-- Titanic witnessed mankind at its heroic best and selfish worst
Titanic took something from the human race when she went down – innocence, certainty and confidence

Titanic was the technological marvel of her age – the ultimate symbol of mankind’s genius, his victory over the elements and a symbol of hope for the new century.
All human life was aboard Titanic.
It contained millionaires and penniless immigrants, the rich from New York and London, the poor from every corner of Europe, men – and women – who were capable of facing death calmly and others who would do anything to stay alive.
The men of first, second and third class on Titanic shared only this – in every class, the majority of them died.
They said goodbye to their families, lit cigarettes and waited for death, true to the old code of honour, “women and children first”.
Those men, from every part of the ship, waving goodbye to the women and children from the deck of Titanic feels like the last act of a lost age of chivalry.
Courage was everywhere that night.
Some wives refused to leave their husbands, and died with them.
The band, in their lifejackets, played as Titanic went down.

Heroic: Captain of the Titanic, Edward J. Smith
And Captain Edward Smith, who legend has dying alone on the bridge, was seen by Fireman Harry Senior in the water after the sinking of Titanic, holding a child up with his last breaths, while others claim he was seen freezing in that black sea, yet still urging lifeboats on, and saying he would follow his ship down.
But there was cowardice, too, and desperate self-preservation.
Bruce Ismay, chairman of Titanic’s owners, White Star Line, slipped into a lifeboat when there were still women and children on board.
Ismay did not look back to see Titanic sink beneath the waves and he was scorned as a coward for the remaining 25 years of his life.
Daniel Buckley, a third class passenger, slipped into a lifeboat by wearing a woman’s shawl – the only evidence of the legend that some men fled Titanic disguised as women.
A stoker who tried to steal a lifejacket from a radio operator was beaten unconscious and left to his fate.
And when Titanic was gone, and a thousand voices screamed in agony in the sub-zero waters of the Atlantic, those in the lifeboats lashed out at them with oars.
The terror of being capsized by the dying was overwhelming.
Titanic witnessed mankind at its selfish worst – and at its very best.
And for 100 years this single, great unanswerable question has haunted our dreams of Titanic – what would I have done?
Here is the inherent human drama of the Titanic. Who will live and who will die?
“You go and I’ll stay a while,” Dan Marvin, on his honeymoon, said to his young wife. He blew his bride a kiss as she stepped into the lifeboat. They never saw each other again.
“You must come with me,” insisted Mrs. Walter Douglas. “No, I must be a gentleman,” her husband stubbornly insisted. They never saw each other again.
Mrs. Isidor Straus, wife of the man who built Macy’s, refused to leave her husband. He, in turn, refused a place in the lifeboat offered because of his age (67).
“I will not go before the other men,” said Isidor Straus, and he sat with his wife in deckchairs, waiting for death.
The couple’s memorial service in New York was attended by 40,000 people.

Lucky few: A lifeboat approaches the rescue ship Carpathia

In both James Cameron’s Titanic and the film A Night to Remember, there is a drunken baker, who looks like comic relief, sucking down a bottle of whiskey, staggering about like Charlie Chaplin and perching on the stern of Titanic as she sits bolt upright in the Atlantic, then slides to her grave.
It was all true.
In reality the Titanic’s drunk was Chief Baker Charles Joughin, of Liverpool, who behaved with insane heroism all night.
Joughin threw women into lifeboats, chucked 50 deckchairs into the Atlantic (straws to cling to) and when he was assigned to number 10 lifeboat as skipper, he jumped out at the last moment and back on Titanic because he thought that leaving the ship would, “set a bad example”.
The Titanic’s comic drunk seems surely marked for death. But the baker rode the stern down and, as Titanic disappeared beneath the surface, claims to have stepped into the Atlantic without even getting his hair wet.
The bottle of whiskey inside him kept Joughin alive in sub-zero waters for hours – far longer than anyone else – and in the end he scrambled on to an overturned canvas lifeboat. Charles Joughin returned to Liverpool and lived for another 44 years.
Who lives another half century and who will die tonight?
In any catastrophic disaster, from 9/11 to the terrible tsunamis of Japan 2011 and Thailand 2004, there is an element of chance in who lives and who dies.
A decision made in a split second can mean the difference between life and death.
What was unique about Titanic was that hundreds consciously chose to die as a matter of honour.
“No woman shall be left aboard because Ben Guggenheim is a coward,” growled millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim.
Guggenheim and his valet changed into formal evening wear then sat in deckchairs, smoking cigars and drinking brandy, waiting for death to come.
Benjamin Guggenheim’s inheritance had largely been squandered on bad investments.

Survivors: Safely aboard the Carpathia after being rescued

In truth he had never been much of a businessman, or much of a husband (he was travelling with his French mistress, a young singer, and she made it to the lifeboats with her maid).
But on the night of his death, Benjamin Guggenheim earned his place in history.
The Titanic feels like an overture to all the horrors of the twentieth century.
The symbol of man’s final victory over nature became a metaphor for the vanity of mankind, and the brutality of fate, and the limits of technology.
The launch of the Titanic did not symbolise a bright new dawn for mankind – but the start of a century where developments in technology would result in the industrial slaughter of the trenches, and the mushroom cloud that threatened the existence of the planet itself.
Nobody really knows how many died on Titanic.
The American Inquiry counted 1,517, the British 1,490 (to understand the confusion, it is worth noting that eight Chinese men were discovered to be travelling on one third class ticket).
It was easily the greatest tragedy in maritime history, but the losses were dwarfed just four years later in the battles of the war that was supposed to end all wars – 35,000 men died on the first day of the Somme.
And yet we remember the victims of Titanic in a unique way. We remember Titanic for more than the senseless loss of life.
Like the casualties of 9/11, their tragedy seems to mark a turning point in our history.
When the icy, black waters closed over the Titanic, and when the last of the screams of the freezing and drowning had finally stopped, the world would look a very different place.
The old world feels like it died with the Titanic – the good and the bad.

