Already a subscriber? Log in
‘It was her first voyage, and she was carrying over a thousand passengers to New York, many of them millionaires,’ wrote Wilfred Scawen Blunt, with a blend of awe, pity and schadenfreude that are still recognisable elements of the abiding fascination of the story:
One thing is consoling in these great disasters, the proof given that Nature is not quite yet the slave of Man, but is able to rise even now in her wrath and destroy him. Also if any large number of human beings could be better spared than another, it would be just those American millionaires with their wealth and insolence.
The other handy thing about the Titanic, as writers from Mark Girouard to the American art historian David Lubin have successfully shown, is that you can say almost anything you like about it and it will probably be true. For a century now authors and filmmakers have used it to explore anything and everything from concepts of masculinity to class divisions, racial stereotyping and anti-Semitism; and Titanic Lives follows suit in the grand style, weaving around the story of one tragic voyage a whole, richly detailed and haunting history of European migration at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The book could, and perhaps should, have been 50 pages shorter, but what ought to go would be hard to say. Henry Harper’s Pekingese, Sun Yat Sen, perhaps, who was rescued in one of the lifeboats? Or Helen Bishop’s lapdog, Frou-frou, bought in Florence on honeymoon? Or the Astors’ Airedale? Or the rare 1598 copy of Bacon’s Essays, which the bibliophile millionaire Harry Widener took down with him? Probably not.
The pity of the Titanic story lies in the detail and it would be as hard to dispense with the few prosaic facts known of a Cornish tin miner or Croatian migrant as it would the more lurid story of Hugh Woolner, one of the first-class passengers who survived. Discrimination would not just be invidious, it would be unhistorical. Ahead of the hundreds of third-class passengers, whose frozen bodies would later be found bobbing in their lifejackets like so many seagulls, had once stretched those same opportunities and hopes that had first brought the Guggenheims and Astors from Europe to America; behind them, in villages across Ireland, Croatia, Syria and southern Greece, they left gaps every bit as desolate as that in the Wideners’ palatial Lynnewood Hall.
This will not be the last book on the Titanic, but it is a safe bet that there will not be a better. It is a grim and harrowing story in its own right, but in Richard Davenport-Hines’s hands it becomes a compelling indictment of the callousness, indignities, greed and exploitation that on both sides of the Atlantic characterised the mass migration of a huge swathe of Europe’s population.
There are the well-known moments of heroism and decency, and contemporaries took what consolation they could out of the Titanic story. It showed how Englishmen could die, the newspapers told them, as they would tell them again a year later, when the news of Scott’s death reached England. It showed, whatever the Bishop of Winchester might preach, that the Anglo-Saxon race was not morally or physically bankrupt. ‘The story is a good one,’ Winston Churchill wrote to his wife.‘The strict observance of the great traditions of the sea towards women & children reflects nothing but honour upon our civilisation.’ He felt ‘proud’, he told her, ‘of our race and its traditions as proved by this event. Boat loads of women & children tossing on the sea — safe & sound — & the rest — silence.’
He was clutching at straws. Faulty design, incompetence, negligence, greed, criminal over-confidence — from shipyard to Atlantic grave, these are the real elements of the Titanic tragedy and the rest is not so much silence as window dressing. Sir Osbert Sitwell was not the only one who looked back on the sinking of the Titanic and saw ‘a symbol of the approaching fate of Western Civilisation’.
Also in Book Reviews
Also by David Crane
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in