Hold The Front Page! Thrilling Details of Titanic Rescue!

Has there ever been a front page to match this one?

This is the New-York Tribune from April 19, 1912.  In the four days since the Titanic hit the iceberg, the world has had no news of the tragedy beyond a piecemeal list of the victims.

Now the rescue ship Carpathia has finally reached New York,  carrying the only survivors of the tragedy, and at last the newspapers have the “THRILLING DETAILS” to get their teeth into.

Or do they?  A quick look at the headlines below, all clipped from this same page, reveals that while the stories are certainly thrilling, it’s quite possible that none of them is actually true.

The stories here include such persistent myths as that Captain Smith shot himself, that White Star Line president J. Bruce Ismay escaped with a hand-picked crew,  and that an officer shot panicking “Italians”.

A century later, we still don’t know whether any of these things really happened.

Top Ten Titanic toe-tappers no. 2: Down with the Old Canoe

Here’s the second selection from my top ten Titanic songs – Down WIth The Old Canoe, recorded by the Dixon Brothers in 1938. Listen to it by clicking on the image below.

While it’s often said that the Titanic disaster was seen as divine retribution for the arrogance of building an “unsinkable” ship, actual expressions of that belief are surprisingly hard to find.  This song, though, a bluegrass duet by two brothers from South Carolina, states it loud and clear.

The Dixon Brothers start by mentioning that “It was 25 years ago”, but they probably adapted the song from a previous version. They then tell their terrible tale, that “Many passengers and her crew went down with that old canoe / They all went down to never rise no more”.

After explaining that “this great ship was built by man, that is why she could not stand”, they move on to use the disaster as an explicit warning to their listeners: “Your Titanic sails today”, and “if you go on in your sin”, you too will “go down with that old canoe”.

You can buy it on the wonderful box set People Take Warning, a compendium of musical mayhem and murder from the early twentieth century. The three separate CDs are categorized as Man vs Machine, which encompasses the Titanic, some tangled and tormented trains, and other transport-related tragedies; Man vs Nature, which is largely weather-related but also covers fires and explosions; and Man vs Man, a catalogue of horrible homicides and heart-breaking homilies.

Author Steven Biel used the title Down With The Old Canoe for his groundbreaking and hugely enjoyable cultural history of the Titanic disaster, a new edition of which is due to appear soon.

Naming the Titanic – or now playing: James Cameron’s Cedric

This photo shows the Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic, under construction at Belfast’s Harland & Wolff shipyards in 1910.

The White Star Line first announced the names of the two ships on 22 April 1908. The impetus for naming the Olympic seems obvious – it was just five days until the opening ceremony of the 1908 Olympic Games in London.

In fact, the name officially referred to the Greek gods of Mount Olympus – the pantheon of Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, and so on. In Greek myth, those gods came to power by subduing the mighty immortal Titans, who had ruled in the preceding Golden Age. Hence the name Titanic.

The Olympic and the Titanic also had a younger sister, work on which had barely started when the Titanic went down. Despite subsequent denials, historians generally agree that this third ship was originally destined to be called the Gigantic – in Greek mythology, the Giants, or Gigantes, were yet another race of gods, who staged a revolt against the Olympic gods in the hope of reinstating the Titans.

The name Gigantic was quietly dropped after the disaster. In 1914, with jingoism seeming a better bet than hubris, the third ship was launched as the Britannic.

Every White Star ship, incidentally, was given a name ending in –ic, whereas the ships of their big rivals Cunard ended in –ia; thus Mauretania, Lusitania and so on. Previous White Star vessels had included the Traffic, the Magnetic, and the Arabic.

When RMS Cedric was launched in 1903, she was, like the later Titanic, the largest ship in the world.

You have to wonder whether the sinking of the Titanic would be quite so well remembered had disaster befallen the Cedric instead. Does James Cameron’s Cedric in 3D have quite the same ring?

The Titanic’s (very) big sister, filmed in 1910

This remarkable footage, from the BFI archive channel on YouTube, shows the construction of the Titanic’s “older sister”, the Olympic, in 1910.

The Olympic and the Titanic were built side by side in the same enormous gantry at Belfast’s Harland & Wolff shipyards, surmounted by 214-foot cranes. Fifteen thousand men worked on the two ships; up to eight of them are thought to have lost their lives.

For the initial overhead sequence here, the camera must have been somewhere near the top.  Sadly, when it moved down to ground level, the operator resisted panning far enough over to reveal the Titanic, which must have been already taking shape.

The Olympic was eventually launched later that year, on October 20, and set off on the first leg of her maiden voyage on May 31, 1911, the same day that the Titanic was launched. Although the Titanic was subsequently modified to provide extra passenger comforts, the two ships were all but identical.

Historians seeking to debunk the myth that the Titanic was considered “unsinkable” thus point to the fact that there’s no record of anyone making similar claims about the Olympic.

Many thanks to Simon McCallum at the BFI for inviting me to post the clip on Blogtanic.

Titanic season at the BFI

The British Film Institute is marking the centenary of the Titanic disaster with a season of Titanic films. Showings at London’s BFI Southbank cinema in April will include Atlantic, made in England in 1929; the infamous “Nazi” Titanic, produced as anti-British propaganda in Germany in 1943, on orders from Joseph Goebbels, which will form a double bill with the 1912 silent melodrama In Nacht und Eis; the first Hollywood Titanic, released in 1953; and the 1958 British docudrama A Night to Remember. The new 3D version of James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic will be shown at the nearby BFI IMAX. I’ll be posting dates for each showing when they’re confirmed.

