A Night to Remember
Page 1
WALTER LORD
A Night to Remember
With a Foreword by Julian Fellowes and an Introduction by Brian Lavery
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Foreword by Julian Fellowes
Introduction by Brian Lavery
Preface
1 ‘Another Belfast Trip’
2 ‘There’s Talk of an Iceberg, Ma’am’
3 ‘God Himself Could Not Sink This Ship’
4 ‘You Go and I’ll Stay a While’
5 ‘I Believe She’s Gone, Hardy’
6 ‘That’s the Way of It at This Kind of Time’
7 ‘There is Your Beautiful Nightdress Gone’
8 ‘It Reminds Me of a Bloomin’ Picnic’
9 ‘We’re Going North Like Hell’
10 ‘Go Away – We Have Just Seen Our Husbands Drown’
Facts about the Titanic
Passenger List
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
PENGUIN BOOKS
A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
‘Absolutely gripping and unputdownable’
David McCullough, Pulitzer prize-winning author
‘Walter Lord singlehandedly revived interest in the Titanic … an electrifying book’
John Maxtone-Graham, maritime historian and author
‘A Night to Remember was a new kind of narrative history – quick, episodic, unsolemn. Its immense success inspired a film of the same name three years later’
Ian Jack, Guardian
‘Devotion, gallantry … Benjamin Guggenheim changing to evening clothes to meet death; Mrs Isador Straus clinging to her husband, refusing to get in a lifeboat; Arthur Ryerson giving his lifebelt to his wife’s maid … A book to remember’
Chicago Tribune
‘Seamless and skilful … it’s clear why this is many a researcher’s Titanic bible’
Entertainment Weekly
‘Enthralling from the first word to the last’
Atlantic Monthly
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
A graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law, Walter Lord served in England with the American Intelligence Service during the Second World War. His interest in the Titanic dates back to 1926 when, at ten years old, he persuaded his family to cross the Atlantic on the Olympic, sister ship to the doomed ocean liner. Lord was renowned for his knowledge of the Titanic catastrophe, serving as consultant to director James Cameron during the filming of Titanic. A Night to Remember was published in 1956 and has never been out of print. Walter Lord died in 2002.
Julian Fellowes is an actor, writer, director and producer. His film and television work includes Gosford Park, Downton Abbey and Titanic. His novels include Snobs and Past Imperfect.
Brian Lavery is Curator Emeritus at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is the author of books including Ship: The Epic Story of Maritime Adventure. He was consultant on the film Master and Commander and the BBC’s Empire of the Seas.
To my Mother
Foreword by Julian Fellowes
There are certain episodes in the past which fix like a burr on our imaginations, events in history which will not let us go. They are generally tragic ones: the destruction of Pompeii, the plague and fire in the London of the 1660s, the French Revolution. But few of these outrank that single incident, just a century ago, when a luxury liner, the very acme of its own type and time, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11.40 on the night of 14 April 1912, and sank just over two and a half hours later, thereby giving birth to books and films and memoirs and articles without number.
It is hard to pin down exactly why this tragedy still haunts us to the degree that it does, when the last of the infant passengers to survive have now gone to their reward. Maybe it is because the ship seemed, even then, to represent that proud, pre-war world in miniature, from the industrialists and peeresses and millionaires and Broadway producers who sat about the vast staterooms in first class, to the Irish and German and Scandinavian immigrants packed into third, carrying with them all they possessed, on their way to a new life in America.
There were the passengers in second class, too, professionals and their wives, and salesmen with samples of wares or order books at the ready, all set to make a deal with the entrepreneurs of the New World. And there was the crew, the boilermen and deckhands, the stewards and stewardesses, and, of course, the officers, who would find themselves at the centre of the drama of the ship’s final hours. And as they headed for destruction, so did the larger world they represented, which would soon hit its own iceberg in the shape of the First World War.
Walter Lord begins his account of the disaster with a curious fact: in 1898 one Morgan Robertson wrote a novel about a fabulous liner, packed with the rich and fashionable folk of the day, which crashed into an iceberg and sank. The book was called Futility and the events predicted in it would become startlingly true. It seems to have been the discovery of this eerie coincidence that inspired Lord to take on the mantle of Chief Chronicler of the Titanic.
He would have many imitators, but what continues to mark his version apart from the rest is its extraordinary economy. He manages to convey both the detail and the sweep, the little sorrows and the all-embracing horror, in prose which is minutely researched but never dense. His style is serious, moving and, above all, readable. In my own investigation into the truth behind the sinking, I never came across another book to rival it.
The Titanic has spawned its own legends, its own heroes and heroines, but, as so often in life, the truth is a little more complicated. Some of these stars, the famously ‘unsinkable’ Molly Brown, for instance, or John Hart the third-class steward, or the stalwart Countess of Rothes, prove satisfactorily authentic when they are researched. Mrs Brown did indeed take the oars and try to get the lifeboats to go back for survivors; John Hart did lead parties up from steerage to the boat deck on his own initiative and he did get them away to safety; Lady Rothes did take over the tiller, and corresponded with the sailor in charge of her boat for the rest of their lives.
