This is actually the Olympic, never mind that the caption reads White Star Line RMS Titanic
For a larger version click on image
The sinking of the Titanic on her maiden voyage created an amount of publicity which had hardly ever been reached before. The press went into overdrive and a mad scramble ensued for any sort of information about the ship, her passengers and crew.
In the race to publish the story of the disaster and pictures of the participants many mistakes were made. Even the Titanic herself was frequently a victim of misrepresentation. Due to her short career and the fact that her launch or maiden voyage was far from the media sensation one is sometimes led to believe, only few photographs of the sunken liner were available. To compensate her elder sister-ship, the Olympic, had to stand in. To the present day, many pictures published as the Titanic are actually the Olympic.
Even worse, on several occasion the Officers of the Olympic were identified as those of the Titanic. It is only natural that in the first flurry of events many mistakes crept into the reports, the earliest reports are not necessarily the best.
What is less understandable is that some of them are still repeated without hesitation. The Olympic continues to stand in for her sister (see above), most pictures of the interior of the Titanic are likewise in fact photographs of the Olympic's interior. The photograph of the officer of the Titanic continues to be reproduced even though it has been identified as showing the officers Olympic.
The names of the officers of the Titanic were not exempt from being mangled. It is safe to say that all of them were misspelled or misnamed at one point or the other.
The officer who has suffered most gravely and persistently from the early descriptions' sloppiness was undoubtedly James Paul Moody.
The sixth officer was not only repeatedly misspelled, or given wrong names, he was even reduced to the rank of quartermaster - and in this guise he even survived the disaster. Early newspaper articles printed a statement by "J. H. Moody, a quartermaster". As the "quartermaster" in question was at the wheel at the time of the collision with the iceberg, it is clear that the man referred to was in fact Quartermaster Hitchens.
The dubious quality of a newspaper article like this is obvious. Not only did the man who was quoted given a completely wrong name, the name in itself is wrong as well. It should after all be J.P. Moody. (Hitchens first name was Robert, so any confusion with his name can be ruled out.)
Not surprisingly, the statement of "quartermaster Moody" reported in the paper is equally flawed: "It was close to midnight and I was on the bridge with the second officer, who was in command. Suddenly he shouted, 'Port your helm!' I did so but it was too late." The officer on watch was however First Officer William Murdoch. Since Murdoch had been Chief Officer on the trip from Belfast to Southampton, several people continued to refer to him as 'Chief Officer' (which in turn means that sometimes it is unclear whether people were talking of Murdoch or Wilde) but he would certainly not be mistaken for the Second Officer. - But then, of course, the quartermaster on the bridge had been Hitchens.
This little excerpt from one of the earlier newspaper articles proves again that they have to be treated with great care and not be taken as true just because they originated from the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
(Unfortunately, the book in which the article has been reprinted does not mention where it was originally published. Wreck and Sinking of the Titanic. The Ocean's Greatest Disaster edited by Marshall Everett the Great Descriptive Writer. First published 1912, reprinted 1998, p. 45)
'Quartermaster Moody' even made it at least into the fictional world: in the guise of 'Quartiermeister Modey' he appears in the German novel Titanic. Die Tragödie eines Ozeanriesen by Josef Pelz von Felinau first published in 1939. This amazing oddity of a book is even in the edition of 1998 presented as a realistic description of the events of the night the Titanic sank. Next to Modey it sports a number of fictional crew members, most notably a fictional officer: Herr Petersen. The names of the remaining officers are almost all misspelled, Murdock, Lightolder and Loeve.
Apart from his unexpected transformation into a quartermaster, James Moody's name was particularly often distorted in various newspaper articles. The name given most frequently instead was 'Pelloody'.
The origin of this names seems to have been Moody's own handwriting. Looking at his signature on the signing on lists without knowing what it should read, the J P Moody can be read as J Pelloody, as the P for his middle name Paul does tend to run into the M of his surname.
This explanation in itself is quite intriguing since it seems that the person who invented the name Pelloody must have seen either the signing on list itself or another example of Moody's signature. And, while White Star Line officers on occasion signed menus for passengers (s. S. Störmer, Good-bye, and Good Luck, p. 56) who of the Titanic passengers would have kept even a signed menu on his person during the sinking where it had a chance to survive the disaster? It is possible, naturally. Moreover, would this hypothetical passenger, who have had to be interested enough in the officers to have a menu signed, not know that there was no officer 'Pelloody' on board?
Next to Pelloody a variety of other version have found their way into print. The most peculiar accumulation of variations of Moody's name has to be in the Yorkshire Evening Press where on the same page three different names appear: On the 17 April, p. 3, the article "Scarborough Victims", mentions that James Melloody, a native of Scarborough, had been sixth mate of the Titanic, further down the page, the sixth mate's name is given as James Pelloody, and in a third article, still on the same page, a more careful journalist writes that "No news is to hand of ... Mr J. P. Moody, the sixth officer (Not Pelloody as reported in the Press)".
The misinterpretation of James Paul Moody's signature is also the origin of the occurrence of a false middle name: 'Pell'. Even Geoffrey Marcus - who is generally a reliable source - includes this mistake. (G. Marcus, The Maiden Voyage (1969, Manor Books, New York, 1974), p. 83).
Another misspelling with a surprisingly long life is only minor, first officer William M. Murdoch became William Murdock.
The wrong spelling of the name is of course the way the name is generally pronounced. Somehow, just as today everybody seems automatically to write 'Murdoch' correctly, and I doubt that this is only due to the prominence of a certain media magnate of this name, in 1912 the spelling 'Murdock' appears to be preferred universally.
Whatever the reason for this particular misspelling, it occurs not only in almost all newspaper articles of the time, the official reports of both the American and the British Inquiry repeat it as well, even though they had access to official documentation which would - one hopes - have the name in the correct form.
The misspelling also remained in use for many decades to come. For example, it is the spelling used by James Bisset (who had been 2nd Officer of the Carpathia) in the second volume of his memoirs, Of Tramps and Ladies (p. 289) and in the cast list of the 1953 film.
In recent time, it seems that the correct spelling of the Titanic's officers has achieved general acceptance, but just as these original 'fictional' officers were caused by lack of research or information, some of the fictional officers appearing in novels and films came into being because the writers apparently could not be asked to find out the historical officers' names.
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