No distress signal was sent from the Titanic for three-quarters of an hour after it struck ice, a new book claimed.

Time was spent assessing the damage from the iceberg when nearby ships could have been steaming to the rescue, research from author Tim Maltin said.

His work - 101 Things You Thought You Knew About The Titanic... But Didn't - is published today and claims no alert was sent from the ailing vessel for 47 minutes because the ships' officers wanted to keep the disaster quiet.

The largest passenger steamship in the world collided with ice on her maiden voyage in April 1912 and sank with the loss of many lives.

Mr Maltin said: "They (the ship's authorities) may have been considering the public relations aspect of it and was it going to sink or not because then they would have rather kept it quiet." He said the order to go to the lifeboats was given at the same time as the distress signal. A total of 1,517 people lost their lives.

The writer added: "It may be that it took them that long to look at the damage but it seems likely to me that they were unwilling to send out a distress message."

He said it was a moot point whether lives could have been saved but added the relatively nearby Californian vessel could have been at the scene earlier had the alert gone out before midnight when key crew were awake. When it eventually received the alert it was after midnight and the Californian waited until 5.30 a.m. to respond.

Mr Maltin spent two years researching the book and studied the results of American and British inquiries into the disaster and worked with some of the main Titanic experts around the world.

The book claims Captain Edward Smith, despite being the most experienced seaman in the north Atlantic, was accident-prone and not used to that size of ship (50,000 tonnes).