The Titanic was launched in Belfast on May 31, 1911. The White Star Line didn’t believe in christening its ships with champagne; as a shipyard worker commented to a watching journalist, “They just builds ’er and shoves ’er in”.
Today’s the launch day for my book, The Rough Guide to the Titanic.
The book took a year to write. And now that I’ve built ’er, I’m shoving ’er in . . .
Today’s also launch day for Blogtanic. As the centenary of the disaster approaches, I’ll be using this blog to spotlight upcoming events; review the latest Titanic books, movies and TV programmes; and share stories from the final days of the great liner.
If you’re arranging an event, or commemorating the anniversary in some other way, contact me at info@gregward.info, follow @rgtitanic on Twitter, or simply leave a comment here.
In the meantime, to celebrate launch day, here’s the oldest surviving Titanic movie, In Nacht und Eis, a wonderful silent melodrama made within weeks of the disaster and long thought to have been lost.
Blogtanic 
Good luck with the blog. Really looking forward to reading more. And thanks for posting Nacht und Eis – fascinating. Were there hundreds of other films like this being made at the time?
Apparently the movie theatres were filled with cobbled-together “newsreels” consisting of montages of liners setting off to sea, lumps of ice bobbing in the water, and even a bit of real-life footage of Captain Smith from a couple of years earlier. When Nacht Und Eis was released, four months after the disaster, a German trade paper reported that films about the Titanic “don’t attract audiences any more”!