"Lost" interview

[Yusuf Khan]

Hi, I've always been interested in the titanic but only just joined this forum, so sorry if I post this in the wrong place. Anyway, I recently saw this video on YouTube of a "Lost interview" of a survivor from a news channel in the 80s. He was called William Hall. The trouble is that I can't find any other record of this survivor apart from an image on Getty images. I was wondering if anyone here had anymore information.



Mr. W. Hall, who was a survivor of the Titanic at his Winston Hills...

Thanks!

 

[Encyclopedia Titanica]

Either a fantasist or a genuine survivor who for some reason changed his name... probably the former!

 

[Arun Vajpey]

I think there was a fiction film in 2012 called After The Titanic about a supposed survivor named William Hall talking about his experiences or something. I don't think it ever got released, not even direct to video.

 

[Yusuf Khan]

Thanks for the info! I guess he was probably making it up then

 

[Brad Walton]

Maybe he was orphaned (he says his mother died), and on adoption his name was changed? Or maybe he was an orphan who invented the story to explain what had happened to his mother.

 

[Seumas]

A classic Walter Mitty character right there.

He's certainly done his homework well enough to know the broad details of the sinking so he won't get easily tripped up. That was smart on his part, a lot of the fake survivors never bothered to do that.

Mr Hall (or whoever he actually was) was probably a lonely old man just glad to get some attention and conversation. It's quite sad actually that he had to go to all the bother of pretending to be a Titanic survivor just to get that.

As a boy my Dad knew a man on his street who used to tell all the kids wild stories about fighting with the Long Range Desert Group in WW2. Then when the man died my Dad and his mates found out from the old man's family that it was all lies. Seemingly, this man felt guilty about not being able to fight and invented this highly detailed story as a kind of reaction.