100 Years since the Titantic distaster

[woodrot]

please post your memories and recollections of that fateful day here.

My thoughts are with those still grieving

[Marmora Man]

As the Polar Bear sang:

HAVE YOU HEARD ANY WORD OF THE ICEBERG?

By Les Barker

On a cold rainy night on a Liverpool quayside

In the years before the Great War

The world was in shock at the loss of Titanic

So proud had they been days before.

Relatives gathered for news of their loved ones,

To read through the list of the dead,

When into the throng came a sad-eyed Polar Bear,

And to the clerk at the counter he said?

Chorus:

Have you got any news of the iceberg?

My family were on it you see,

Have you got any news of the iceberg?

They mean the whole world to me.

My wife and children were coming from Greenland

To be by my side in the zoo.

Belinda's my wife and the eldest's called Bernard, and Billy, well, he's only two.

I know on the ship there were hundreds of people,

And I know the iceberg's not yours,

The Polar Bear's eyes held the start of his teardrops

He covered his face with his paws.

It's been over a year since I last saw my children,

I left home to build my career:

I've worked very hard, I'm a star in the circus,

It's all been for nothing I fear.

There's my face on the poster,

We're in town this week.

My Children were meeting me here.

Everyone watched as he struggled to speak.

By now all the people had gathered beside him,

His grief was one they could share,

The people around him in silence and sadness,

Listened to the sad Polar Bear.

I wanted my children to see me performing,

And Belinda, she would have been proud.

At last, lost for words and his tears flowing freely,

The question was asked by the crowd.

Chorus:

Have you got any news of the iceberg?

My family were on it you see:

Have you got any news of the iceberg?

They mean the whole world to me.

[ianr]

Were any cats lost?

[Alan Medic]

I'd like to know what a 'distaster' is. Some sort of starter? Was the 'Titantic' the name given to the iceberg? How did it come out of all this? Did it melt away into oblivion?

PS There are always cats lost.

[woodrot]

I was thinking about raising funds for a memorial on Goose Green to the ships cat, Jenny. Who sadly perished in the icy brine of the North Atlantic on that fateful day. I propose a 1571 minute silence for the much missed and dearly loved Jenny.The peoples cat.

A memorial to all missing/ lost/ locked in sheds cats ever.

[katie1997]

glaciation activity

http://www.metaphoricalplatypus.com/Images/CatHistory/Churchill%20and%20Blackie.jpg

[woodrot]

actually, it seems that Jenny jumped ship in Southampton and avoided the disaster

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/nostalgia/titanic/titanic-did-psychic-cat-foretell-disaster-16135338.html

bah.

[Mick Mac]

I was at the Titanic exhibition in Southampton last week. It affected many families as the crew were mostly fromSouthampton and about 500 of those lost were local people.

The exhibition included spoken transcripts from the inquiry which put Ismays conduct under the spotlight. As it was at least partly his decision to have insufficient lifeboats and arguably he put pressure on the captain to increased the speed of the boat, he surely did not have a right to a place in a lifeboat. However without his survival the inquiry would have been short on official information.

Also watched the BBC2 commemoration from Belfast last night which was very good also.

[DJKillaQueen]

Yesterday I bought a copy of the book 'A Night to Remember' in Sainsburrys (they are selling it for ?3.75) because I wanted something new to read (and have read pretty much everything else but the one book held as being the best book written on the disaster). I completely missed that I bought and started reading it on the 100th anniverary of the disaster though!!!! Doh.....

I'm already half way through it but the foreword points out that there is no evidence to support the claim that Ismay put pressure on the Captain to increase speed. It's impossible to know for sure why a liner was travelling at speed in the dead of night in an area that had received iceberg warnings. It was Captain Edward Smith's last voyage. Icebergs also didn't normally veture that far south and the Captain had changed course several times to avoid sighted icebergs. The iceberg that Titanic hit was it's SEVENTH warning about icebergs. So there has to be a lot of questions asked as to why a Captain of that level would ignore the sum of his experience because of the pressure of a White Star Managing Director. After all....it's not like he would be fired if he refused is it?

[Huguenot]

Apparently the pillorying of Ismay was unfounded: it was predicated on a personal feud with Randolph Hearst, and antisemitic fabrication from Goebbels and the Nazis!

From the Beeb:

The stories surrounding J Bruce Ismay, the president of the company that built the Titanic, are many but almost all centre on allegations of his cowardice in escaping the sinking ship while fellow passengers, notably women and children, were left to fend for themselves.

