100 Things: Titanic
{Take the 100 Things challenge!}
I have decided! My 100 things are: 100 things 100 things that move or interest me
Thing One: Titanic
Ships have always been part of my life. My parents met on board ship. My dad worked most of his life on both cargo and passenger ships, meaning he was absent for large chunks of time, but also meaning that I managed to memorise his Survival at Sea booklet and from a young age could tell people how to get water at sea by sucking fish spines. I’ve only slept overnight on a ship twice but I loved it and would do it again - but the notion of going on a modern cruise ship sounds quite close to hell to me, ugh.
Of course you can’t be mildly obsessed with ships without taking some kind of interest in the Titanic. It’s not just a tragedy, or a tale about arrogance or pride or heroism, although it has all those elements. I think the Titanic’s sinking was the real end of the nineteenth century; the end of the notion that anything was possible, that Man (and it was Man then) was in total command of the natural world and the elements, that more and bigger would always be better. It was one of the first disasters that led to measurable changes in safety regulations. And above all, as Walter Lord says in the best Titanic book ever written, it was really a small town - one with people from so many different backgrounds and nationalities. The Titanic is about people.
I was going to share with you a photo of my own copy of Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember, which is the book that really hooked me on Titanic stories, but alas, I cannot find it. It was a 1958 edition that looked like this, which I bought in the Carlton Secondhand Bookshop on a rare trip to the city when I was about 16. I literally read it to pieces - it was in about four pieces last time I looked.
There have been so many books written about the Titanic disaster, many more detailed or more accurate or more fanciful than Lord’s; but for me this will always remain the definitive Titanic book. More than that, it’s the definitive humans-in-disaster book. It is crisp and yet unhurried in its account of the unfolding disaster - the entire book is less than 200 pages but it still manages to highlight some of the most moving or tragic moments from the night, like details picked out in gold embroidery on a dark ground. It was written 43 years after the disaster, meaning that many survivors still lived to give Lord their own accounts, and he had access to private letters and writings.
More than this, Lord is clear enough to be able to “show not tell” those details that tell us more about the time and the era than long explanations could; he tells you about Third Class being locked behind gates or turned away by stewards, or of a newspaper making the stoker who tried to steal Jack Phillips’ lifebelt “into a Negro for better copy”, or of the Pekinese dog being saved while so many drowned, but he doesn’t presume to interpret or analyse, most of the time.
I’m personally not interested in the ship’s specs, although I am interested in what she looked like, what it was to experience her, and am always remembering the words of Charles Burgess, the Titanic’s last crewman in active service, who had served on most of the big posh ships after Titanic but still remembered “the care and effort that went into her... she was a beautiful, wonderful ship.” I don’t care about the various theories about “why it really sank” (here’s a clue: ICEBERG), and I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head how long it was or how many tonnes displacement. However, I bet I could easily name 100, maybe 150, Titanic passengers and probably tell you who among them survived and who drowned. Like most Titanic buffs I’ve had my own favourites among the passengers and crew (Harold Bride, Jack Thayer, Fifth Officer Lowe, Thomas Andrews), and will grasp for any and every crumb about them. And subsequent books have only fed more and more into that.
And I have my own theories and ideas and questions. Did the First Class men who saw their wives into lifeboats really know they were going to die, therefore being noble in the face of certain doom - or did they believe until close to the end that the ship really was unsinkable, and were therefore assuming their gallantry would be admired and laughed over fondly with their wives once they were safe in New York? Who were the people in cabin C-78 who refused to leave despite Steward Etches’ explanations? Was there really a deep, abiding gay love between Frank Millet and Archie Butt? What happened to Chief Officer Wilde, who seems to have made little impression on anybody all night? Did Jack Phillips really make it to the overturned Collapsible B, only to die and slip off during the night? And what the hell really went on on the Californian that night?
In the wake of the 100th anniversary I have read new Titanic books and old favourites, and they’ll all be going on Goodreads pretty soon. But here are some brief recommendations, all books available on Kindle.
Walter Lord, A Night to Remember. Still the best Titanic book ever written, because it manages to grasp and convey the enormity, tragedy, humour, bravery, cowardice, unfairness and extraordinariness of that night in a small space.
Walter Lord, The Night Lives On. Follow-up, attempting to answer some of the questions raised since the publication of the first book, and also to counter some of the arguments people had brought up about the night (like the one that so much of Third Class perished because they couldn’t speak English).
Hugh Brewster. Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World. Wonderful for following up what the few days on the Carpathia were like, after the lifeboats were picked up. Also follows what happened to many of the first-class passengers in the post-Titanic era. Great for answering so many silly, trivial questions - like what happened to Mrs Candee’s son who had been injured in an aeroplane accident?
Richard Davenport-Hines. Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats and the Worlds They Came From. A much more well-rounded book than Gilded Lives, mainly in the fact that there is so much focus on the crew and on the appalling conditions that the trimmers, stokers, etc on those big ocean ships endured. (The Kindle version of this seems to be called Titanic Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crews; pretty sure it's the same book)
Daniel Allen Butler. Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic. Thorough explorations of the ship and the events, although he does include some speculation.
And, although I have mentioned this one before: Titanic In Her Own Words. A BBC doco which has synthesised the wireless messages which flew back and forth between ships that night, each ship having a different synthesised voice. Try to download the MP3 if you can rather than listen online - the MP3 is an extended version and much better.
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