I've had a look at Susanne Stormer's comments re the suicide question, and am quite surprised - I thought she knew more about the
Titanic's officers, and about James
Moody in particular. I realise that her intention is to deflect speculation away from Murdoch as the suicidal officer, but to attempt to seriously put forward
Moody on the grounds she has suggested is gobsmacking. I'm particularly disapointed to see that my name was mentioned in connection with one of her supporting 'arguments' - I certainly don't want to be associated with this work in any way.
I'm very tempted to do a point-by-point rebuttal. As Stormer has not done as much work on Moody as she has on Murdoch, she may be genuinely in error. However, I have to question the objectivity of a researcher who rejects no less than three sightings of Moody on the starboard side on no better grounds than that they don't fit her theory of a suicide at 14-16 (a point that is extraordinarily contentious in and of itself).
Take, for example, just one of her points - her suggestion that Rheims reported the officer who shot himself as having saluted first. She argues that this could possibly the clincher, because Moody had training along RN lines aboard the
Conway, whereas Wilde and Murdoch did not have RN training.
It may indeed be the a definitive point, but not in the way that Stormer proposes. James Moody attended HMS
Conway from 1902-03...he was 14-16 when he attended the training ship, and had left it nearly
nine years before he joined the
Titanic. After that, Moody had no further contact with the RN. Any references to the Navy in his correspondence tend to be light-hearted.
Murdoch and Wilde, while they may not have been in the RN, were active members of the RNR - their ranks entailed RN training, and the RNR was important enough to them that these ranks were incorporated onto their headstones. Is there a record of an RNR officer serving in the merchant service saluting?
Yes. In a ceremony in 1912, Harold Lowe - although he was then wearing his WSL uniform - gave what was described as a 'smart naval salute'. Although he, like Wilde and Murdoch, had never been in the RN, he was trained in the RNR.
Moody, contrary to some sources, never joined the RNR.
Susanne's arguments for ignoring Wynn's evidence for Moody being on the starboard amounts to suggesting that Moody had ordered him over to a starboard boat from the portside - an argument I find highly unconvincing. Likewise, she attempts to obfuscate Lee's description of the officer loading 13 by suggesting vaguely that it could have been someone else - even, bizarrely, Harold Lowe. Not only is there a lack of evidence to support the idea that Lowe was ever at the starboard aft boats, to answer her question about Lowe's height, he was recorded at either 5'7" 1/2 - 5'8" and was described by those who saw him as 'small' and 'dark'...a far cry from the description by Lee of the officer he saw at 13. Lee's description is a spot-on verbal sketch of James Moody. Lee had his height correct to within an inch, described him as having a 'fresh complexion' (the fair-skin, blue eyed and light-haired Moody had often suffered from sunburn with his fair skin), very spare (Moody's slenderness is evident in both descriptions and full length photographs I've seen of him) and was the 'fifth or sixth officer' whom, as far as Lee knew, was drowned.
Nor do we need to rely on Lee or Wynn to place Moody on the Starboard side - Hemming puts him there by name. Stormer's sole basis for doubting Hemming boils down to this: they had not known each other long enough for Hemming to identify Moody. I don't buy this at all. Hemming doesn't hem or haw or say he 'thinks' it was Moody. He names him very matter of factly. Moody had spent much of the time since joining the ship in Belfast overseeing stores coming aboard. Hemming was in deck as a lamptrimmer. The two would have had a good deal of contact since joining the ship, and there is no reason to doubt Hemming's ability to identify Moody.
Stormer also attempts to place a gun in Moody's hand - although there is absolutely no evidence that he had one - by suggesting that as Lowe had a private weapon aboard, Moody might have had one as well. This betrays Stormer's lack of knowledge about these two men.
Lowe was a lifelong weapons enthusiast and gun officiando, to the point where he had received invitations to officially compete. Moody had absolutely no such interest. In going through Moody's correspondence spanning the whole of his short life, I have seen only two references that I can recall to guns or shooting. One was a mention in a letter that some of the crew (not he himself) had shot seabirds during a crossing in sail. The other was a comment on a rifle his brother had sent him. Moody found the fact he had been presented with a gun both hilariously funny and quite bemusing. It had been passed on from another branch of the family when they moved, and - as Moody said - he had absolutely no earthly use for it and intended to sell it at the earliest opportunity. In all his letters, when he describes his activities from caving to swimming to reading magazines and getting a decent panama hat, he shows no interest in or inclination to own or use a gun. While it is hard to prove a negative, there is no reason to suppose he carried his own private weapon aboard the
Titanic, and to do so would be out of character.
Then there is Stormer's quite surreal argument that his fellow officers didn't like Pitman (part of her attempt to explain how he doesn't fit into her 'Oceanic'/'Adriatic' schism, which is another point I dispute very strongly). The only evidence she can muster for this is a rather idiosyncratic reading of a query
Boxhall made as the identity of a call he received from the stern (he asked if it was the third officer). From this absolutely flimsy point, she has extrapolated a scenario that Pitman was the odd man out. I'd disagree with this, pointing not only to lack of evidence suggesting such (one can't take the
Boxhall comment as seriously indicating Boxhall harboured any ill feeling towards Pitman), but also to indicators that
Lightoller relied on Pitman's support aboard the
Carpathia (it was with Pitman he visited at least one first class passenger, and it was with Pitman that he went over the lifeboats that were brought aboard).
There are so many holes in Stormer's argument, so many tenuous arguments built on flimsy grounds, that one hardly knows where to begin. Essentially, though, it boils down to a suggestion that Moody was the suicidal officer because she believes the suicide took place at the loading of 14/16, and that no one saw him alive after that point, therefore it must have been the sixth officer. In order to even accept this much, we must adopt the highly contentious argument that the suicide occured at 14/16, and we must dismiss Wynn, Lee and Hemming. This is in spite of the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that Moody even had a gun and no eyewitnesses that suggest he shot anyone.
I'm busy at the moment, but I think that - for the sake of historical clarity, if nothing else - Stormer's obfuscating, muddy arguments must be countered. I'll begin compiling a detailed response. Stormer, in her latest book, is critical of those who have argued for the Murdoch suicide, and talks about mythologising. She's subjecting Moody to the same treatment here. She's also scathing about
Lightoller, and suggests (without a convincing argument, I might add) that he edited out Wilde's role at loading lifeboats. I contend she has done exactly the same thing here to Moody - by having him kill himself and denying evidence that he assisted at the starboard boats, she has edited him out.
The last time we see Moody is through Hemming's testimony, when he was working at A. I think it does him a tremendous disservice to try and edit him out of the role he took in saving lives - and to do so on such flimsy grounds as Stormer's arguments is bordering on the risible.
