliberately destroyed evidence to cover his crime of ignoring a distress call, destroying the scrap log records was normal company practice. RMS "TITANIC" Reappraisal of Evidence Relating to SS "CALIFORNIAN", 1992 Marine Accident Investigation Branch report, London 1992, HMSO, p. 8. While modifying the official ship's log or removing pages is a serious violation of maritime law, this was not the case. A re-appraisal by the British government, instigated informally in 1988 and published in 1992 by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB), further implicated the consequences of Lord's inaction. Among its conclusions were that although the Californian was probably out of visual sight, the Titanics rockets had been sighted by the Californians crew. Another conclusion stated that it was unrealistic to assume that Lord could have rushed towards the signals and that with the Titanic reporting an incorrect position, the Californian would have arrived at about the same time as the Carpathia and fulfilled a similar role – rescuing those who had escaped.MAIB 1992 report p. 18 The report was critical of the behaviour of the other officers of the Californian in reaction to the signals. What has never been satisfactorily resolved was why Lord did not simply wake his radio operator and listen for any distress signals.
Daniel Allen Butler, in his 2009 book The Other Side of Night: The Carpathia, the Californian, and the Night Titanic Was Lost, makes a case that Lord's personality and temperament — his behaviour at both inquiries, his threats towards his crew, his frequent changing of his story, the absence of the scrap log, and odd remarks made by Lord in Boston in a newspaper interview – point to Lord's having some sort of mental illness. His lack of compassion — never once expressing grief at the loss of the Titanic or sorrow for those who had lost family when it sank is, according to Butler, compatible with sociopathy.Butler, Daniel Allen; Epilogue: Flotsam and Jetsam; "The Other Side of Night: The Carpathia, the Californian, and the night Titanic was Lost"
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