All of the screenplays, including the new TV series written by Julian Fellowes, portray Ismay as a coward who bullied the captain into driving the ship too fast and then saved his own skin by jumping into the first available lifeboat.

"Every single film-maker has found that betrayal to be too delicious not to incorporate into their film," says Paul Louden-Brown.

"If you go back to the genesis of where that came from, it goes back to William Randolph Hearst, the big newspaper magnate in the US. He and Ismay had fallen out years before over Ismay not cooperating with the press with regard to an accident that happened to a White Star Line ship."

Ismay was almost universally condemned in America, where the Hearst syndicated press ran a vitriolic campaign against him, labelling him "J Brute Ismay". It published lists of all those who died but in the column of those saved it had just one name - Ismay's.

Some survivors said he jumped on the first lifeboat, others that he had demanded his own crew to row him away and the ship's barber said that Ismay had been ordered into a boat by the Chief Officer.

Lord Mersey, who led the British Inquiry Report of 1912 into the loss of the Titanic, concluded that Ismay had helped many other passengers before finding a place for himself on the last lifeboat to leave the starboard side.

"Had he not jumped in he would merely have added one more life, namely, his own, to the number of those lost," he said.

The 1943 German film Titanic, commissioned by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, portrays Ismay as a power-mad Jewish businessman who bullies the brave, Teutonic captain into driving the ship too fast through the ice despite being warned that this is reckless.

The 1958 film A Night to Remember, long regarded as the most historically accurate of the Titanic films, also portrays Ismay as the villain.

Louden-Brown believes this to be unfair, and raised the issue with James Cameron when he was working with him as a consultant. In Cameron's film Ismay uses his position to influence the captain to go faster with the prospect of an earlier arrival in New York and favourable press attention.

"Apart from being told, under no circumstances are we prepared to adjust the script, one thing they also said is 'this is what the public expect to see'," Louden-Brown says.

Ismay never overcame the shame of jumping into a lifeboat and retired from the White Star Line in 1913, a broken man.

Frances Wilson, author of How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J Bruce Ismay, says she feels sympathetic towards Ismay and sees him as "an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances".

"He was emotionally completely unequipped for what he was to go through... His confused and confusing behaviour on the Titanic was due to the confusion around his status - was he an ordinary passenger, as he claimed, or as the inquiries suggested a 'super-captain'? People on ships act according to rank and Ismay had no idea of what his rank was."

[DJKillaQueen]

Also if you look at the passenger list for those who died and survived and you look at it divided by first class, second, steerage and crew, what is immediately apparently is that a fair few men from the first class passengers were first into lifeboats with their wives (you have to remember at the time that upper class people thought they were born to rule and were not going to be told by a seaman what they could and couldn't do). The press at the time poured huge guilt on any man who survived. 'Women and children first' became replaced with 'women and children only'. It's only with the passage of time and the fuzz of historical account that the story becomes focussed on one or two characters (whether factually correct or not)....a natural consequence of simplifying a tale before it passes into legend. Hence the cry of E.H. Carr in his book 'What is History' warning of the need to study the historian as much as the history she or he writes.

[Mick Mac]

The official inquiry into the titanic exhibition asked ihim the direct question if felt it was appropriate knowing that he knew there was insufficiet space for all passengers whether he asked if he owed that space to another passenger. His response was no.

The captain and the designer went down with the ship like many others who had no input into design and no control over events and Ismay should have taken the same decision as the captain and designer.

Helping others onto lifeboats is no big deal if you know tjeret is going to be a space for you on the last one.

[Huguenot]

Mick Mac, are you suggesting that he should have killed himself in some sort of 'Seppuku' ritual even if there was a space on a lifeboat that none other were available to take, as a way for atoning of the design flaws inherent within the construction? A sort of religious martyrdom?

Legislation, regulation, economics, social attitudes and corporate policy will have had far greater influence on the number of lifeboats on board rather than a single individual's supposed personal decisions.

Interestingly Ismay suffered particularly at the hand of Irish Catholics due to Harland and Woff's sectarian employment policies - for which he can hardly take personal responsibility.

I can't imagine he was a particularly nice bloke, but then I don't imagine I would have liked many Victorian oligarchs, sustained as they were by exploitation, and belief in genetic supremacy and birthright.

Why single Ismay out?

[DJKillaQueen]

Only his position as Managing Director singles him out for criticism, but his reply also I think typifies the psychology of a person determined to survive no matter what. I don't sit easy with the notion that his position makes a determination to survive immoral. It's a difficult one for me. I think Ismay saw a chance and took it. Who wouldn't do the same?

