TITANIC - ONE HUNDRED YEARS ON

Incredible. Thanks, Bonny.

I'm having some trouble getting out of Steerage as no one seems to know where they are supposed to go. Panic everywhere.

Awww, those reports are really chilling. They take you right there

Thank you Bonny.

Titanic documentary, Last minutes of the Titanic mystery (2005) now on National Geographic. Amazing pictures

100 years ago today, the first reports were coming in.

Rose wrote:Titanic documentary, Last minutes of the Titanic mystery (2005) now on National Geographic. Amazing pictures

Missed it. Drat!

National Geographic has had some amazing programmes this week, I hope lots of people are able to watch them?

I cannot recommend this article highly enough:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tony-parsons-titanic-witnessed-mankind-794758


Titanic witnessed mankind at its heroic best and selfish worst

Titanic took something from the human race when she went down – innocence, certainty and confidence

By Tony Parsons

He has managed to capture all the emotions, and the ongoing fascination, associated with Titanic.

From:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tony-parsons-titanic-witnessed-mankind-794758

In both James Cameron’s Titanic and the film A Night to Remember, there is a drunken baker, who looks like comic relief, sucking down a bottle of whiskey, staggering about like Charlie Chaplin and perching on the stern of Titanic as she sits bolt upright in the Atlantic, then slides to her grave.

It was all true.

In reality the Titanic’s drunk was Chief Baker Charles Joughin, of Liverpool, who behaved with insane heroism all night.

Joughin threw women into lifeboats, chucked 50 deckchairs into the Atlantic (straws to cling to) and when he was assigned to number 10 lifeboat as skipper, he jumped out at the last moment and back on Titanic because he thought that leaving the ship would, “set a bad example”.

The Titanic’s comic drunk seems surely marked for death. But the baker rode the stern down and, as Titanic disappeared beneath the surface, claims to have stepped into the Atlantic without even getting his hair wet.

The bottle of whiskey inside him kept Joughin alive in sub-zero waters for hours – far longer than anyone else – and in the end he scrambled on to an overturned canvas lifeboat. Charles Joughin returned to Liverpool and lived for another 44 years.

I am amazed that that character really did exist, and all that did happen to him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joughin

I cannot begin to imagine how he managed to survive in that freezing water for so long, but he clearly did, it was witnessed and recorded.

He seems to have had almost a charmed life, serving on WW2 troopships before dying in the States at a fairly ripe old age.

Thanks for all the info Bonny. We haven't seen any of that here.

It's fascinating, isn't it, Lily? The twitter feed was rivetting, when I was watching it last night, I found myself forgetting that it was all so long ago, and that I knew how it was going to end.

What a story. It never fails to interest does it?

Maybe it's because it is almost the first 'modern' disaster, and we know so much about the people involved? Also, I think that, over time, the story would have slipped from the headlines - until she was found.

Did anyone living now ever expect to actually see the Titanic, albeit on a screen? Or to be able to touch her hull in Las Vegas, of all places? It's as if in some strange way, she came back to a kind of life again.

bb1 wrote:

Goodness me. Morais must have been around Churnalisting Mediatic Codswallop.

I know, Sabot, it's stunning just how wrong the first reports were - it was only about now that the truth about the scale of the disaster was realised:

bb1 wrote:It's fascinating, isn't it, Lily? The twitter feed was rivetting, when I was watching it last night, I found myself forgetting that it was all so long ago, and that I knew how it was going to end.

That's it, I think. We all keep on hoping that the end will be different. Or at least that we particularly would have survived. Dying is for other people, you see.

I can imagine the pleasure or happiness at Titanic´s launch, also the same happiness at Southampton, Cherbourg also at Queenstown, also the same feeling that it was felt by those who travelled on Titanic until the moment of the iceberg.