Editing Stanley Lord (section)

== Reputation ==
While Lord was never tried or convicted of any offence, he was still viewed publicly as a [[Outcast (person)|pariah]] after the ''Titanic'' disaster. His attempts to fight for his exoneration gained him nothing, and the events of the night of 14–15 April 1912 would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Lord was dismissed by the Leyland Line in August 1912. So far as any negligence of the SS ''Californian'''s officers and crew was concerned, the conclusions of both the American and British inquiries seemed to disapprove of Lord's actions, but stopped short of recommending charges. While both inquiries censured Lord, they did not make any recommendations for an official investigation to ascertain if he was guilty of offences under the [[Merchant Shipping Act]]s. Lord was not allowed to be represented at either the U.S. or British inquiry.{{cn|date= January 2022}}

In February 1913, with help from a Leyland director who believed he had been unfairly treated, Lord was hired by the Nitrate Producers Steamship Co., where he remained until March 1927, resigning for health reasons. In 1958, Lord contacted the Mercantile Marine Service Association in [[Liverpool]] to clear his name. The association's general secretary, Mr. Leslie Harrison, took up the case for him and petitioned the [[Board of Trade]] on his behalf for a re-examination of the facts, but there had been no finding by the time of Lord's death in 1962. In 1965, largely because Lord had offered no new evidence, his petition was rejected, but in the same year [[Peter Padfield]]'s book ''The Titanic and the Californian'' was published, defending Lord's reputation, with a preface by his son Stanley Tutton Lord.<ref>Eugene L. Rasor, ''The Titanic: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography'' (2001), p. 53</ref> This was followed by a second petition, in 1968, which was also rejected.

In 1957, Lord's wife died. It was a devastating loss to him and precipitated a decline in his health. In 1958 the film ''[[A Night to Remember (1958 film)|A Night To Remember]]'' was released, based on a 1955 book of the same title by [[Walter Lord]] (no relation). Stanley Lord, now 81 years old, never saw the film, but purportedly read the ''[[Liverpool Echo]]'' newspaper reviews of the film. Lord was very disappointed, and it brought back memories of the ''Titanic'' tragedy, and was upset over his negative portrayal by the Australian-British actor [[Russell Napier]], which depicted him as a captain in his forties, in a warm cabin in bed asleep when ''Titanic'' was sinking. In reality, Lord was 34 years old at the time and was asleep in the chart room with his uniform on at the time of the disaster. Lord's son Stanley Tutton Lord saw the film and was upset about how his father was treated after the ''Titanic'' tragedy. In 1959, Stanley helped fight to get his father's name cleared from the records of the ''Titanic'' disaster. He continued his attempts after his father died in 1962, up until he died in 1994.{{cn| date=January 2022}} Stanley Tutton Lord was seen in an interview from ''Titanic: The Legend Lives On'', part 2 of [[Titanic: The Complete Story]] documentary in 1994 just before his death. Stanley Tutton was only 4 years old when the Titanic tragedy happened, and he told stories about how his father's life was affected by the tragedy up to when the 1958 Hollywood film was released in theaters. In 1996, just two years after Stanley Tutton passed away, the TV series Titanic was released on TV. It had a scene of the Californian ship that had stopped for the night, because of field ice. The crew on board the Californian saw a passenger ship that had also stopped from the ice. The Californian crew called Captain Lord on the phone and told him about a ship that had stopped for the night, and had also tried Morse lamping the ship to know who it was. Captain Lord in the low-budget TV series was depicted in his late 60s and was sleeping in his cabin just like in the 1958 film ''A Night To Remember'' 38 years earlier.

The discovery in 1985 of the remains of the ''Titanic'' on the sea bed made it clear that the S.O.S. position given after the iceberg collision by the ''Titanic's'' fourth officer, [[Joseph Boxhall]], was wrong by thirteen miles. At both of the 1912 inquiries, there had been some conflict about the true position of the ship when it sank. The conclusions of the inquiries discounted the evidence of uncertainty about the position of the ''Titanic''. At the time, some assumed that the position that Lord had given for his ship was incorrect and that he was much closer to the ''Titanic'' than he claimed to be. While the entries in the ''Californian'''s scrap log (used for recording information before it was written up officially in the ship's [[logbook]]) referring to the night in question had mysteriously gone missing, sometimes seen as overwhelming proof that Lord deliberately destroyed evidence to cover his crime of ignoring a distress call, destroying the scrap log records was normal company practice.<ref>''RMS "TITANIC" Reappraisal of Evidence Relating to SS "CALIFORNIAN"'', 1992 Marine Accident Investigation Branch report, London 1992, HMSO, p. 8.</ref> While modifying the official ship's log or removing pages is a serious violation of maritime law, this was not the case. A re-appraisal by the British government, instigated informally in 1988 and published in 1992 by the [[Marine Accident Investigation Branch]] (MAIB), further implicated the consequences of Lord's inaction. Among its conclusions were that although the ''Californian'' was probably out of visual sight, the ''Titanic''{{'}}s rockets had been sighted by the ''Californian''{{'}}s crew. Another conclusion stated that it was unrealistic to assume that Lord could have rushed towards the signals and that with the ''Titanic'' reporting an incorrect position, the ''Californian'' would have arrived at about the same time as the ''Carpathia'' and fulfilled a similar role – rescuing those who had escaped.<ref>MAIB 1992 report p. 18</ref> The report was critical of the behaviour of the other officers of the ''Californian'' in reaction to the signals. What has never been satisfactorily resolved was why Lord did not simply wake his radio operator and listen for any distress signals.

[[Daniel Allen Butler]], in his 2009 book ''The Other Side of Night: The Carpathia, the Californian, and the Night Titanic Was Lost'', makes a case that Lord's personality and temperament — his behaviour at both inquiries, his threats towards his crew, his frequent changing of his story, the absence of the scrap log, and odd remarks made by Lord in Boston in a newspaper interview – point to Lord's having some sort of [[mental illness]]. His lack of compassion&nbsp;— never once expressing grief at the loss of the ''Titanic'' or sorrow for those who had lost family when it sank is, according to Butler, compatible with [[antisocial personality disorder|sociopathy]].<ref>Butler, Daniel Allen; Epilogue: Flotsam and Jetsam; "The Other Side of Night: The Carpathia, the Californian, and the night Titanic was Lost" {{page needed|date=April 2014}}</ref> 

Captain Lord died on 24 January 1962, aged 84, almost half a century after the sinking of the '' Titanic''. He is buried in Rake Lane Cemetery  [[Wallasey]].