'We'd never find them': The true story behind the Titanic and the Hollywood scene that never was

Claes-Göran Wetterholm was living in a forest region in Sweden when he sent a letter addressed to a man claiming to own the world's most famous shipwreck.

It was the late 1960s and Wetterholm was a curious 15-year-old schoolboy. He first heard about sinking of the RMS Titanic after watching a TV movie when he was eight.

His need for knowledge about the calamity has occupied his thoughts for decades.

Today, he is a leading historian who meticulously collects artefacts and stories from the survivors and the family of those who died on board. He curates the collection for exhibitions, including the most recent Titanic: The Human Story.

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"It's the world's most famous ship. There are no ships in history that compete with the Titanic," Wetterholm, now 72, told 9honey from his leafy surroundings in Sweden.

"Her fame came because she sank."

It was the early hours of April 15, 1912 the hulking British ocean liner sank after colliding with an iceberg in waters off the coast of Newfoundland, a province of Canada.

There were an estimated 2224 passengers and crew on board, including six Australians and 123 Swedes. Of the passengers, 1500 died.

The ship was five days into its probably seven-day voyage to New York City, when tragedy struck.

It's been 112 years since the tragedy, and the world's appetite for stories about the ship remains unsatiated. There have been scores of books written on the subject, enough for Wetterholm to turn his apartment in Stockholm into an unofficial archive.

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He first started collecting books on the Titanic as a schoolboy. He would seek recommendations in his letters to experts, including UK-based Douglas Woolley. 

Woolley has dedicated much of his life to finding and raising the remains of the Titanic. He claims to own the legal rights to the wreck. 

"I got involved in a very funny thing," Wetterholm recalled, before sharing a story from his childhood about Woolley.

"I heard that a chemist magazine – my father was a chemist – wrote about a man called Douglas Woolley, who was going to raise the Titanic. I found out his address and I wrote to him. I was a teenager."

Through their correspondence, Wetterholm learned Woolley had added him to his team. The teenager could speak both Swedish and German.

"He named me the interpreter in the team to go to raise the Titanic. Everything was built on dreams but this became news all over Sweden," Wetterholm said.

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"So I got in contact with some other people who had the same interest. I lived in the middle of nowhere, up in the forest."

Woolley was not the first to discover the Titanic wreckage.

Robert Ballard, a US oceanographer and retired Naval Reserve commanding officer, discovered it in 1985. It took him eight days to locate it.

Wetterholm published his first book on the Titanic in 1988 and has continued to write on the topic ever since. One of his books is about the myths of the famous ship.

"There are always all these questions, but there are actually no answers," he said. 

"So even down to the question if the real Titanic sank or not, which some people claimed she didn't." 

One myth he believes he can dispel centres on depictions of the disaster which have featured on celluloid – the most famous being the 1997 film, Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

In the film, which was directed by US filmmaker James Cameron, as the water rushes through compartments, DiCaprio's character, Jack Dawson, breaks through a series of gates to reach the top deck of the ship. 

Wetterholm questions the existence of these gates.

"When one tries to find out about such gates, we'd never find them," he said. 

"So I agree with other researchers that there were no such gates. This is an invention by film directors so they're more dramatic, so the gates were sort of interior in people's minds. 

"There were, of course, locked doors but there were other ways to get up on deck if people knew it."

Through his research he has learned how passengers were told about the need to evacuate as the Titanic rapidly took on water.

"First class, [the stewards] knocked politely on the doors, and said, 'Sorry, but it's Captain's orders, you have to put your life jackets on and get up on deck'. And people thought it was a joke," he said.

"So none of them did that. Because the light was on, the heat was working, everything's fine. There was a slight till towards the bow, but that's about it, nothing more."

The situation in third class was drastically different.

"In the forward compartments, close to where the damage is, water rushed in," he said. 

"One Swedish survivor said later on that he'd been up on deck to see what was about,  came down and when he was in his cabin to put on his socks and shoes, the water rushed in and he had no time to take any shoes or socks or anything. He just grabbed a life jacket and ran out. He took his watch, but that's about it." 

In other instances, the ocean water quickly filled guest compartments, with the force of the water literally bursting from outside the ship to inside.

"This was the horrible experience of many people that suddenly the water just exploded into their cabins," he said.

Another tragedy on the boat was mistaking the captain's urging for women and children to be loaded first in the lifeboats as "only women and children".

Wetterholm said one officer on board took this literally, and turned away all men from the lifeboats. Yet, another officer, William Murdoch, did not.

"Murdoch didn't care about those rules. If there was room in a lifeboat, he allowed men into them as well. Over 80 per cent of the surviving male passengers, they had their lives thanks to William Murdoch," he said. 

It is these sorts of true stories and more that Wetterholm has included in the new exhibition Titanic: The Human Story, which will open in Sydney in 2025.

"It's focused very much on the people, the passengers, and, of course, also the crew," he said.

Wetterholm curated the exhibition with Spanish company Musealia. 

The exhibition boasts a historical account of the Titanic and its final hours, brought to life with music, sound effects and testimonies from Titanic passengers and crew.

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