But then it was Charles Lightoller, second officer, one of the accepted heroes of the sinking, who decided not to fill the boats to capacity, and to take ‘women and children only’ (rather than the more usual ‘women and children first’), his idea being that the men could swim out to join their womenfolk once the boats were safely launched. This doomed plan seems to have been arrived at because Lightoller was unaware that the boats had been tested full in Belfast, and failed to recognize that, after a short time, the hatches from which the men were to swim would be unreachable or that the water was too cold to survive in for more than a few minutes. As it was, the boats rowed away from the wreck as soon as they touched the surface of the sea to escape the suction which never in fact happened.
So while Lightoller definitely was a very brave man and a real hero, his split-second decision not to take men and not to fill all the boats cost hundreds of lives.
I wonder, too, whether some of the villains have been justly treated. History has not been kind to the Duff Gordons, but the charge against them of paying the sailors to keep away from the drowning was never proved. If they were afraid to return for fear of being swamped, it was no more than the fear felt in almost every boat.
And the Managing Director of the White Star Line, Bruce Ismay, has had a hard press when he did not, as one often reads, get into the ‘first’ lifeboat to leave the ship. In fact, he climbed into the very last boat of any descri
ption, one of only two collapsibles to be successfully launched, to get away before the ship went down. Nor is there any solid evidence that he was responsible for the increase in speed, since it was White Star’s clear and stated policy that they sold luxury rather than a record crossing. It is not anyway realistic to exonerate Captain Smith from the decision to go faster, as some have tried to do, when the order could not have been carried out, no matter where it came from, without his approval. During those frightful last two hours, Ismay had in fact spent a good deal of the time helping women and children into the boats before the temptation to survive proved too much for him. I wonder if his subsequent title, The Coward of the Titanic, which cast such a shadow over the remainder of his life, was quite merited.
I was recently in Budapest, where they were filming my scripts for the ITV/Indigo production of the story. Standing alone on the huge sets, astonishing replicas of the promenade deck and the boat deck, it was impossible not to think of that moment, a hundred years before, when some of the great names of Belgravia and Newport stood, in silent and dignified groups, waiting to learn their fate. The American Croesus John Jacob Astor and his pregnant young wife, Madeleine; the banking Wideners of Philadelphia; the railway king Charles Hays; the hedonist Benjamin Guggenheim; the silent-movie queen Dorothy Gibson; and behind them all those other men, women and children, rich and poor, old and young, from every background under the sun, for whom the next hundred minutes would deliver them either to life or to death.
Despite the wealth of new evidence gleaned from the discovery of the wreck, long after this book was first published, some of the mysteries of the sinking will probably never be solved. Why some piece of crucial equipment was mislaid, why this telegram was ignored, why that warning went unremarked.
And, like most of us, I am not sure of the lessons we can draw from this awful story; maybe just that we cannot know what Fate has in store, that we should not forget man is never the superior of nature, or simply that ordinary men and women are capable of acts of courage and kindness that make them great in the doing. Perhaps that’s it. That savage events can inspire people to greatness.
Certainly, we cannot predict how we would behave in such a case, but we can hope and even pray that we would act as nobly as so many of the victims did, on that dark and terrible Atlantic night.
Julian Fellowes
August 2011
Introduction by Brian Lavery
When A Night to Remember was first published in the United States in 1955, Burke Wilkinson, in the New York Times, wrote that ‘the author’s style is so simple as to be almost an absence of style. But his great story needs no gilding, and he has given us that rarest of experiences – a book whose total effect is greater than the sum of its parts’. Stanley Walker of the New York Herald Tribune claimed that it was based on ‘a kind of literary pointillism, the arrangement of contrasting bits of fact and emotion in such a fashion that a vividly real impression of an event is conveyed to the reader’.
When it was published in Britain in the following year, the reviewers were divided along political lines. In the Illustrated London News Sir John Squire, a poet and historian who had flirted with both Marxism and fascism in his time, found that Lord’s populist approach to disaster ‘slightly disgusts me’. The conservative Times thought that Lord had been unfair to the ship’s owner, Bruce Ismay, who had escaped from the disaster. The high loss of life among the poor steerage passengers, it was claimed, was due to shortage of lifeboats and not class distinction. To the left-wing New Statesman, the disaster was caused by ‘complacency and commercialism … the attempt of the White Star Line to wring the last penny out of the profitable Atlantic trade’. But most reviewers saw it as having all the elements of a Greek tragedy.
Whatever the reviewers might think, the book sold very well and made Lord’s reputation as a storyteller. It was filmed in 1958 with the highly popular British star Kenneth More in the role of Second Officer Charles Lightoller. The book helped to establish the idea of reporting a dramatic event through the accounts of ordinary people involved, which was used, for example, by Cornelius Ryan in The Longest Day. And it put the ageing story of the Titanic back in the forefront of the public consciousness.
