Titanic
The Tragic Story of the Ill-Fated Ocean Liner
Rupert Matthews
Having read it
★★★★☆
Clearly good research coupled with good writing to make for an interesting and grounded take on an evocative twentieth-century event.
It had a good pace and wasn’t too long so aided the narrative and reader interest and basically presented – in my opinion, which was also, sort of, supported in the final chapter – that the Titanic was a fine example of the early days of capitalism and its preponderance for ever bigger and more ambitious things and was a strong example of the legacies of the class system and a folly of engineering new, based on old assumptions but shinier materials. Plus, a combination of circumstances, including natural conditions, worked against a rescue of any successful kind, despite the Carpathia managing to help save and return approximately 700 of the estimated 2,224 onboard.
The unprecedented size of the Titanic and the complex internal layout of the ship would also cause problems. As events unfolded this would prove to be particularly difficult for those in third class. They were deepest in the bowels of the ship and furthest away from the lifeboats. Some of them were faced with a walk of over a quarter of a mile (400 m), and a climb of seven storeys, to get to the Boat Deck – and that was if they knew the way. Of course, they did not. The rigid delineations between the accommodation areas for the three classes of passenger meant that third-class passengers simply did not go to the Boat Deck, so in an emergency they did not know where it was. Neither did second-class passengers for that matter, but they were generally closer to the boats and could work out how to get there more easily.
As with so much about the Titanic, the evacuation plan was a traditional one that failed in the novel environment of the huge liner. The plan was based on those that had worked well enough in liners of 15,000 tons, but in a liner of 46,000 tons it failed. The ship was simply too big and too complex for the old-style evacuation systems to function properly.
A good passage
Icebergs are large individual masses of ice that tower high into the air and extend deep beneath the surface. Only about 10 per cent of the iceberg can be seen above the water. In the North Atlantic, icebergs are typically steep-sided, have jagged summits and are often divided into two or more peaks. Such icebergs can become very unstable as they melt. The warmer waters of the North Atlantic Current erode the subsurface ice quicker than the cool air melts that above the surface. This can make the iceberg top-heavy, causing it to topple over suddenly and without warning.
All these forms of sea ice are composed of glacial ice which is generally clear, with a slight blue or greenish tinge. They appear to be white to the human eye because the ice surface has been pitted and scratched by waves, wind and spray. This mottled and broken surface reflects and refracts the sunlight in such a way that the ice surface appears to be white.
A second good passage
But the Titanic had some very special problems of its own on that freezing cold, beautifully starlit night. For a start there was no rescue ship. The liner was in the middle of the main North Atlantic sea lane. There should have been half a dozen ships within sight of her, but because of the coal strike those ships were tied up in port. There were very few boats about in the North Atlantic. Moreover there was, as yet, no response to the radio distress signal.
That meant that there were only the lifeboats on board Titanic to help her stricken passengers. Given the bitterly cold temperature of the water it was unlikely that anyone who fell into it would survive for very long. In warmer seas people had bobbed about for hours without any ill effects, but that would not happen this night. Only those in lifeboats would stand any chance of survival. And there were simply not enough lifeboats.
A third good passage
The rigid class barriers that had seen the Titanic so firmly divided into separate areas collapsed. The differences in survival rates between first class and third class had passed almost unnoticed in 1912, but soon came to appear deeply unfair and anachronistic. Some suggested that they reflected what was seen as the bad old days. There were even efforts made to try to demonstrate that first-class passengers had been given preferential treatment or that those in third class had been locked down below to drown.
Others looked back to the Titanic as the embodiment of better times when heroic self-sacrifice and devotion to duty were the norm. The behaviour of the ship’s band was held up as being exemplary, as it was. The way in which the crew stuck to their duty even though almost certain death awaited them was hailed as showing all that was best among the old society before the Great War.
The sinking of the Titanic did much to destroy the faith of Western society in technology. For more than a century the wonders of the industrial revolution had seemed to produce nothing but benefit for humanity. More food, better housing, piped and purified water, gas lights and gas heating, better and cheaper clothing, more job opportunities and vastly improved transport links. Each new advance had been hailed by international fairs and enthusiastic newspaper reports, with promises of even better to come.
But now the latest wonder, the great superliners that would ply the world’s oceans and tie humanity together in a common brotherhood as never before, had been brought crashing down in disaster. The supposedly unsinkable ship had sunk. The Bishop of Winchester preached a sermon, the main message of which was that the iceberg had every right to be there, but that the Titanic had not. People began to lose their unquestioning faith in technological advance. The promises made by scientists and industrialists were treated with more scepticism and subjected to more study before being accepted.
Coming so soon before the advent of the First World War and its horrors, the event seemed to symbolise the death of a bygone era. The world of Edwardian splendour and self-confidence had gone down with the Titanic. But though the ship was gone it was not forgotten.