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Down among the dead men
Apr. 14th, 2012 10:19 pmI've just been watching the Titanic centenary memorial concert broadcast from Belfast. It's a strange thing for me. I was born not within sight of the Harland and Wolff yards, but a couple of miles over the hill. I've lived most of my life elsewhere, but for me, for a long time the Titanic was simply part of the city's industrial heritage, recorded as such at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum; with the quietly crumbling yard buildings part of the ordinary quayside scenery as the ferry from Scotland trundled its way from Belfast Lough into the Lagan on its way to its city centre mooring.
One fragment of memory, from a time before I was really aware of it as the centre of a commemorative tourism industry -- the display in the Museum included, perhaps still does, a set of tiny, anonymous, human figures, grouped according to ticket class, and within those groups, men, women and children, and survivors and fatalities. It was a stark display of how class affected survival rates -- not because first class was deliberately given priority in the evacuation, but simply because the more luxurious cabins were above deck and thus closer to the lifeboats, with fewer stairs and safety doors to negotiate en route. There were not enough lifeboats, even though the Titanic was built to the highest safety standards of the day, in part because it was assumed that all that was needed was enough lifeboats to run a ferry service to nearby ships in the shipping lane. Nobody imagined that help would not be immediately to hand. The harsh lessons learnt that night saved many other lives down the years.
I'll probably go and see the shiny new exhibition centre some time. I doubt if it will have quite the same impact on me as the first time I looked at a sheet from one of the original design drawings, seeing the loving care with which someone had drawn it a lifetime earlier.
One fragment of memory, from a time before I was really aware of it as the centre of a commemorative tourism industry -- the display in the Museum included, perhaps still does, a set of tiny, anonymous, human figures, grouped according to ticket class, and within those groups, men, women and children, and survivors and fatalities. It was a stark display of how class affected survival rates -- not because first class was deliberately given priority in the evacuation, but simply because the more luxurious cabins were above deck and thus closer to the lifeboats, with fewer stairs and safety doors to negotiate en route. There were not enough lifeboats, even though the Titanic was built to the highest safety standards of the day, in part because it was assumed that all that was needed was enough lifeboats to run a ferry service to nearby ships in the shipping lane. Nobody imagined that help would not be immediately to hand. The harsh lessons learnt that night saved many other lives down the years.
I'll probably go and see the shiny new exhibition centre some time. I doubt if it will have quite the same impact on me as the first time I looked at a sheet from one of the original design drawings, seeing the loving care with which someone had drawn it a lifetime earlier.
