Probably the most famous ship in the world, helped to be so, no doubt, both by the movie as well as the haughing song by Celine Dion, the RMS Titantic was the largest ship in the world in her day. It was claimed by her owners to be unsinkable. Three days into her maiden voyage, from Southampton to New York, and just 370 miles (600 km) southeast of Newfoundland, had struck an iceberg late in the evening of Sunday, 14 April. She had an estimated 2,224 persons on board. The poor disaster management, inadequate staff training, shortages of life boats, and the unequal treatment between the three different classes of passengers quickly showed as the ship—with a gash ripped in her side by the ice-berg, and estimated to be three-hundred feet long and ten feet wide—took on water and began to list. Two and a half hours later she went under, with over a thousand persons still on board.
Help came for the survivors only when the RMS Carpathia, after picking up the Titanic's distress signals, arrived nearly an hour and a half afterwards.
The investigation into the sinking quickly discovered the inadequacies of the safety measures then in practice; demands to rectify them led to the establishment later that year of the SOLAS (International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea).
The Titianic touched my own life when, many years ago, I bought a second-hand book and, on arriving home, discovered an old B-W photograph of a group of half a dozen persons taken at a garden party somewhere in the tropics. On the back of the photograph was inscribed the names, I assumed, of the persons in the photograph. Next to one of them, and in a different hand, was the note "Lost on the Titanic."
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