A Night to Remember

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 description, 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