Titanic Imposters

Just wanted to let you know that I have published a book I think you'll all enjoy reading called TITANIC IMPOSTERS. Debbie Beavis states there were over 7,000 people who pretended to be Titanic survivors, but were never on the ship. With help from Don Lynch, George Behe (who penned the foreword for this book) and a few other treasured friends, I compiled quite a few stories, many which will make you laugh, some will cause you to shake your head and others will shock you, as they did me! Chock full of surprises, TITANIC IMPOSTERS tells each person's story and helps you understand who they were and why they did it. The answers are not always what you think they are. Available on Amazon.com.

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This is a very old post, but I'll give it a try anyway.

Just wondered if you had a "Vaginhak Byrut" (also spelled "Vaginak)in your list of imposters ?
This is a recent thread and has
been fairly well de-bunked as a hoax.
Among other things this person is mentioned as being in "cabin 804" on Titanic and being saved by " 50 year old Mrs. Astor who saved him by saying he was her 25 year old son". That doesn't even deserve an L0L.

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This thread deserves some discussion as there have been quite a few Titanic survivor imposters, some more colourful than others. A few have even been "authenticated" by other contributors to the extent that the border between fact and fiction sometimes gets blurred. Among such 'official' imposters was a woman named Vera Hanson who claimed in the 1950s that she was actually none other than genuine Titanic survivor Virginia Martin-Emmanuel, who by then had not been heard from for almost 30 years. Despite the fact that almost nothing in Mrs Hanson's claim tallied with the known real-life story of Virginia Emmanuel, some sources accepted the former story. Among them is journalist Andrew Wilson who wrote the book Shadow Of The Titanic; in that book Wilson goes on about how Vera Hanson had a "genuine need to trace the ghostly memories of her past" and such nonsense.

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Helen Kramer comes to mind. She was the woman who claimed that she was Lorraine Alison, the girl who disappeared in the Titanic disaster, remember? I wonder if there were other people who claimed to be children that died on the Titanic? Perhaps a couple aside from Helen. These imposters were the 9/11 pseudo-survivors of their time.

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Another imposter who was initially "accepted" even by Walter Lord was a man named Walter Belford, who claimed that he was the "Chief Night Baker" on the Titanic and was on duty and baking rolls when the ship struck the iceberg. He supposedly watched in dismay as his freshly baked rolls fell to the floor and rolled around due to the impact. Miraculously, he was asleep in bed without his underpants some 10 minutes later when Steward Dodd burst in and alerted the occupants of the shared cabin. He later claimed that in the final minutes of the sinking, he took a 'bomb dive' into the sea and swam to an unspecified lifeboat - still without his underpants.

It was not just Walter Lord who accepted Belford's story; he was invited to the 50th Anniversary of the Titanic's sinking and had photographs taken with a few genuine survivors, thus "authenticating" his own position as one of them. When Belford died the following year, then a very young Edward Kamuda was outraged to find out that Belford's landlady had thrown out most of the old man's Titanic memorabilia. This apparently paved the way for creation of what was to become the Titanic Historical Society.

The only problem with that story is that Walter Belford was never on the Titanic in any capacity; neither was there any position called "Chief Night Baker" on the ship. The only Chief Baker, be it day or night, was the redoubtable Charles Joughin.

That said, there was an Assistant Cook named William Bedford on the Titanic and he died in the sinking (RIP). Bedford is one of those relatively unknown victims of the disaster and it looks like either Walter Belford himself or someone else decided to usurp the identity, change it around a bit and make a survivor claim.

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William Barnett Bedford wasn't just a normal assistant cook but the assistant Rôtisseur in the first/second class galley on D-deck. Of the three actual assistant cooks in the galley, no one survived either. Bedford his superior, Harry Owen Glendower Jones, also didn't survive.

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Thanks. That probably explains why the imposter, Walter Belford, was obliged to create an important sounding but non-existent post called "Chief Night Baker" to forward his claim.

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