Titanic mistakes

There is nothing quite like a good centenary to remind us how surprising it is that anyone got out of the 20th century in one piece. In the space of a few weeks this spring will be the 100th anniversaries of the Titanic and Captain Scott’s death, and from then on it’s going to be pretty much downhill all the way — the Balkans in 2013, Sarajevo in 2014, the Armenian massacre in 2015, Jutland and the Somme in 2016, the Russian Revolution, Spanish flu, Amritsar, civil war in Ireland, the rise of the dictators … until before we know where we are it will be 2080 and — light at the end of the tunnel at last — the centenary of the birth of John Terry.

Not every centenary works out quite as expected — the Howards’ medieval tournament at Arundel to celebrate the 600th anniversary of Magna Carta had to be abandoned midway when Major Frederick Howard was killed in a cavalry charge at Waterloo — but one that is unlikely to disappoint is that of the Titanic. From the day the ship went down it seized the world’s imagination, and 100 years of controversy, recrimination and obsessive speculation have done little to suggest that one survivor was too far wrong when he dated the birth of the modern world to the night of 15 April 1912 and the loss of a ship that, till that moment, had seemed to symbolise industrial man’s triumph over the natural world.

The great thing about ships is that they make ideal symbols, and if symbols tend to end up symbolising whatever people want, there has been a remarkable continuity in the way that generations have seen the Titanic. There may not be many who would join the Bishop of Winchester in seeing God’s vengeance at work, but in its overblown mix of elegance and vulgarity, of extravagant wealth and struggling poverty, of hubristic pride and national navel-gazing, the story of the Titanic still seems a perfect symbol for that endlessly contradictory, self-asserting and self-questioning age that only finally came to an end in the mud of Flanders.

‘It was her first voyage, and she was carrying over a thousand passengers to New York, many of them millionaires,’ wrote Wilfred Scawen Blunt, with a blend of awe, pity and schadenfreude that are still recognisable elements of the abiding fascination of the story:

One thing is consoling in these great disasters, the proof given that Nature is not quite yet the slave of Man, but is able to rise even now in her wrath and destroy him.