Stanley Phillip Lord (13 September 1877 – 24 January 1962) was the British captain of the SS Californian, the nearest ship to the Titanic on the night she sank on 15 April 1912, and, depending on which sources are believed, likely the only ship to see the Titanic, or at least her rockets (also known as flares), during the sinking.

In 1965 he wrote a preface to a book by Peter Padfield, The Titanic and the Californian, which supported the case for Lord having been judged unfairly.

Before turning in for the night, he ordered his sole wireless operator, Cyril Evans, to warn other ships in the area about the ice.

Evans listened in for a while longer as Phillips sent routine traffic reports through the Cape Race relaying station before finally turning in for bed at around 11:30 p.m. Over the course of the night, officers and seamen on the deck of Californian witnessed eight white rockets fired into the air over a strange ship off in the distance.

Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall and Quartermaster Rowe tried in vain to contact the strange ship by Morse lamp.

Authors Tim Maltin and Eloise Aston attribute Captain Lord's belief that the nearby ship was not the Titanic to visual distortions caused by cold-water mirages.

When she had slipped below the water, the sudden disappearance of lights was interpreted by the Californian crew to mean that she had simply steamed away.

Then l went to sleep.Lord made no effort to awaken the wireless operator and send a message that way, which might have been far more effective in obtaining information from the Titanic.

His attempts to fight for his exoneration gained him nothing, and the events of the night of 14–15 April 1912 would haunt him for the rest of his life.

So far as any negligence of the SS Californian's officers and crew was concerned, the conclusions of both the American and British inquiries seemed to disapprove of Lord's actions but stopped short of recommending charges.

While both inquiries censured Lord, they did not make any recommendations for an official investigation to ascertain if he was guilty of offences under the Merchant Shipping Acts.

[citation needed] In February 1913, with help from a Leyland director who believed he had been unfairly treated, Lord was hired by the Nitrate Producers Steamship Co., where he remained until March 1927, resigning for health reasons.

The association's general secretary, Mr. Leslie Harrison, took up the case for him and petitioned the Board of Trade on his behalf for a re-examination of the facts, but there had been no finding by the time of Lord's death in 1962.

In 1958 the film A Night To Remember was released, based on a 1955 book of the same title by Walter Lord (no relation).

Captain Lord in the low-budget TV series was depicted in his late 60s and was sleeping in his cabin just like in the 1958 film A Night To Remember 38 years earlier.

position given after the iceberg collision by the Titanic's fourth officer, Joseph Boxhall, was wrong by thirteen miles.

While the entries in the Californian's scrap log (used for recording information before it was written up officially in the ship's logbook) referring to the night in question had mysteriously gone missing, sometimes seen as overwhelming proof that Lord deliberately destroyed evidence to cover his crime of ignoring a distress call, destroying the scrap log records was normal company practice.

[5] While modifying the official ship's log or removing pages is a serious violation of maritime law, this was not the case.

A re-appraisal by the British government, instigated informally in 1988 and published in 1992 by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB), further implicated the consequences of Lord's inaction.

Another conclusion stated that it was unrealistic to assume that Lord could have rushed towards the signals and that with the Titanic reporting an incorrect position, the Californian would have arrived at about the same time as the Carpathia and fulfilled a similar role – rescuing those who had escaped.

What has never been satisfactorily resolved was why Lord did not simply wake his radio operator and listen for any distress signals.

His lack of compassion — never once expressing grief at the loss of the Titanic or sorrow for those who had lost family when she sank is, according to Butler, compatible with sociopathy.