At bottom with Titanic was a high

Rory Golden was the first Irishman to dive to the wreck and he was the one who retrieved the wheel, says Jonathan deBurca Butler

RORY GOLDEN runs his diving school, Flagship Scuba, from an old CIE ferry docked in the Grand Canal basin in Dublin.

“This is the ferry that brought people to and from the Aran Islands,” says Golden. “It was decommissioned in the early 1980s and they brought it here. They were going to make a maritime museum out of it, but that didn’t happen and so we use it. I call it extreme recycling.”

Golden, who was the managing director of Virgin Records Ireland for 15 years, had his first dive in Sep 1976. “I was always fascinated with the Jacques Cousteau series and the underwater world when I was a child,” says the Dubliner. “Back in ’76, I saw this ad in the back of a paper about a thing called ‘dive for fun’ in Killiney [Co. Dublin] and I went along with this man called Shane Gray, who trained hundreds of divers in Ireland. My very first dive in the sea was in Dalkey Sound and I remember it was like flying. It was a fantastic feeling.”

Golden has done 3,000 dives since. Many involved looking for ship wrecks. Discoveries such as The Polwell, near Rockabill Lighthouse, Skerries, and The Marlay, near Howth, garnered Golden a reputation as a wreck hunter.

“I was always very interested in the history of the wreck,” says Golden. “The whole thing about wrecks is the story behind them. Finding the wreck is the last piece of the jigsaw, but actually looking at and hearing about the ships that went down and then trying to locate them was always a fascination for me.”

In 2000, Golden dived to the mother of all wrecks when he was asked to join a recovery expedition to Titanic.

“I was involved in the Irish Underwater Council and I got into running dive conferences,” he says. “For one of those conferences, in 1988, we brought over a man called Ralph White who was involved in the original expedition to the Titanic in 1985. We became great friends over the years and he recommended me for head of dive-safety operations for the 2000 expedition.”

Golden says that he wasn’t supposed to dive to the famous wreck but he had devised what he calls “a cunning plan”.

“Well, I had arranged for a commemorative plaque to be brought on the expedition from Cobh,” he says. “A nice brass plaque that had been given to me by Michael Martin, the creator of the Titanic Heritage Trail in Cobh.

“One of the Americans on the expedition said to me ‘we’re hardly going to send an American down with an Irish memorial so you’re going down in two days’ and I ended up getting a dive.”

Golden became the first Irishman to dive to Titanic and one of only a couple of hundred people who have ever gone down to the ship.

“You go down in these Russian subs called Mirs,” he says. “They’re 18 tonnes and two metres in diameter and you’re in there for ten to twelve hours. You can’t stand up in this. The pilot is the only one in a comfortable position.

“And you just drop through the ocean layers but you’ve no sensation of falling. It takes two and a half hours just to travel to the depth the Titanic is at, nearly 4,000 metres. It’s a long, slow process and when you get to the bottom of the sea bed, the lights come on. The pilot will just navigate his way across the bottom. And as you get nearer, the sonar picks up the outline of a wreck. And out of the blue you just see this big huge wall of rivulet steel appearing in front of you. And as the sub rises slowly, the lights bathe the whole bow of the wreck and there you are looking at one of the most famous sites in the world. You’re at a very special place. When I speak about it, I’m back there.” Golden will be giving two presentations on his Titanic experiences in the National Concert Hall over the coming month. The presentation lasts for one and a half hours and will feature footage of the wreck.

“It’s broken into two parts,” he says. “I take people through the history of the ship; its construction, its sailing, its ports of call, its sinking and the fallout from the tragedy. And then we go on to talk about the original idea to go and look for it. I have a collection going back nearly 25 years relating to Titanic and what happened in the original search, the first recovery expeditions and right up to my time. So it’s a potted history if you like.”

Five years after his first dive to Titanic, Golden was lucky enough to be asked to go a second time. It was a special day.

“As we were travelling around the officer’s deck, I saw a semi-circular object sticking through a pile of debris,” he says. “So the robotic arm reached in and shuffled around and pulled out this piece of steel. And out came the remains of the ship’s wheel.

“When we eventually brought it to the surface, I was given the honour of being the first person to touch it. So I was the first person to touch it since Captain Smith went down with the ship. That was quite a unique experience.”

* Return To Titanic with Rory Golden takes place in The John Field Room, National Concert Hall, Mar 12 & Mar 28. Tickets are on sale now from nch.ie or Tel: [phone].