TITANIC TALES

Ninety nine years ago today, at approximately 2.20 AM in the morning, and slightly less than three hours after a fatal collision with an iceberg, the RMS Titanic sank, taking with it the lives of over 1500 passengers and crewmen and immediately becoming both the stuff of legend and at the same time a  cautionary tale of mankind’s folly in our continuing battle against the forces of nature.

It’s a moving, shocking and yet somehow humbling story of humanity daring to take on nature and nature sticking two fingers up back at humanity, as this supposedly ‘unsinkable’ vessel, the absolute peak of what human engineering thought it could achieve at that time, sank on its first proper trip out, as if the fates were daring us to tempt them and then laughing back at our pathetic attempts to take them on at their own game.

If she had sunk on her one hundredth voyage or her thousandth, would her tale have resonated quite so much with us over the last century? It would still have been a tragedy of course, but it’s really the fact that it was the first time, the maiden voyage, that somehow makes the story more incredible, more unbelievable, almost as if there is too much going on for it to be even true at all. If you’d written it as fiction, no-one would have thought it credible, although rather incredibly, a novel called “Futility” was written some 14  years earlier about the largest ship afloat, named the “Titan” succumbing to a similarly dreadful fate after striking an iceberg in the middle of an Atlantic crossing. There are, of course, many differences between the fiction and the later facts, but naturally, it is the similarities that strike you.

You know what human beings are like. We love to see the connections and are quite happy to ignore the differences if it helps us to build our case for finding the proof of magic or the patterns making a conspiracy or just plain coincidences being somehow extraordinary.

But then, the story of the Titanic is a very unusual one anyway, because she foundered because of a set of circumstances where, quite literally, the events unfolded at the only possible moment that it could have gone so catastrophically wrong. It is said that the sea was as calm as possible that night and the skies were crystal clear, both of which meant that there was little in the way of movement and light to make the deadly iceberg even slightly more visible to the lookouts in the crow’s nest, none of whom, due to another unfortunate sequence of events, had the binoculars that they should have done because they had been misplaced, and the possession of which might have meant them spotting the iceberg a few seconds earlier, and it was just those few seconds that spelt disaster for the mightiest steamship of the era.

It is essentially true that if the iceberg had been spotted a few seconds earlier, the fatal turn the ship took would have missed it altogether and history would have taken a different course. Equally, a few seconds later and she wouldn’t have turned enough and would probably struck the iceberg pretty much head on which, in itself, might have caused some injury and death, but on nothing like the scale that we now know about, because, ironically, a head on collision would not have sunk that ship. Sadly, by trying to avert a disaster, one was caused instead because turning at that precise moment and having that spar of ice rip along so much of the length of the vessel is what doomed her to the fate that history decreed for her.

But there are so many other factors, too that make her death so mathematically unlikely that the fact that they occurred still disturbs us to this day. If the ship had been going just half a knot slower or faster, these two objects would never have even met. Nor would they have done if one breath of wind or one ocean current had caused that iceberg to drift just a few hundred yards in any other direction, but then the tragic story of the doomed Titanic is one that is full of “if onlys” which is probably why it still fascinates us nearly one hundred years later.

So many died of course, because of decisions made in boardrooms and design offices months and even years before, and her specifications actually matched the standing regulations of the time that tended to believe that in the event of accident, the best lifeboat you could hope to be in was the stricken vessel herself, and the ship was truly considered, with the bitterest of irony given all our hindsight, “unsinkable”, a label alone that quite possibly made it almost the dictionary definition of “tempting fate”, and truly, the fates really had it in for that ship…

I can’t remember how old I was when I first became aware of the story of the Titanic but I was still fairly young. It was probably an afternoon showing of “A Night to Remember” back in the days when long summer holidays meant that there was especially interesting television to be seen during the daytime. I know that I wasn’t that old when I read Walter Lord’s book that the film was based upon, but I think that I got the book because I remembered the title of the film. Unless, of course, I read the book first, which is always a possibility, although I have no recollection of getting it, I just know that I had it (and indeed still do). But it is still that powerful film directed by Roy Ward Baker that I remember most vividly, and which can still bring a lump to my throat when I see its portrayal of decency, dignity and bravery amongst the doomed.

The musical sting used to portray the panic and confusion aboard is so powerful that I still hear it in my head whenever there’s some kind of mass panic going on. When I was heading into work during the petrol blockade a few years ago and saw the cars queuing up outside the filling stations it was that musical cue that I heard in my mind as the mass hysteria began to kick in.

Of course, we can never know whether or not that film is an accurate portrayal of those last desperate hours in the middle of the Atlantic, but I like to think that the film shows the best of what people are capable of, whilst equally it doesn’t shy away from showing us the worst too. Whenever I watch it now, I’m left with a sense of wonder at the quiet bravery of those passengers left to their fate with no hope of rescue, knowing full well what is about to happen and facing up to it with calmness and grace, and then I remember the real lives that were genuinely lost that night and my admiration for them grows further still.

I find myself asking if, in similar circumstances, would I be so brave? Given a “no-win” scenario could I act with such dignity and grace? Maybe I would be running around in fear, or curled up in a weeping ball of madness…? Or perhaps I’d be ranting and railing against the unfairness of it all? Would there even be time for that…? Would the all-consuming fear just freeze me and resign me to my dreadful fate? I have always suspected that I’m not one of life’s survivors, but when you hear of people being crushed in the rush to the exits during some disasters, you start to wonder just what, given the situation, any of us is capable of…

In the end, perhaps all that we should remember is that ninety nine years ago, 1517 people from all parts of the social spectrum were brought together by fate and circumstances and were destined to be literally ‘in the same boat’, and they all lost their lives together in the bitter cold of the North Atlantic on a clear April night, some of them stepping aside so that others could have their own chance to survive.