I was trying to give Lord a little wiggle room. Do you have any for him or is he a full blown coward?
IMO, clearly he wasn't thinking very clearly that night. We know what he did or didn't do. What we really don't know is the 'why.'
I agree with Sam. To call Stanley Lord a 'coward' would be bit short sighted IMO. He went to the sea at an early age and to rise to the rank of Captain in one's 30s, he must have been good professionally. Being a sailor in any capacity did involve some risk at the time, especially in the pre-wireless days which was when Lord started his career. An outright coward would never have made it that far.
My personal view is that for all his martinet manner,
Lord was not very bright. In fact, his stern and forbidding personality might have been a front to disguise his limitations in lateral thinking. Yes, I know that one did not have to be a rocket scientist to think that a ship firing off rockets at night could be in distress, but Lord's reaction - or the lack of it - means that there was a reason. Lord was probably half-asleep when he was told about the other ship and the rockets and with some people in that state it takes a while to clear one's mind.
Reading Lord's bio, one thing stood out in my mind. Whatever Lord faced or did not face from officialdom after the
Titanic disaster and whatever direction his own career took or did not take,
he did not really appear to harbour much personal guilt over the matter. At first glance that would seem rather odd because for all his mistakes that night, even his worst detractors have to agree that Stanley Lord was not a bad, heartless man. He had a wife and child himself and so later realization about the extent of loss of life, especially the children, should have made him privately feel very guilty had he come to believe that he could have saved many lives if he had reacted effectively.
That suggests that Lord really believed that he had done nothing wrong that night. Of course, he would have felt sorry for the deaths and disruption afterwards but I think he did not privately blame himself too much. His continued quest to clear his name in the following years does point to that.