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[kcountess]

OMG you guys, OMG.

So I've spent much of the day trying to think of just what to write about the anniversary of the Titanic's sinking, as the Titanic has kind of been a big part of my life.  There are dozens of things I do every day that have even the tiniest reminders, like my email address, knitwit1912.

It's been a few years since I really looked

Comments

[cybertoothtiger]

The Titanic has always fascinated me, too. My grandmother emigrated from England to Montreal in 1912, and her father didn't want to wait for the Titanic so they came on an earlier ship. My grandfather, her future husband, was a naval wireless operator who trained with Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator on the Titanic. And my cousin Steve was an extra on the film.

But mostly it's the Titanic as a symbol of the era - an era which thought it was unsinkable, but was sailing slowly but surely to its doom in the First World War. 1912 was huge in the west. Grain prices were high, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was starting to offer competition to the CPR, and real estate speculation was out of control. Calgary and Vancouver both formed '100 thousand' clubs, thinking their populations were about to boom. It's when most of the grand mansions were built in new, Garden City suburbs. In retrospect, the Titanic sinking was the first sign that all that optimism could be hubris. The president of the GTPR went down with the ship, and the company was bankrupt within two years.

It's also a symbol of all the 'little people,' the lower classes who came here hoping for a better life, whose labour supported the one per cent, but who were largely forgotten and literally left behind. And a premonition of how they were sent to die in the trenches of France because the people in First Class were playing a game of brinksmanship.