I personally think the mistakes on Titanic (and that's everything from design to the voyage itself) are too numerous to blame on any individual. By the time of the launch of the last collapsable, the scene on board would have been one of fear and panic and chaos. At that moment, there is no hierarchy, social or otherwise - just people.

[woodrot]

well this piss take thread has gone well hasnt it

[Huguenot]

Just a note on the lifeboat issue.

We tend to judge the role of a lifeboat upon those events that actually unfolded, rather than the original intention.

If the lifeboats were there to 'save the lives' of passengers on a rapidly sinking ship in the North Atlantic then it would be appropriate to blame a corporation who 'deliberately and knowingly' did not have sufficient to do so.

However, this wasn't the designed intention, nor was the disaster anticipated to have a reasonable risk of taking place.

The lifeboats were actually there to act as 'ferries' to attendant ships that were expected to arrive within a reasonable amount of time for a boat that was compartmentalised to the extent that sinking had a ridiculously low expectation of taking place.

Just a design flaw - not mass murder.

We make the same decision today - where automatic train collision avoidance systems are not installed in the UK because the cost of installation isn't regarded as comparative with the expectation of an accident taking place.

[????]

Sitting through Titanic seemed like a 100 years

[DJKillaQueen]

lol quids.......I agree...couldn't wait for the darn ship to sink in the end!

H has a point regarding lifeboats though. The same could be said for not giving parachutes to airline passengers for example. In rough seas, lifeboats and life rafts have limited use anyway.

But in the end all the mistakes are academic. She should never have hit an iceberg. She was going too fast at a time when other ships in the srea had stopped for the night for safety reasons. Responsibility for that is with the Captain. I think Captain Smith was complacent. That his years of experience had seen a revolution in ship buidling and the safety attached to vessels. That he belived the folly that a ship could be so safe it couldn't sink. And because of that he took a risk with speed to perhaps end his career on the glory of a record breaking maiden voyage. It's just a theory but one I think to be more likely than a man, reknowned for being a natural leader, who commanded the respect of everyone around him, being pressured by a company boss, of a company he was about to retire from working for.

[Mick Mac]

Huguenot Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Mick Mac, are you suggesting that he should have

> killed himself in some sort of 'Seppuku' ritual

> even if there was a space on a lifeboat that none

> other were available to take,

Funnily enough that seems to be the suggestion of the questioner at the inquiry.

But space on a lifeboat that noone else was available to take? If that was the case then fine but were there not many who could have taken this place ahead of him?

[Mick Mac]

DJKillaQueen Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

I

> think Ismay saw a chance and took it. Who wouldn't

> do the same?

>

I think that is exactly what happened and why he received criticism.

[DJKillaQueen]

Approx one third of first class male passengers survived (58 of them). On the other hand 81 third class female passengers (around half) and 53 third class children (two thirds of those in third class) died. In total from the passenger lists, 126 men survived whilst 154 women and children died. Of the crew, 189 men survived (approx a quarter) and all but two female crew survived. More than enough room then to save all of the women and children if class hadn't been such an issue.

[Lost Yorkshire Man]

My brother died that night. He was a porter on the Titanic and died of a heart attack after seeing a couple making out in the back of a car that was in storage.

RIP Bro

[*Bob*]

Very much the Apollo 13 of her time, in that nobody was really interested until she sank.

(throws long-lost jewel poignantly into the icy depths)

[El Pibe]

"if class hadn't been such an issue"

I was reading that it was much less to do with class and much more to do with standards of health and safety.

Third class passengers were lower down in the hull, and many simply couldn't find their way out as exits weren't signposted or many of the doors were still locked (as dictated by US immigration law to ensure no sneaky avoiding Ellis Island). Also many refused to abandon their possessions.

First class passengers were above decks and right next to lifeboats.

[DJKillaQueen]

That's all true, along with there being no organised evacuation plan in place. But class was at the heart of the locked doors and gates. The first class passengers were not subject to the saame scrutiny through immigration...so class plays again. And some male first class passengers used their upper class status to insist on being allowed into a lifeboat (the first boat to be lowered only had two women in it!). So class was very definitely dealing different hands to the passengers. The crew had decided that the first class women and children would go first followed by the second and only then would the third class passengers be allowed up (by which time it was too late). Some took things into their own hands and found other ways up or charged the crew and gates. All in all there was enough room to evacuate every woman and child although there were women and children who would not leave their husbands behind. First class ladies who felt that way it seems were allowed to take their husbands. Class again.