TWO YEARS ago Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the Titanic’s sinking, died. At nine-weeks-old, the youngest passenger, she had been, according to the Daily Mirror ( May 12th, 1912), “the pet of the liner during the voyage ... So keen was the rivalry between women to nurse this lovable mite of humanity that one of the officers decreed that first and second class passengers might hold her in turn for no more than ten minutes.” Although she, her brother and mother, would be among the first steerage passengers to escape aboard Lifeboat 10, her father, bound with the family for a new life as a tobacconist in Wichita, Kansas, like some 1,500 others would not survive.
Then there there’s the story of Isidor Straus, founder of the RH Macy department store, and his wife Ida who refused to board a half-full lifeboat. “I will not be separated from my husband,” she insisted. “As we have lived, so will we die, together.” He insisted that his wife’s maid take her place, and the couple were last seen on deck sitting in deck chairs, holding hands. A huge wave swept them into the sea.
The sad but lingering appeal of that night, a hundred years ago next Saturday, is all bound up with the story of the mighty engineering feat that was the Titanic, and the scale of the disaster, but also, and even more so, with the countless stories of Strauses and Deans. Of the band that went on playing to the end, all of whose members would perish. Individual stories of courage and of chance, of class, of arrogance, complacency and greed, of generosity. Stories woven into a tapestry that vividly represents not just a great ship, but a hidebound, conservative society steaming towards its own disaster.
The commemorations that are marking the sinking, not least Belfast’s multiple events and its fine €120 million Titanic Belfast towering visitor’s centre, have combined the idea of remembering but with a curiously celebratory and uplifting quality that sits a little uneasily with the tragedy. But this is marketing, the selling of Belfast as a tourist destination – accentuate the positive, the heroism, the engineering achievement, the spirit ...
A less Hollywood-driven account, but truer, will rediscover a more nuanced story, one that is also being told by others commemorating the tragedy. It will recall in Harland and Wolff a sectarian bastion of unionism, in the White Star’s boss, the man who sacrificed lifeboats for promenade space, in the death toll, a mirror image of a privilege-driven society....
Yes, let’s remember the Titanic.