Potentially the most interesting event of all is Hitchcock’s Titanic Project, a talk by Professor Charles Barr on April 11. Alfred Hitchcock was originally scheduled to make his Hollywood directorial debut with a Titanic movie in 1939. He called it a “marvellously dramatic subject for a motion picture”, but the film was never made. Professor Barr will show a sequence edited from his other work to illustrate how it might have looked.

Caketanic – not just another chocolate-ship cookie

I noticed this vast chocolate Titanic in a bakery window in the city of Lugo in northern Spain last summer. As the shop was closed at the time, I never got to ask who made it; why; how much it cost; or, above all, whether a luscious sponge cake, layered to correspond with each of the Titanic‘s many decks, lay concealed beneath its chocolate exterior.

It came to mind today because of a picture I didn’t have room to use in yesterday’s Raising The Titanic post, which unless I’m very much mistaken shows another truly Titanic cake.

Raising the Titanic in London’s Docklands

Many thanks to Adrian Ward for sending me his photos of Raising The Titanic, staged almost thirty years ago by performance group Welfare State International. Described by Artistic Director John Fox as “part theatre, part encampment, part community gathering”, Raising The Titanic took place in Regent’s Canal Dock Basin in Limehouse as part of the London International Festival of Theatre.

An “allegorical political and mythological extravaganza”, designed to highlight how greed-fuelled redevelopment was changing London’s docklands, it was performed over twelve evenings in July and August 1983. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and the actual wreckage of the Titanic had yet to be re-discovered.

After the original idea of re-floating a sunken barge by pumping it full of air proved too difficult to repeat to a precise schedule, the company ended up using a crane to raise an eighty-foot scaffolding framework out of the water.

As Adrian remembers it:

Raising The Titanic was a genuinely spectacular event, much closer to carnival than to “drama”, starting with food and drink and ending with dancing and fireworks.  It was also political at many levels; only a year had passed since the Falklands war and the sinking of the Belgrano, so the images of disaster and loss at sea had a very contemporary resonance.

Just before the ship went down the band played the (still relevant?) Unthinkable Song:

Don’t think the unthinkable.

Dance to the ragtime band.

How could they sink the unsinkable?

Trust in the Captain’s hand.

Let’s drink what is drinkable.

Nobody’s going to drown.

How could they sink the unsinkable?

How could the world burn down?

Mind over Matter – a Titanic survivor’s story

An American first-class passenger, the redoubtable Colonel Archibald Gracie, wrote the single most dramatic eyewitness account of the Titanic disaster. In his rip-roaring memoir, he described being dragged beneath the waters with the sinking ship, then fighting his way to the surface and onto an upturned lifeboat.

He told his story for  the first time in the Washington Times of April 19, 1912 – the morning after the survivors reached New York. The tone is typically florid: “Emotions never before experienced by man thrilled me as I stood there and felt the great ship trembling”. Amid his tributes to the heroism of all concerned, though, we get the occasional glimpse of repressed panic: “only in rare instances was it necessary for the officers to use force to prevent frenzied men from pushing aside women”.

In his book, Gracie complemented his own experiences with extensive interviews with his fellow passengers, to create a full narrative of the night’s events. Attributing his survival to “mind over matter”, he wrote that in the ship’s final moments,“I questioned myself as to the performance of my religious duties”. He then decided: “God helps those who help themselves; I should have only courted the fate of many hundreds of others had I supinely made no effort to supplement my prayers with all the strength and power which He has granted to me.”

In a public talk on November 24, 1912, Gracie denounced inaccurate newspaper reports of the tragedy. “The terrible phase [sic] of the wreck was that it would go down in history in the way the papers had pictured it”. He insisted for example that the Titanic’s band did not play Nearer My God To Thee, and had stopped playing long before the ship finally sank.

Sadly, Gracie died just ten days later, from the lingering effects of his ordeal. His book, The Truth About the Titanic, was published posthumously the next year.

So what SHOULD you do with the deckchairs on the Titanic?

“Re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” has come to mean making a pointless gesture in the face of certain catastrophe.

When the Titanic really was sinking, and all the lifeboats were gone, baker Charles Joughin hit on a more practical plan for the deckchairs: he threw them overboard.

As he told the British Inquiry into the disaster, he threw fifty chairs into the icy Atlantic through the ports of B deck. “Was it to give something to cling to?” he was asked. “I was looking out for something for myself, Sir”, he replied.

In James Cameron’s Titanic, Joughin appears as a comedy drunk; he’s right there clinging to the rail next to Jack and Rose as the ship goes down.

In real life, he had the last laugh. He let go of the rail at the very last moment, and told the inquiry “I do not believe my head went under the water at all. It may have been wetted, but no more”.

Joughin never needed his floating deckchairs; he managed to clamber onto an upturned lifeboat, and survived the sinking.

Orphans of the Titanic

As the last lifeboat was lowered from the Titanic, a second-class passenger, Mr Louis Hoffman, handed two angelic-looking boys to the women already in the boat. He then stepped back into the crowd of men on deck, and lost his life in the disaster. The two boys, aged two and three, proved to be the only children to survive the sinking without a parent. When it turned that Mr Hoffman had been travelling under a false name, and that the boys could speak no English, their identity became an international mystery. Newspapers all over the world printed photographs of the so-called “Titanic Orphans”, known as “Lolo” and “Lump”.

Their mother, Marcelle Navratil from Nice in France, eventually recognized them as her sons Michel and Edmond. “Mr Hoffman”, her estranged husband, had kidnapped the boys and was taking them to a new life in America.

The elder boy, Michel, eventually became a philosophy professor, and lived into the twenty-first century as the Titanic’s last male survivor. His reflections on the disaster remained bitter: “The people who came out alive often cheated and were aggressive, the honest didn’t stand a chance”.