However much one would like to say about the millions of people who built ships or sailed in them as passengers and crew, it is impossible for a maritime historian to escape from iconic characters such as Lord Nelson, and dramatic events such as the sinking of the Titanic. But it is quite likely that the Titanic would be almost forgotten now, or known only to specialists, if Walter Lord had not researched and published his most famous book at just the right moment.
By the 1950s the sinking had been overshadowed by two world wars, and it was no longer the greatest maritime disaster of all time – for Britain that distinction went to the Lancastria, sunk off Le Havre in 1940 with 2,500 people on board. In world terms the greatest loss of life was in the German Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in 1945, when an estimated 7,000 people, including many refugees, were killed. But, of course, these were wartime disasters, unlike the Titanic, which sank in the calm waters of a peaceful world.
Lord was motivated by his love of the great liners, which he had travelled in as a boy with his parents, including a trip in the Titanic’s surviving sister-ship, Olympic, in 1927. He was fascinated by the idea of a closed society like a town afloat, even if the passengers were only on board for a week or so. He was researching his book at the right time, partly because many of the survivors were still alive and had fresh memories of events more than forty years before. Perhaps they were far enough from the disaster to get over any survivor’s guilt, or the traumas of the night in question.
But Lord did not make use of one new invention which a modern researcher would regard as essential: the tape recorder. Nor did he take notes during the interviews, for fear of intimidating the witnesses. Instead, he prepared his questions for each interview very carefully, and memorized what was said, writing them down afterwards as soon as he found privacy.
The book was also published at exactly the right time. The television age was just beginning, but the public was already used to the immediacy of newsreel and radio reporting, and the highlighting of individual stories in the midst of historic events. Despite the reactions of some traditional historians, history was no longer about kings, queens and presidents but about how it was shaped by people of both high and low status.
Like most history books, A Night to Remember is about the time in which it was written as well as the period it describes. America in the 1950s was more prosperous than it had ever been, and it felt a great moral superiority after defeating the Nazis and taking on the Soviets in the Cold War. As Lord is careful to point out, it was far more classless than the society of 1912. Yet it too had a huge threat hanging over it, as the Soviets built up an increasingly terrifying nuclear arsenal, with thermonuclear bombs and ballistic missiles. Britain was no less threatened by the bomb, and its people had far less space to hide from it. It was about to face its own sinking moment, when the Suez Crisis of 1956 signalled the end of the British Empire. Lord does not deal with the issue of race, which was about to engulf the United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain. Many British shipping lines employed Africans and Asians as firemen, stewards and seamen, but not White Star. Almost everyone aboard the Titanic, both passengers and crew, was white (though there is casual mention of Chinese and Japanese) and racialism, which was an essential and largely unspoken feature of 1912 society, was directed against what were considered the ‘lesser’ European races such as the Italians.
Lord begins his story with the first sighting of the iceberg, and the world outside the ship appears only incidentally, increasing the feeling of peril and claustrophobia among those on board. He portrays the sinking as a slow-motion disaster, with its extent dawning on crew and passengers only by degrees. As he wrote in 1987, part of the appeal of the story relies on ‘the initial refusal to
believe that anything was wrong – card games continued in the smoking room; playful soccer matches on deck with chunks of ice broken off from the berg. Then the gradual dawning that there is real danger – the growing tilt of the deck, the rockets going off. And finally, the realization that the end is at hand, with no apparent escape.’ Lord also starts with different levels in the ship – the lookout at the head of the mast, the officers on the bridge, the passengers in the saloons and the firemen down in the engine room. He explores the alternative hierarchies on board – the normal social one and the sea discipline, with officers commanding seamen, who in turn are nominally in charge of the passengers in a lifeboat – though in real life they were often challenged successfully by the first-class passengers, who believed they had a right to rule in any circumstances.
When he mentions it at all, Lord portrays the world outside the Titanic as a very stable one, only ended in later years by war and taxation, but it is worth remembering that Britain was in turmoil at the time, with militant suffragettes, very bitter strikes and Ireland on the verge of rebellion. Nevertheless, Lord convinces us that the social order was maintained on board the ship, as stewards and valets helped their masters prepare for the lifeboats. And the sacrifice of third-class passengers went largely unchallenged by the inquiries in Britain and the United States. Lord tells many individual stories of heroism and cowardice, selfishness and generosity. The band did indeed play on, though not, apparently, ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. Lord tells how Bruce Ismay bullied his way into a lifeboat, only to live the next twenty-five years in loneliness and shame.
The interaction between Europe and America had been one of the most dynamic factors in world history for four hundred years, and Lord’s story taps into that, in particular the links between Britain and the United States, with a common language. They had fought together undefeated in the recent war, and one was in the process of handing over the mantle of world power with a generally liberal reputation to the other. Practically all white Americans had ancestors who had emigrated in ships like the Titanic, and millions more had crossed the Atlantic both ways in wartime. Yet the era of the great liner was about to end. The Boeing 707 began its service in 1957 and for the first time it was more economical to cross by air. The liner had a slow death paralleling the Titanic herself, but regular scheduled transatlantic services had ended by 1973.