Who was Murdoch? The right man at the right place at the right time? Or would somebody else have been able to avoid the disaster? - These were the questions I asked myself when I prepared a lecture for an English class at school in 1989. My interest in the Titanic had already started in 1977 after watching a film on TV. Right from the beginning my heart was with the officers, however, my special interest in Murdoch started only that fateful night while working on that paper.
It was impossible for me to get rid of these questions which had appeared in my mind unexpectedly. However, I had to face the fact that hardly any information on Murdoch was available at that time although none of the non-fiction Titanic books left out Murdoch's name. The driving force behind my research was to find out Murdoch's background - what kind of experiences he had gained, what qualified him for becoming Titanic's 1st officer and what kind of man he had been. My intention was to base my judgement on him on as many facts as possible. You might of course ask "What is fact and what is fiction" - which seems an especially vital question when it comes to Titanic - however, by gaining research experience and by relying on sources like crew agreements or written material which is objective and/or is backed up by other publications which seem to be independent from the first source I am convinced that it is possible to find out what is fact and what has to be left out because the source cannot be verified beyond doubt.
My research put me in touch with Murdoch's family, and I got to know quite a lot of people in the western world - some of them became true friends. Apart from that I worked with archives in Scotland, England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; the spreading internet eased this part of my research a lot. To build up a general knowledge on seafaring and British society in Murdoch's lifetime, I relied on autobiographies of sailors from that age and books on society.