Titanic: a night remembered
Stephanie Barczewski Hambledon and London, 382pp, £19.95
ISBN 1852854340
This is yet another book about that tragedy in the small hours of 15 April 1912, when the mighty Titanic encountered a drifting iceberg and sank with the loss of 1,500 lives. Fortunately, it is a story that never loses its power to shock, and those who have not previously read a detailed account will find this one absorbing.
I do, however, take issue with the author's assertion that there is still a dispute as to whose fault it was, and controversy as to how the passengers and crew reacted. The fact that there was a fire out of control in number ten coal bunker is not mentioned. I was also somewhat dismayed at the many references to James Cameron's film, in which smoke billowed out of all four funnels - one was an air vent - and the two lovers fled into the boiler rooms without descending vertical ladders to G deck.
One of this book's strongest arguments deals with the belief that this was a British disaster rather than an American one. Although the White Star Line was owned by the American millionaire J P Morgan, the Titanic's captain and senior officers were all British, as were 900 of her crew. British, too, or certainly not American, were several of the heroes who emerged from the tragedy, including the senior wireless operator who died at his post, the bandmaster who encouraged his musicians to continue playing as the ship began to list, her chief architect Thomas Andrews and Charles Lightoller, the heroic second officer.
Barczewski also describes the near- collision at noon on 10 April as the R M S Titanic started downstream on her maiden voyage from Southampton. Due to the suction of her giant propellers, the nearby liner New York was wrenched from her moorings, hawsers snapping with a sound like gunshots, her stern swinging dangerously towards the Titanic. Just in time, the unsinkable ship stopped her engines and tugs dragged the New York out of the way.
There was another potential danger, a very serious one, this time deep below the waterline and known to both captain and port authorities. Months before the sailing there had been a national coal strike. When it ended, every available ton of coal was purloined to fuel the Titanic. Often coal sluiced down the chutes into bunkers caused combustion, a conflagration easily put out by hosing. This happened to the Titanic, but although she was given a certificate of seaworthiness, the fire raged on. It was burning when she left the dockyards of Belfast and Southampton, still burned when she steamed from Cherbourg to Queenstown. It was finally doused two days before her brush with the iceberg, by which time her steel plates, impure and part compounded of iron, had become brittle.
This important detail is left out of Barczewski's book, possibly because it was never alluded to in Cameron's film. This omission and one or two others rather sink the claim that A Night Remembered contains substantial new material on the history of the Titanic.
That said, it does contain a dramatic and factual account of what happened between 11.40 on the night of 14 April and 2.20am on 15 April, when the blue ensign on the flagpole of the ship finally slipped under the water. I particularly liked the description of the last sighting of Benjamin Guggenheim - one of six millionaires on board - who had changed from nightclothes into full evening dress and shouted out to the lifeboats below that his wife should be told that he had "played the game out straight . . . and to the end". That he had been on board with his mistress - she was saved - is beside the point.
The author also gives us a number of fascinating potted biographies, including that of Jack Phillips, the Titanic's wireless operator, Wallace Hartley, bandleader of the ship's eight-man orchestra, and Captain Edward Smith, master of the ship on its first and only voyage. It is blundering Smith who most captures the imagination. In the photographs he stands there, every inch the venerable sea captain, holding the lead of a giant white dog. One finds it hard to believe that he could be so criminally irresponsible as to disregard the numerous ice warnings and continue to race towards New York while other ships had dropped anchor. There was not just one iceberg; when dawn came on that terrible 15 April, the survivors in the boats saw a horizon dotted with great chunks of ice.
Smith had been involved in another incident seven months earlier when in command of the Olympic, sister ship to the Titanic and bound for New York. Damage had been caused to a propeller shaft and the voyage abandoned. Smith was exonerated from blame because the Olympic had been technically under the charge of the harbour pilot.
In 1912, little blame was attached to him in regard to the Titanic. A statue of him was commissioned, though never erected in Southampton. Curiously, it stands in a park in Lichfield, birthplace of Dr Samuel Johnson. There is another curious fact - the sculpture is the work of Kathleen Scott, widow of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who froze to death in his tent one month before the sinking of the Titanic.
Beryl Bainbridge's most recent novel is According to Queeney (Abacus)
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