As the old show Red Dwarf put it: definitely brown trouser time! As a result of the occassional fatality, several injuries, and many terrified passengers, handrails were installed to try and reassure passengers I'm sure it was a big help. I often seek the comfort of handrails when I think the ship I'm on is going to capsize.
The handrails were made of the lightest, strongest material of the time - bakelite, the earliest form of plastic. Fortunately plastic was a bit a novelty so it wasn't seen as a cheap move on management's part.
When World War I broke out in , merchant vessels, and their crews, were required for the war effort to serve in convoys and as hospital ships. By , Germany had unleashed its U-boat fleet in a bid to choke off Britain's supply lines. The toll on the merchant fleet was horrendous. Priest was among those who went to war, serving aboard the armed merchant vessel Alcantara. In February , Alcantara intercepted the German raider Grief, which was disguised a Norwegian ship.
As Alcantara approached, Grief opened fire. There was a short, ferocious, close-range battle, at the end of which both ships were sunk. More than 70 of Priest's shipmates were killed and he only narrowly escaped, with shrapnel wounds. When he returned to work, it was aboard Britannic, Titanic's other - even bigger - sister, which was serving as a hospital ship ferrying wounded soldiers back to Britain through the Mediterranean.
Having already survived a collision on Olympic and the loss of Titanic, it must have been with no small amount of trepidation that he joined the third of the celebrated White Star Liners. Joining Priest on board were two other Titanic survivors; Archie Jewell, the lookout, and Violet Jessop, a White Star stewardess who was now serving as a nurse. If Priest did feel any nervousness, it was entirely justified. On 21 November , the great ship struck a mine and sank near the Greek island of Kea.
Once again, he emerged from the very depths of a foundering ship alive. Indeed, the majority of the ship's crew were evacuated safely, but two of the lifeboats were lowered into the sea too early and were sucked into the ship's still turning propellers, killing 30 men. So thorough are the precautions which have been taken to prevent the ship from sinking in the event of a serious accident that any two compartments may be flooded without endangering the safety of the vessel.
In the creation of the Titanic myth there were two defining moments: , of course, and Introduction The RMS Titanic was the biggest moveable man-made object of her day, a colossal presence in the water and the subject of a tragic story that fascinates us to this day.
How long was the Titanic? How many rooms did the Titanic have? Many of the lifeboats went off half empty and didn't come back to pick up survivors. Statues were erected in his memory. There were postcards produced and stories of him swimming through the water with a child in his arms, saying 'good luck, lads, look after yourself'… all of which never happened," adds Louden-Brown.
Captain Smith did not issue a general "abandon ship" order - which meant many passengers would not have realised the Titanic was in imminent danger. There was no plan for an orderly evacuation, no public address system, and no lifeboat drill. John Graves agrees that on that fateful night "Smith seems to have vanished into the ether". He thinks that the captain may have become traumatised when he realised there were insufficient lifeboats. The latter's promenade deck was enclosed in part, yet he ordered lifeboats to be boarded from that deck, rather than from the boat deck.
The stories surrounding J Bruce Ismay, the president of the company that built the Titanic, are many but almost all centre on allegations of his cowardice in escaping the sinking ship while fellow passengers, notably women and children, were left to fend for themselves.
All of the screenplays, including the new TV series written by Julian Fellowes, portray Ismay as a coward who bullied the captain into driving the ship too fast and then saved his own skin by jumping into the first available lifeboat. He and Ismay had fallen out years before over Ismay not cooperating with the press with regard to an accident that happened to a White Star Line ship.
Ismay was almost universally condemned in America, where the Hearst syndicated press ran a vitriolic campaign against him, labelling him "J Brute Ismay". It published lists of all those who died but in the column of those saved it had just one name - Ismay's.
Some survivors said he jumped on the first lifeboat, others that he had demanded his own crew to row him away and the ship's barber said that Ismay had been ordered into a boat by the Chief Officer. Lord Mersey, who led the British Inquiry Report of into the loss of the Titanic, concluded that Ismay had helped many other passengers before finding a place for himself on the last lifeboat to leave the starboard side.
The German film Titanic, commissioned by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, portrays Ismay as a power-mad Jewish businessman who bullies the brave, Teutonic captain into driving the ship too fast through the ice despite being warned that this is reckless. The film A Night to Remember, long regarded as the most historically accurate of the Titanic films, also portrays Ismay as the villain.
Louden-Brown believes this to be unfair, and raised the issue with James Cameron when he was working with him as a consultant.
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