On this day in 1912 the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic hit an iceberg: she sank early the next morning. There were 1,496 deaths and only 712 survivors. I think Titanic’s fate still haunts us because of the combination of hubris (believing a ship couldn’t sink); the unimaginable wealth of some of the first-class passengers; the stories of horror and survival (many more third-class passengers and crew died than others) and the fact that she sank at the beginning of the end of a long period of (relative) European peace, signalling the end of an era.
This month The Aristocrat, the Able Seaman and the tragedy of Titanic is published. It’s my first piece of non-fiction and it tells the stories of two Titanic survivors: Noël Rothes, my great-grandmother, and Thomas Jones. The book also shows what went wrong and what might have been done to prevent at least some of the deaths. I developed the book from my talk about these two survivors, after various people in various audiences urged me to write it all down. (Thank you for persuading me.)
Noël Rothes survived in Lifeboat Number 8, the lifeboat that Able Seaman Thomas Jones commanded. They worked together all night: Noël helped Jones by rowing and taking the tiller, and by doing her best to comfort their fellow passengers who were mostly women who’d had to leave the men they loved behind. Jones did his best to pilot his lifeboat towards a nearby ship where he intended to leave his passengers and return to Titanic for more. But that ship, the Californian, had closed its wireless room for the night (normal practice at a time when wireless rooms were usually manned by a single operator). But the fact that Captain Stanley Lord of the Californian failed to reopen his wireless room when he and some of his crew saw signals that they failed to interpret correctly (because of highly unusual weather conditions) was one of the reasons so few survived Titanic‘s collision with the iceberg.
There’s an extract from the book here and there’s more about it here. It’s available from all good bookshops now and if you’d like to tell me how you felt about it, should you decide to read it, I’d love to know, either in the comments or in a review. Thank you.