Sister ship of the Titanic cocktail bar

The Lambton Hounds has its very own star attraction, which is a feature of our lounge bar. The bar is taken from the cocktail bar of RMS Olympic, sister ship of the Titanic.

The Olympic cocktail bar is located in the pub's current lounge bar. The bar was installed during recent renovations to the Lambton Hounds having previously been stored at Sunderland's Vaux Breweries Ltd. After the brewery went out of business in July 1999, the bar came to light and was installed in the Lambton Hounds. Vaux, a brewery dating from 1806, had originally repossessed the bar after a publican failed to pay his debts. Only the outside of the bar is original. It has a new top, and most of the inside has been sealed off, although the inside still shows the number 400, Olympic's hull number while under construction at Belfast, Ireland's Harland and Wolff shipyards.

The Olympic was initially dismantled at Tyneside's Palmers shipyard in Jarrow in 1935 before final scrapping two years later at Inverkeithing in Scotland. The Lambton Hounds pub also displays a brass plaque informing patrons of the lounge bar's provenance.

Some conspiracy theories suggest that the Titanic and Olympic were swapped and it was the Olympic, not the Titanic that sank. One of the most controversial theories regarding the sinking of the Titanic was put forward by Robert Gardiner. His theory is that the ship that hit the iceberg on 14 April 1912 was in fact the Titanic's sister-ship the Olympic, disguised as the Titanic. All this was part of an insurance scam of huge proportions by the White Star Line.

The Olympic was identical to the Titanic. On September 20, 1911, the Olympic was involved in a collision with the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hawke near Southampton. White Star Line was left without an insurance claim to cover the cost of fixing the serious damage caused to the Olympic.

Gardiner proposes that it was decided to turn the Olympic into the Titanic. The conversion was done in two months and the plan to dispose of the ship and collect the insurance money was hatched as follows. The Titanic (ex-Olympic) would steam out into the Atlantic, where the sea cocks would be opened and the ship slowly flooded. Numerous ships would be stationed nearby to take off the passengers. The shortage of lifeboats would not matter as the ship would sink so slowly that the boats could make several trips between the sinking Titanic and the rescuers.

Gardiner then makes one his most controversial statements — that the Titanic did not strike an iceberg, but one of the rescue ships that was drifting on station with its lights out.

Gardiner based this theory on the facts that he does not believe an iceberg could inflict such sustained and serious damage to a steel double-hulled vessel such as the Titanic.

As it happened, the already fragile structure of the ship gave way and the Titanic sank. The vast majority of the crew were not aware of the scam, and 1,503 passengers and crew died in the sinking.

No one really knows for sure how the village of Pity Me received its intriguing name. One theory derives it from miserere me, a phrase chanted by pilgrims who walked this way.

Another suggests the deceased St Cuthbert somehow whispered pity me, when monks dropped his coffin at the site. Others say it was a pilgrim's inn, or the protests of a prisoner taken to a gallows that perhaps stood on the site.

However most theories incorporate water of some kind. The French ‘Petit Mare’ or 'little sea' is often suggested, but the English word mere (a lake) seems more likely. It was certainly a marshy area and the boggy land called the Carrs still located to the west is a likely setting for a mere.

Place-name experts are however unmoved by these suggestions and see Pity Me as a wry name given to an exposed or desolate locality. Such names often arose after land enclosures in the 1600s or 1700s when farm buildings were erected on newly enclosed fields.