Wrecked dream: The bow of the Titanic at rest on the bottom of the North Atlantic

The unforgiving class system of Titanic is part of its myth, and gives it immense symbolic power – we may have lost the age of chivalry with Titanic, but we also lost the age of deference, and serfs who were content with their lot, who would cheerfully tug their forelocks while they died and their superiors lived.
On boarding, first class passengers were greeted personally by Captain Smith while third class passengers had health checks to ensure they had no disease to prevent them gaining entry to America.
History has been kind to Captain Edward Smith, despite dark rumours of excessive alcohol, reckless speeding and suicide.
He is forgiven for everything, because he did the honourable thing and joined Titanic in its watery grave.
It was a night when doing the right thing usually resulted in death. It did not take very long for RMS Titanic to sink.
From hitting the iceberg to disappearing beneath the waves, only two hours and 40 minutes elapsed – about the length of a play, or a film, or some other human drama, a story we might watch in order to better understand the hearts of men.
Death was fickle on Titanic.
Men were allowed to board lifeboats on the damaged starboard side if there were spaces and no women and children were waiting.
On the port side, only one man was allowed to enter a lifeboat – an amateur yachtsman, sent down the rigging to help the sailor in the boat.
There were not nearly enough lifeboats and yet the lifeboats left with empty places. Men often stood smoking on the deck rather than take a place.
Number 1 lifeboat rowed away with 12 people aboard and 28 empty places. And then Titanic began to dip forward and chivalry became more scarce.

Poignant: The last message received from the Titanic

Desperate mobs rushed the last remaining lifeboats. Men made decisions that would give them another 50 years of life, but see them branded as cowards.
Many third class passengers now lost themselves in prayer. Some found their way to the first class restaurant and stared dumbfounded at such impossible splendour.
The band played on and the music floated across a sea as smooth and still as black glass.
In his classic book, A Night to Remember, Walter Lord described how Titanic looked to those in the lifeboats.
“From the boats, they could see people lining the rail; they could hear the ragtime in the still night air.
"It seemed impossible that anything could be wrong with the great ship; yet there they were out there in the sea, and there she was, well down at the head.
"Brilliantly lit from stem to stem, she looked like a sagging birthday cake.”
The very last of the lifeboats had 47 places. There were approximately 1,600 people who needed them.
Then the music ended.
The stern began to rise, and this is where those on board ran to, until it was too steep to stand, and some slipped down into the freezing sea, or clung on until their grip broke.
Titanic tilted forward as if exhausted, finally broken, and acknowledging that it was time to die.
The stern rose still higher.

Tragedy: List of dead men because there were not enough lifeboats

The bow dipped forward and down, and the sea poured in for the end. The lights went off, came on again, then went out for good. Now a single light burned high at the stern. The forward funnel collapsed, crushing hundreds, but washing one lucky canvas lifeboat away to safety.
Then the mighty ship stood bolt upright, an unforgettable and terrible sight, with the din of all its riches smashing inside, as black as death itself against the starry night sky.
Then all noise from the ship stopped.
And at last, always gaining speed, Titanic slid beneath the sea like a collapsing skyscraper.
It did not take long to die in the middle of the night in the sub-zero waters of the Atlantic. Only 13 people made it from the water to the boats.
Those wearing lifejackets died of hypothermia. Those without lifejackets drowned.
Those close to the ship were sucked down to their deaths; those who had swum for their lives or jumped further out had more of a chance.
But the lifeboats all kept their distance.
Only one lifeboat, manned by Fifth Officer Lowe, went back to look for survivors, and even Lowe – a new kind of hero – waited one hour for those thousand souls drowning to “thin out”.
There was no need to wait that long. Hypothermia thinned them out quickly in those freezing waters and Lowe fished only four souls from the water and one of those was dead within the hour.
The other lifeboats rowed away from the screams.

On dry land: Survivors of the disaster There had been endless acts of heroic sacrifice over the last few hours. But it was already a different world.
For 100 years now we have been gripped by this story where we all know the ending.
Every generation discovers Titanic anew, retells her story, tries to find meaning, and sees some reflection of its own time.
The souls who jumped from the Titanic as she stood bolt upright are a ghostly echo of those who jumped from the Twin Towers, on that day to remember when our world changed.
Titanic teaches us that every generation must witness the unthinkable.
When 15,000 men built Titanic in the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, it was more than the biggest ship in history – it was the greatest invention in the world.
The loss of Titanic shook the world – and changed it. Titanic took something from the human race when she went down – innocence, certainty and confidence.
Why are we still haunted by this ghost ship?
Beyond the incredible human drama of that night, it is because when Titanic went down on that cold, starry night exactly 100 years ago, our modern world began. When the sun came up pink and gold on the 712 survivors shivering in their lifeboats, a more anxious age was dawning, a world that we can easily recognise, where man understands the uncertainty of life, the random nature of death and the fragility of all things. In the fate of Titanic we glimpse the place where all our dreams go to die.

14 Apr 2012

By Tony Parsons