The Ship of Dreams. Gareth Russell
in First Class
VIOLET JESSOP, a stewardess in First Class
THOMAS JONES, Able Seaman, put in charge of Lifeboat 8
MARY SLOAN, a stewardess in First Class
ANNIE ROBINSON, a stewardess in First Class
CAPTAIN EDWARD J. SMITH, Commander of the Titanic
CAPTAIN ARTHUR ROSTRON, Commander of the Carpathia
DR FRANCIS (‘FRANK’) MCGEE, the Carpathia’s Surgeon
DR WILLIAM O’LOUGHLIN, the Titanic’s Surgeon
HENRY WILDE, the Titanic’s Chief Officer
WILLIAM MURDOCH, the Titanic’s First Officer
CHARLES LIGHTOLLER, the Titanic’s Second Officer
HERBERT PITMAN, the Titanic’s Third Officer
JOSEPH BOXHALL, the Titanic’s Fourth Officer
HAROLD LOWE, the Titanic’s Fifth Officer
JAMES MOODY, the Titanic’s Sixth Officer
On Sunday 14 April 1912, at about 11.40 p.m., the Titanic, an ocean liner operated by a British shipping company with American owners, struck an iceberg. Two hours and forty minutes later, she sank with a loss of life that was variably estimated at 1,502, 1,503, 1,512, 1,517 and 1,522 but which has recently been established at 1,496.[1] A total of 712 survivors in lifeboats were rescued by another British ship, the Carpathia, between two and six hours after the Titanic disappeared. Two inquiries were held, in each of her homelands, and they reached broadly similar conclusions about what had been done in the past and should be done in the future. In 1985, the wreck of the Titanic was discovered 2½ miles under by an expedition led by American oceanographer Robert Ballard.[2]
These are the bare facts surrounding a ship that is, arguably, the most famous vessel in history. When compared to nearly any other contender for that epithet, the Titanic’s popular appeal outstrips that of Cleopatra’s barge, the Mayflower, the Lusitania and perhaps even Noah’s Ark. Her name has become a synonym for catastrophe. The story of the largest and most luxurious ship ever built, racing across the Atlantic Ocean in an attempt to break the record for that journey, ignoring numerous ice warnings and then sinking with the loss of thousands, is an entrenched narrative, the belittling of which is surprisingly easy, if one is so inclined. Had she survived her first voyage, the Titanic would have dated like other ocean liners. While she was the largest man-made moving object when she eased off from her Southampton pier in 1912, she would only have held that accolade for the next thirteen months, until the arrival of a German passenger liner with room for a thousand more passengers amid 6,000 more tons.[3] Some of the Titanic’s second-class passengers preferred the accommodation on the Mauretania.[4] Before she sank, the Titanic was eclipsed in fame by her elder and slightly smaller sister ship, the Olympic, which had captured the attention of the world’s press when she set sail a year earlier.[5] Her passenger quarters, while splendid in many places, were soon surpassed – the march of comfort on the sea lanes did not halt in the spring of 1912.
The exceptionalism of the Titanic can be rubbished in other ways. On a more macabre note, she was neither the only great seafaring tragedy of the Edwardian era – two years after her, the Empress of Ireland sank following a collision with another ship as she departed Quebec City, with the loss of just over a thousand lives.[6] Nor, arguably, was she the most important. In 1915, the Titanic’s one-time rival, the Lusitania, foundered off the coast of Ireland with marginally fewer casualties, but far greater and more tangible a political impact. The attack on the Lusitania by the German submarine U-20 irrevocably hardened attitudes towards Imperial Germany in the United States at the height of the First World War, forcing an emergency meeting of the Crown Council in Berlin which effectively altered German naval policy for the next eighteen months and prepared the mood that would bring America into the war against Germany two years later.[7]
However, although the Titanic’s dreadful allure may be easy to unpick, it is impossible to dispel. There are societies dedicated to the study of the Titanic across the world, along with numerous museums, souvenirs, novels, musicals, children’s cartoons, computer games, television shows and movies. The first Titanic motion picture was produced in the weeks immediately after the sinking, another silent movie was produced in Germany later that same year, and an early ‘talkie’, Atlantic, appeared in 1929, heavily inspired by the sinking but with the ship’s name and appearance altered after the Titanic’s still-operational owners, the White Star Line, allegedly threatened a lawsuit.[8] A project in the late 1930s between David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock to dramatise the disaster never moved beyond pre-production, with the result that after Atlantic it was another fourteen years before a motion picture that was both filmed in sound and unambiguously about the Titanic appeared.[9]
On 30 April 1943, Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, banned the movie Titanic, the production of which he had initially authorised.[10] Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Goebbels had overseen a series of anti-British costume dramas that were released in Germany and then, despite some concerns about their potential impact, in various Nazi-occupied territories. Titanic proved to be the last of this politicised genre, which had begun with 1940’s Der Fuchs von Glenarvon and 1941’s Mein Leben für Irland, both dramatising the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. They were joined by Ohm Krüger, set during the Boer wars, and by a biographical drama loosely based on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with her English kinswoman, Elizabeth I, cast as a villain who was manipulative to the point of depravity. By the time Titanic went into production, American entry into the war on the Allied side had widened the target of these historical didactics, for which the sinking of the Anglo-American Titanic offered seemingly perfect fodder. The allocated budget made Titanic one of the most expensive motion pictures produced thus far in Germany, dozens of naval personnel were transferred from active duty at the front to serve as extras, and the decommissioned German passenger liner Cap Arcona was provided as a set for much of the filming. Prior to the war, the Cap Arcona had been the most luxurious ship to ply the route to South America, sailing from Hamburg to Buenos Aires, but like many vessels she had been removed from commercial service upon the outbreak of hostilities.
Goebbels wanted Titanic to depict Teutonic heroism, to which end a fictional German officer was inserted into the ship’s roster and shown in the final scenes dashing bravely through flooding corridors to rescue trapped children, but the movie was also intended to highlight the corruption of Germany’s enemies. In one particularly memorable scene, showing a dinner during the Titanic’s voyage, the shipping line’s owner, J. Bruce Ismay, gives a speech to the Dining Saloon boasting of the liner’s record-breaking speed. At his announcement, several American financiers scuttle away from their tables to send telegrams ordering their brokers to buy shares in the White Star Line while, back in the Saloon, the Titanic’s privileged passengers stand as the ship’s orchestra plays ‘God Save the King’. As a depiction of German perceptions of British arrogance and American greed, the scene had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer – although that, of course, was not the reason Goebbels vetoed his own creation.
Filming had been plagued with difficulties from the start. The director, Herbert Selpin, privately complained about the military extras’ sexual harassment of the actresses, comments that may have widened into criticism of the armed forces. The scriptwriter reported Selpin’s comments to the Gestapo, who had him arrested and imprisoned, at which point Goebbels almost certainly gave the order that Selpin was to be found hanged in his cell, as if from suicide. Certainly, almost nobody believed Selpin had died by his own hand.[11] Back on set, the production costs were spiralling beyond the generous allowance and several Allied bombing raids on nearby