Titanic Was Unsafe : Chicago Daily Journal

SAYS TITANIC WAS UNSAFE

Steward, Suing for Injury in Wreck Says Precautions Were Disregarded

[Associated Press Cablegram]

London, Jan. 16—The plea that the Titanic was unseaworthy when she left England in April, 1912, on her disastrous maiden trip to the United States, which cost the lives of over 1,500 people, is to be advanced in a suit for damages brought against the White Star line by Thomas Whiteley, one of the surviving stewards. The plaintiff sustained a fracture of the right leg in the wreck.

Whiteley’s counsel, Allen Clement Edwards, a member of parliament, will also argue on behalf of his client that there was negligence in the steering of the ill-fated vessel.

The hearing has been provisionally fixed for March 1.

This will be the first time that a suggestion in regard to the unseaworthiness of the Titanic has been raised in the courts. Whiteley in an interview given while he was living in a New York hospital after the wreck declared that the officers of the Titanic had disregarded the warnings of the lookout that icebergs were in the vicinity.

[Note: The same news item, with slight variations, also appeared in the following Chicago papers: Chicago Daily News, Friday, January 16, 1912, p. 1, c. 2; and Chicago Evening Post, Friday, January 16, 1912, p. 2, c. 4.]

Chicago Daily Journal, Friday, January 16, 1914, p. 6, c. 2