TITANIC, HER LEGACY

Exactly one hundred years ago, as I am sure you are aware, the R.M.S Titanic out of Belfast sank in mid Atlantic with great loss of life. I was born forty one years and two World Wars after this event and yet for me it still loomed out of the past, a vast and tragic ghost wreathed in the misery of so many stolen lives and broken dreams. Something about this shipwreck became ingrained in to the collective psyche, not only in the generation closest to the event but in the consciousness of the nation, perhaps the world up to this present day.

One stormy winter's afternoon when the light was fading fast and the black clouds tormented by a fierce east wind hurried towards the dark horizon, the Titanic came in to my life and the grandeur and the pathos has remained with me ever since. I was seven years old and had been ill for several weeks, I lay upon the sofa wrapped in a rug and because I had been a good girl and had at last managed to eat a little my mother, by way of a treat, gave me a book of her own to read.

Old and somewhat tattered the blue and silver cover bore the title “The Story Of Twenty Five Years” and contained an account of the reign of George V. I skipped through the book looking at the photographs of people strangely dressed, roads full of horse drawn vehicles, state funerals and then I came upon a photograph of Titanic, a post card placed like a book mark at the beginning of the account. Even though I knew nothing of her story there was something about that huge stark structure that made me shiver, I began to read.

To this day I believe that the account of the sinking in this publication although short is one of, if not the best, accounts I have ever read as it comes from people who had lived through the tragedy, and of course from those who were on board, the fortunate ones who survived.

I read the account of the desperate attempts to contact other vessels, the changing from C.Q.D. to S.O.S. practically for the first time, the life boats leaving with only a few people on board while below decks the steerage class passengers remained locked in what became for many their tomb. I read of the heroism of the engineers who kept the engines going so that there would be light, not one survived.

I became lost in the story, the screams, the tormented cries for help unheeded, the almost empty life boats whose occupants refused to return to pick up survivors even though their own husbands and sons were among those still on board when the ship sank.

How the cries of those lost souls have echoed down the years, the raw terror, the hopelessness and the horror. Titanic is gone but those things remain almost tangible whenever her name is mentioned.

I have never forgotten that stormy afternoon reading of a huge ship which sank without trace in a flat calm sea taking hundreds to their death in a few short hours.

Almost one hundred years later the Costa Concordia sank in shallow water, there was loss of life but thankfully on nothing like the scale of the Titanic. Last night I watched a documentary about the sinking made entirely with footage from the cameras and mobile telephones of those on board at the time of the sinking,

Watching the peoples faces, the hope, the fear, the shear terror, listening to the screams, and the terrified cries of small children I suddenly knew for sure what those last dreadful hours on-board Titanic must have looked and sounded like.

There was terror, yes, and there was courage too, people smiling trying to show those engulfed by terror that everything would be fine.

Most of all there was the panic in the voice of an officer trying to explain the chaos to someone on shore and an ill-informed crew trying their best to reassure the passengers when they themselves were terrified. Yes there was courage, just as there had been on Titanic.

Titanic will be remembered long after people have forgotten Costa Concordia, after all who now remembers the, “Andrea Doria”, another great ship which foundered with loss of life.

Titanic still captures our imagination because she embodies what is best and what is worst in humanity. She showed society as it really was at a time when change was just around the corner, her tragic ending displayed our arrogant pride, our callous disregard for those beneath us in society yet it also showed the great strength and boundless courage of which we are capable. Titanic sank in less than three hours and in those hours all this was displayed in such a way as could never be forgotten. All felt a sense of blame and all felt a sense of pride and I believe we still feel this several generations later.

The loss of the Titanic signalled the end of a time when mankind thought he was invincible, that he had tamed nature, that he dominated the world with his cleverness and when privilege could and often did mean life or death. Titanic's end was the death knell of this confidence in our superiority, it has never truly returned, and thank the Gods.

While mankind believes that he can conquer nature, there is no hope for our lovely green planet and while he believes that birth, breeding or wealth gives one human being superiority over another there will be no peace .

Titanic taught us all of this. One hundred years later is it now time that we acted upon that knowledge?