Sir – It seems a shame that The Oxford Times chose to commemorate the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic with the loss of over 1500 lives by giving the oxygen of publicity to Robin Gardiner and his theory that the ship at the bottom of the Atlantic is not the Titanic but her sister ship, the Olympic.

This view is not in fact new, being first proposed by Gardiner in a book co-authored with journalist Dan Van der Vat in the 1990s. Time enough for the theory to be demolished in a rivet by rivet rebuttal by leading Titanic researchers, Steve Hall and Bruce Beveridge in their book Olympic & Titanic — The Truth Behind The Conspiracy which appeared in 2004. This outlines irrefutable differences in the two ships with positive evidence from the wreck site showing that the remains are indeed those of the Titanic.

The Titanic disaster defines the beginning of the end to an era of social and technical hubris that finally died in the trenches of the Somme.

While acts that some came to be ashamed of hit the headlines, many died heroically saving others and trying to keep the ship afloat and the lights burning for as long as possible. Their memory should not be denigrated by being considered as merely the victims of an so-called insurance scam.

Mike Gould, Abingdon