The Key to the Titanic (Preventable Disasters Pt. 2)

If there had been more lifeboats on the RMS Titanic, the sinking of her maiden voyage might not have been so tragic. Still, I hold that her sinking would have been prevented entirely, had one Mr. Davy Blair not left his keys at home.

David Blair was a seaman (snort) under the employ of the White Star Line, the company that owned and operated the three then largest ocean liners in existence: the Olympic, the Gigantic (later Britannic), and the Titanic. Blair was originally to be the Second Officer of the Titanic and had even been with her on her trial voyages to test the ship’s seaworthiness and the sailing from the construction site in Belfast, Ireland to its first passenger loading in Southhampton, England. Just before she left port in Belfast, however, Blair received the news that he would be replaced with the more experienced Henry Wilde, Chief Officer from the temporarily out-of-service RMS Olympic. At this news, he wrote to his family, "this is a magnificent ship, I feel very disappointed I am not to make her first voyage."

When he left the ship for the last time on April 9, 1912, he took with him the key to the Crow’s nest locker, which was supposed to contain the binoculars for the lookouts. On the night of April 13, the Crow’s nest crew were in near freezing conditions with a calm ocean in front of them, smooth as glass. The moon was a waning sliver and provided little light to illuminate any icebergs – about which the Titanic crew had been warned. While Davy Blair lay in bed in England with the locker key in possession, the Titanic and Mr. Iceberg were meters away from collision. 1,522 passengers and crew, 68% of all on board, died that night.

The lookouts on duty at the time of the collision, Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee, testified later that they were informed they were to have no binoculars during the voyage, because the locker key could not be found. Fleet and Lee died attesting that if they had had binoculars, they would have seen the iceberg with ample time to get out of the way.

The locker key was donated by Blair’s daughter to the International Sailors Society and sold in 2007 at auction for £90,000 (140,000 USD) and is on display now in Nanjing, China.