On March 9th this year, the Daily Mirror's front page was divided in two. The top portion was given over to a colour photograph of the actress Kate Winslet, with a caption directing the reader to look inside the paper, where , you were told, "Titanic Kate" would reveal all (or words to that effect). Below this item, in much smaller print, appeared the following headline: "Harland & Wolff Sinks - 1800 Workers Face the Sack." This felicitous (or infelicitous, depending on how you look at it) juxtaposition went unremarked by the paper's editors. The point is, that with all the hullaballoo surrounding the second revival of popular interest in the doomed Titanic (of which the centrepiece is James Cameron's highly commercial film starring Kate Winslet), comparatively few people outside Northern Ireland realise, or remember, that the Titanic's birthplace was Harland & Wolff's shipyard in Belfast, and that its construction there was a tremendous source of pride and exultation for the city - before the word "unsinkable" was overtaken "unthinkable".
John Wilson Foster, himself a Belfastman, has already reasserted the city's claim to Titanic fame, as well as exploring all the implications, metaphorical usages and reverberations of the disaster in a pungent little book entitled The Titanic Com- plex. Now he has put together a collection of writings on every aspect of the singular ship - its vastness ("a ship so big it was called Titanic", as Louis MacNeice has it), its conception as an ocean-going miracle, its calamitous encounter with the iceberg, after which all the legends began to proliferate.
What George Bernard Shaw - predictably level-headed - called "outrageous romantic lying" soon passed into the sphere of myth : the band playing on while up to its waist in water, the instances of upper-class chivalry, the calm, steady, courageous demeanour of Captain and crew in the face of death, and all the rest of it.
Other myths arose as well: the Titanic fuelled class-antagonism, for example, when the numbers of steerage passengers who drowned were compared with those of the dead who had travelled in greater luxury. In the end, the Titanic became a metaphor for absolutely everything you care to name: unchristian hubris, Ulster Protestant supremacy, materialism in the modern world, the glamorous era before the cataclysm of the first World War.
And it still goes on. Recently, the Rev Martin Smyth was compared to the iceberg looming out of the darkness to scupper David Trimble, and the North's best chance of peace and sanity. The tragedy, indeed, seems to have drawn to itself a truly astonishing number of coincidences, allegories and poignant ironies, right down to the overworked steward who wrote to his wife on April 9th, 1912, that he wished the bally ship at the bottom of the ocean.
John Wilson Foster has joked about having written extensively on the passenger pigeon (now extinct), the Titanic (lost) and the Ulster Unionist Party, remarking that some people like to see a connection between the three. (Actually, they're not far off the mark. The first was hunted to extinction to decorate the hats of women like some of the passengers travelling on the Titanic, while diehard Unionism must look to any thinking person to be seriously adrift, and moving towards something that will bring down the whole caboodle.) However, the Titanic editor's scholarly and inspiriting approach ensures that whatever he tackles, even if it seemed moribund, will resurface in a new, unexpected and invigorating incarnation.
Patricia Craig's most recent book, The Belfast Anthology, was published last year by Blackstaff Press