In April 1912 Mr and Mrs Brewis of Newcastle were expecting a baby. They had planned to go to America and start a new life there but at the last minute cancelled their trip as the six month pregnant wife felt she could not face the rigours of the sea voyage. Their daughter, Mary, was born on 2 July 1912. The ship on which they should have sailed was the Titanic and Mary was my mother.
My mum never mentioned this until I had taken her to the cinema to see the Cameron film and she casually dropped it into conversation totally oblivious to the sight and sound of my jaw hitting the floor. As their tickets were for steerage it was highly unlikely that they would have survived and I would not be writing this blog today. Scary thought....
Totally ignorant of this fact, I have always been interested and intrigued by the sinking of this seemingly invincible ship. I remember reading an article about it in the long ago Sunday Express when I was about 11 and thinking then how simply dreadful and frightening it must have been. Over the years I have watched programmes about it and seen documentaries and, of course, in the 1980s there came the discovery of the Titanic on the ocean floor and the first pictures were shown. Since then technology has advanced so far that it is now possible for pictures to be beamed back, via a robot camera, which are staggeringly good in quality and detail. Last week I watched a two hour special on the National Geographic channel rather grandiosely called The Final Word which featured the ubiquitous James Cameron who had gathered together a team of 'experts' all with names featuring Deep Sea Expert, Naval Historian...you get the drift. They spent an awful lot of time sitting around a table and talking learnedly and gazing at computer screens and trying to make the most tiny bit of trivia sound world shaking. It was a programme padded out to the nth degree but as I watched it I began to be drawn into the minutiae of it all, the sight of a china plate lying on the sea bed, a shoe, and other small artifacts which really tug at the heart and a sense of dreadful sadness came over me. All those people embarking on the Titanic, all full of excitement and wonder at the sight of this magnificent ship, which in the end brought everyone regardless of age and class, together in tragedy.
There was one guy there who looked like a caricature of a character out of a movie. He reminded me very much of a character in Jurassic Park (remember the baddie? fat with glasses who got eaten by a veloceraptor in the end); he was short, grossly overweight, big hairy beard, glasses and the most unconvincing wig I have ever seen, and he spent the first hour of this programme looking grave and solemn and never opened his mouth once. He looked rather like an overweight Hobbit and I kept my eye on him throughout.
And then he spoke, on his own, to the cameras and he turned out to be eloquent and passionate about the Titanic and its human tragedy rather than the technical ins and outs which had been discussed. He has a huge collection of Titanic artifacts, all of which are on display, which include china and ornaments and he held up a tiny perfume bottle to show us. 'Remember' he said ' all of these objects which were brought up had been on the sea bed all these years, they were dirty and filthy, they smelled fetid, they smelled of death, the lab where we were working was a horrid place to be. And then I opened up this perfume bottle and a smell of flowers filled the air with perfume and for that moment Titanic was alive again". By this stage he was quite emotional and I will admit to a tear in my eye. It was a salutary reminder that appearances are deceptive and you should not judge by how someone looks. I felt quite ashamed of myself after listening to him speak.
I have a Titanic book or two to review and will do this tomorrow.
