A Night to Remember

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 written as well as the period it describes. America in the 1950s was more prosperous than it had ever been, and it felt a great moral superiority after defeating the Nazis and taking on the Soviets in the Cold War. As Lord is careful to point out, it was far more classless than the society of 1912. Yet it too had a huge threat hanging over it, as the Soviets built up an increasingly terrifying nuclear arsenal, with thermonuclear bombs and ballistic missiles. Britain was no less threatened by the bomb, and its people had far less space to hide from it. It was about to face its own sinking moment, when the Suez Crisis of 1956 signalled the end of the British Empire. Lord does not deal with the issue of race, which was about to engulf the United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain. Many British shipping lines employed Africans and Asians as firemen, stewards and seamen, but not White Star. Almost everyone aboard the Titanic, both passengers and crew, was white (though there is casual mention of Chinese and Japanese) and racialism, which was an essential and largely unspoken feature of 1912 society, was directed against what were considered the ‘lesser’ European races such as the Italians.

Lord begins his story with the first sighting of the iceberg, and the world outside the ship appears only incidentally, increasing the feeling of peril and claustrophobia among those on board. He portrays the sinking as a slow-motion disaster, with its extent dawning on crew and passengers only by degrees. As he wrote in 1987, part of the appeal of the story relies on ‘the initial refusal to believe that anything was wrong—card games continued in the smoking room; playful soccer matches on deck with chunks of ice broken off from the berg. Then the gradual dawning that there is real danger—the growing tilt of the deck, the rockets going off. And finally, the realization that the end is at hand, with no apparent escape.’ Lord also starts with different levels in the ship—the lookout at the head of the mast, the officers on the bridge, the passengers in the saloons and the firemen down in the engine room. He explores the alternative hierarchies on board—the normal social one and the sea discipline, with officers commanding seamen, who in turn are nominally in charge of the passengers in a lifeboat—though in real life they were often challenged successfully by the first-class passengers, who believed they had a right to rule in any circumstances.

When he mentions it at all, Lord portrays the world outside the Titanic as a very stable one, only ended in later years by war and taxation, but it is worth remembering that Britain was in turmoil at the time, with militant suffragettes, very bitter strikes and Ireland on the verge of rebellion. Nevertheless, Lord convinces us that the social order was maintained on board the ship, as stewards and valets helped their masters prepare for the lifeboats. And the sacrifice of third-class passengers went largely unchallenged by the inquiries in Britain and the United States. Lord tells many individual stories of heroism and cowardice, selfishness and generosity. The band did indeed play on, though not, apparently, ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. Lord tells how Bruce Ismay bullied his way into a lifeboat, only to live the next twenty-five years in loneliness and shame.

The interaction between Europe and America had been one of the most dynamic factors in world history for four hundred years, and Lord’s story taps into that, in particular the links between Britain and the United States, with a common language. They had fought together undefeated in the recent war, and one was in the process of handing over the mantle of world power with a generally liberal reputation to the other. Practically all white Americans had ancestors who had emigrated in ships like the Titanic, and millions more had crossed the Atlantic both ways in wartime. Yet the era of the great liner was about to end. The Boeing 707 began its service in 1957 and for the first time it was more economical to cross by air. The liner had a slow death paralleling the Titanic herself, but regular scheduled transatlantic services had ended by 1973.

Today just as many people take to the seas in cruise ships but somehow they do not have the same mythology. Passengers’ motives might range from pure hedonism to intellectual discovery, but even at its best the modern cruise does not have the sense of purpose of the great liner bridging the old world and the new, the isolation of those aboard in a closed society for days at a time, the stark divisions by class. And, of course, voyaging today is much safer than it was a hundred years ago. Loss of life in the Costa Concordia disaster of 2012 was mercifully small, but even so there are echoes of the Titanic—scramble for lifeboats, apparent neglect of duty by those in authority and heroism by others.

The Titanic disaster was soon overtaken by far greater catastrophes as Europe moved into the First World War two years later—a technologically advanced, arrogant and class-ridden society steamed boldly into danger despite numerous warning signals. The public never forgot the Titanic, but thirty years of destruction and savagery seemed to overshadow it. For ten years after 1945 there was a great flood of war memoirs and novels, often made into highly successful movies such as The Cruel Sea and The Caine Mutiny.

There was a certain amount of reaction by the mid-fifties. Peacetime conscription in Britain and the United States had created a generation ready to laugh at all things military, as reflected in films such as Private’s Progress and television characters like Sergeant Bilko, which showed soldiers as essentially lazy and corrupt. The public was ready for new heroes and legends, or for older ones to be revived. Even so, as the New York Times reviewer commented in 1955, there were already fifty books on the Titanic disaster in the Library of Congress, including four novels and six books of verse. But none of them matched the immediacy and impact of Lord’s work.

The Titanic legend had another enormous boost in 1985 when Dr Robert Ballard announced his discovery of the wreck two miles under the Atlantic. Lord was sceptical about this when it happened. ‘At first I thought that the discovery might spoil some of the allure. Part of the spell seemed to depend on the great ship, still hauntingly beautiful in her final moments, disappearing beneath the sea forever. But soon it became clear that the discovery actually added to the mystique.’ The salvage revealed much about the technical details of the sinking, including the fact that the ship had broken in two close to the surface, and that the funnels had become detached one by one. It produced a great range of personal goods, salvaged by RMS Titanic Inc. These added little to the historical account, but they provided poignant and often emotional links with the past when they were shown in well-attended exhibitions around the world.

The third great Titanic revival came with James Cameron’s film of 1997. Since the publication of A Night to Remember, the ship has been represented in fiction far more than any other in history. Offstage, it is included in almost every novel set in the period when it is necessary to get rid of a character or two—most recently, the loss of family heirs was the starting point for the highly successful TV series Downton Abbey. If all the fictional characters on board the ship could be counted, they would far outnumber the real passengers and crew. If they had any weight, they might sink the vessel without any help from the iceberg. Cameron’s film relied heavily on Lord’s research for many of the incidents described, a tribute to the merit of his work. The hero Jack Dawson finds it a little too easy to cross from third class to first or to go to the extreme bow, where only the crew were allowed, but in general the film was quite accurate.

The Titanic story remains as a legend. Though Walter Lord did everything humanly possible to find the absolute truth, he always knew that it could never be achieved: ‘The best that can be done is to weigh the evidence carefully and give an honest opinion.’ This is true of all historic research, and it is a tribute to Walter Lord’s skill and honesty that his work is still influential and worthy of a reprint after more than half a century.

Brian Lavery,

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

January 2012