St. Martin's Literary Fiction asked David Dyer:

When did you first learn about the SS Californian? Why do you think it’s such a little-known aspect of the Titanic’s history, and what can we learn from it?

David Dyer I first learned about the Californian incident when I was a very young child. I watched ‘A Night to Remember’ with my grandmother when I was about 4 or 5, and that film shows (a little inaccurately) the key aspects of the Californian’s role. Later, when I was in Grade 4, I wrote a story entitled ‘Titanic’s Disaster’, which has an intriguing couple of sentences on its second page:

“The wireless operator was sending SOS calls to the Calafornian [sic] which was only ten miles away but its wireless was shut down over one hour ago. Rockets were fired every five minutes but the Calafornian though that it was some sort of ship board celebration.’

We know now that the ‘shipboard celebration’ thesis cannot be true, but this shows that even as an eight year old I was grappling with the mystery of ‘why didn’t the Californian go?’

Although ‘the Californian incident’ is very well known – and, indeed, very controversial – in Titanic circles, it is less well known in the general population. And I think much of the reason for this is the James Cameron film ‘Titanic’. The film was extraordinarily popular, and it does not refer to the Californian. In the DVD version there is a deleted scene showing the Californian warning the Titanic, but no scenes at all showing the Californian seeing the Titanic’s rockets. I think the story was probably too complex, too subtle, too difficult for Cameron to fit within his narrative structure.
What can we learn from the Californian affair? Well, that the universe can be unfair, and that even small errors can have catastrophic consequences. More importantly, though, I think the incident shows us that there are different ways of ‘being a man’, of being strong. Sometimes the greatest strength a person can show is to admit weakness, mistakes, and vulnerability. None of us are perfect.

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