The last hours of the Titanic were a perfect tragedy. No wonder we’re still obsessed
What with the centenary coming up next month, it was hard to imagine anything that could make the Titanic loom larger in the popular consciousness. But that was before Julian Fellowes’s new series, to be broadcast this month. It’s the lot: period detail, a snobbish countess, class resentment and a darkish-blue iceberg. Each and every episode ends with the sea coming in. And all those important details get a mention. I’ve only seen two episodes but it’s already touched on the number of lifeboats, the absence of binoculars, other ships’ ice warnings, iron versus steel rivets, exit opportunities for first class versus steerage passengers, the speed and the bad ship California that didn’t respond to distress flares. If you think Downton Abbey gave the nitpickers a field day, wait till you see the Titanic obsessives getting to grips with this.
But that’s the thing about the Titanic. It has everything. It was a hideous human catastrophe that cost 1,490 lives: the deaths of those trapped inside the Titanic still don’t bear thinking about. The dramatis personae were remarkable: the millionaires J.J. Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim; the most celebrated journalist of the day, W.T. Stead; even a movie star, Dorothy Gibson. The event took about the same real time as a play, two hours and 40 minutes. And it had so many of the elements of a play, only more and better. The clichés about the Titanic, most of them, were true: women and children did go first; the band did play as the ship sank — from ragtime to a melancholy walz called Autumn (and yes, Nearer, my God, to Thee); Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet did change into evening dress to drown; steerage did fare far worse than first class; the vessel was indeed described as ‘practically unsinkable’.
For obvious reasons, the sinking of the Titanic raises abidingly interesting questions of how we would act in the same circumstances. Back then, Bernard Shaw had little time for the notion that the wretched captain should be regarded as a hero by the popular press for errors of judgment that would have had him court-martialled in the Navy. You can just see our papers doing the same: turning every victim into a hero. And what about the collective act of renunciation whereby the great majority of the men on board who could make a choice stood aside to let women and children take their places in the lifeboats? When Senator Smith, who presided over the US inquiry into the event, asked Second Officer Lightoller if this were the law of the sea, Lightoller famously replied, ‘It is the law of nature.’
Helen Churchill Candee, one of the (first class) survivors, observed: ‘The action of the men on the Titanic was noble. They stood back in every instance that I noticed and gave women and children the first chance to get away safely.’ Charlotte Collyer, a grocer’s wife, said: ‘Our second-cabin [class] men were heroes.’ There were of course, exceptions. J. Bruce Ismay, head of the White Star Line, got into a lifeboat after helping women and children into others — and was subjected to a ruthless inquisition during the British inquiry for his failure to seek out women and children on another deck to take his place. Indeed, the onus was on any man who survived to explain himself afterwards.
What would be the chances of it happening now? Children would still get precedence, but how about women? There’d be fewer men holding back, probably, than a century ago, but I’d say that more would than wouldn’t. A friend once told me that the point at which he stopped giving up his seat to women on the Underground was when he realised they could take his job.
But life and death are different. I’d say most men I know, working on the basis that women are physically weaker, would put women first — though I’d probably put more money on conservatives than liberals, old than young. It’s a moot point, which public figure you’d trust to give up his seat… George Osborne? Ken Livingstone? Richard Dawkins? There has been of course a recent test case. When the Costa Concordia went down, the principle of women and children first was not universally respected — some men muscled ahead of women and, unlike the Titanic, some crew put themselves before passengers — but the coast guard who tried to take charge was clear he expected women and children to be counted first and public opinion took a dim view of the men who didn’t show chivalry.
The implications of all this for feminism were already debated in 1912. Boats not votes, was the mocking chorus of one anti-suffragette song, and one feminist Chicago journal, Progressive Woman, observed acidly that ‘If you please, the women are beginning to say that they are willing to exchange the chivalry for the right to help run a government that will build safer ships.’ That argument, that things would be better if only women ran the world, still gets an airing — remember the argument that if only it had been Lehman Sisters, not Lehman Brothers, the 2008 crash wouldn’t have happened? — but it’s harder to make, now that women can run shipping companies. In fact,there’s a global organisation, WISTA, for female shipping executives.
Back with the Titanic, what about the tricky judgment whereby those in the lifeboats, many only part-filled, had to decide whether to go back to pick up the drowning, whose cries were ‘the most appalling noises that human being ever listened to’? Only two out of 20 did; plainly the women on board didn’t insist. Most were scared lest the current from the sinking ship took them down, others that the number wanting to clamber on board would be too great. (They were wrong; one survivor records that his lifeboat refused to take drowning men, but none cursed and one man told them: ‘God bless you.’) Would we be more heroic? The great thing about the anniversary — and, for dinner-party purposes, the television series — is that it brings all these questions to life. The Titanic offered any number of moral dilemmas to ponder in 1912. It still does.