Hello, and welcome to my website dedicated to the life and career of Commander Edward John Smith R.D., R.N.R., a man best known as the captain of the ill-fated White Star liner RMS Titanic.
My name is Gary Cooper and in 1992, I published the first ever biography of Captain Smith. I will say here from the beginning that I am not a Titanic enthusiast as such, rather a local historian, born and bred in the Potteries, where Smith himself came from; in fact, my great, great, great grandparents lived eleven doors away from the Smith family in Well Street, Hanley in 1851. Knowing only too well the humble background he came from, my interest has thus always been with the man and his career rather than the disaster that took his life and ironically made him famous. Indeed, my original biography was prompted not by any fascination with that great ship, but by an almost throwaway remark by a college friend who noted that no one had ever written a biography of Smith. I was a budding historian and had thus been given my first project. Five years later I produced that biography.
That first book was very much a local work, with no pretensions to being a definitive tome of any sort. Written in those far off days before the advent of the internet, the book was, nontheless, as good as it could be and sold quite well (so I am told) for a local book, copies even finding their way to the States and Australia. However as is often the case, time, technology and much new research overtook a lot of what was said there and by the beginning of the 21st century a new look at Captain Smith's life was long overdue. At first, though, I was perfectly happy to leave that to someone else, I had new subjects to pursue and had come to regard any further research into Smith as a rather dusty subject.
It was in 2003 that my attitude changed. Having got my latest project out of the way the year before, I was looking into new areas to explore when I received a telephone call from an actor in the States who was to play the part of Smith in an exhibition and was hoping to pick my brains on the matter. I helped as best I could, though all I could basically say were variations on 'read the book', not having kept up with modern research on the subject. Nevertheless, impressed that someone so far away was actually interested in my opinion, I decided to look into Smith's life once more, little suspecting that six years research and a complete review and re-write of my original work was in the offing. For there was new information available now ... a lot of it.
The result was a 422 page initial biography, first issued in 2009 as a print-on-demand book. An editted, fully annotated version of the text, entitled Titanic Captain: The Life of Edward John Smith, (the cover of which is shown above) was published by The History Press in October 2011.
This website compliments the larger work by offering a brief precis of the story for the more general reader who may be interested in finding out a little more about the life of Captain Edward John Smith.
Hello, and welcome to my website dedicated to the life and career of Commander Edward John Smith R.D., R.N.R., a man best known as the captain of the ill-fated White Star liner RMS Titanic.