Walter Lord
A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
To my Mother
Praise for Walter Lord’s
PENGUIN BOOKS
‘Absolutely gripping and unputdownable.’
‘Walter Lord singlehandedly revived interest in the Titanic… an electrifying book.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘Seamless and skilful… it’s clear why this is many a researcher’s Titanic bible.’
‘Enthralling from the first word to the last.’
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
Julian Fellowes is an actor, writer, director and producer. His film and television work includes
Brian Lavery is Curator Emeritus at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is the author of books including
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
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
