Frances Wilson - How to Survive the Titanic

1 Illustrated London News, 4 May 1912.

2Lightoller, ’Titanic’, p. 304.

3Michael Davie, The Titanic, p. 173.

4Filson Young, Titanic, p. 189.

5Lightoller, ’Titanic’, p. 305.

6Rabelais, Gargantua andPantagruel, p. 830.

7‘The Titanic and the Chairman’, Titanic Commutator, Vol. 13, No. 1, i 989.

1The author is aware that the details of his poem are not in all cases factually correct.

2Matarasso, A Voyage Closed and Done, p. 24.

3The transcripts of the Limitation of Liability Hearings are available at www.titanicinquiry.org.

4Emily Ryerson gave her evidence first in a letter sent to her lawyer on 18 April 1913 (LMQ/7/2/22), and then in an affidavit for the Limitation of Liabilities hearings.

5Matarasso, A Voyage Closed and Done, p. 71.

6Ibid., p. 19.

7Conrad, letter to Edward Garnet, 12 November 1900, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (New York, 1927), i, pp. 298-9.

8Matarasso, A Voyage Closed and Done, p. 18.

9‘Fear’ was written by Basil Sanderson in an army issue notebook. Never shown to his children - who discovered it only after his death — it is now kept with his papers in Trinity College, Oxford.

10Conrad, letter to John Quinn, 27 March 1912, Collected Letters, Vol. 5.

11Conrad, letter to J. B. Pinker, early April 1912, Collected Letters, Vol. 5.

12Thayer, The Sinking of the SS Titanic, p. 9.

13Lightoller, ‘ Titanic, p. 305.

14From Walter Lord, foreword to Patrick Stenson, Lights, p. 8.

15From Sylvia Lightoller to Walter Lord, LMQ/2/4/i53. I am grateful to Louise Patten for drawing my attention to these letters.

1The Titanic was a tale of fatal convergence for other writers as well. Unknown to Hardy, on the day that his poem was being read by mourners in London, Helen Candee, who had been on board the Titanic, had the account of her experience, ‘Sealed Orders’, published in the American weekly Collier’s. Mrs Candee began: ‘When all the lands were thrilling with the blossomed month of shower and sun, three widely differing craft spread out upon the sea. One sailed from the New World’s city of Towers, plowing east. Another coquetted with three near ports of Europe and then sailed West. The third slipped down unnoticed from the glacial North.’ The first was the Carpathia, the second the Titanic, and the third the iceberg. All three were given ‘sealed orders’, and the meeting of the ‘greatest ship on earth’ and the ‘sinister’ iceberg is described as a ‘tryst’. ‘Across the starlit sea’, the frozen groom awaits his ‘virgin’ bride: ‘it was nearly midnight when she shuddered with horror in the embrace of the northern ice’. The same image had been used sixteen years earlier in a little-known poem called ‘A Tryst’, by the American writer Celia Thaxter. A ‘fair ship’ and ‘an iceberg pale’ are drawn together on a moonless night. The iceberg arrives at the appointed spot, ‘Like some imperial creature, moving slow’, and the ‘stately ship’ meanwhile, ‘with matchless grace’ and ‘unconscious of her foe,/ Drew near the trysting place.’

The best sources of information about Ismay and the sinking of the Titanic are contemporary newspaper reports. Those consulted for this book are:

Atlanta Constitution

Boston Globe

Daily Graphic

Daily Mirror

Daily News

Daily Sketch

Daily Telegraph

Denver Post

Emporia Weekly Gazette

Frankfurter Zeitung

Glasgow Evening Times

Guernsey Press

Illustrated London News

Jersey Journal

John Bull

Liverpool Daily Post

Lloyd’s Weekly News

London Evening News

New York American

New York Evening Post

New York Globe

New York Herald

New York Post

New York Times

New York Tribune

New York World Telegram

Northern Whig

Orleans American

Philadelphia Evening Bulletin

San Francisco Examiner

Sharon Herald

St Louis Post Dispatch

The Chronicle

The Ogden Standard

The Sphere

The Times

The Times Democrat

Uttoxeter Advertiser

Washington Post

Blackwood’s

Christian Science Journal

Christian Science Sentinel

Country Life

Engineering

The English Review

Fairplay

Financier

International Marine Engineering

Journal of Commerce

National Magazine

New York Times Book Review

Pall Mall Gazette

The Critic

The Review of Reviews

The Semi-Monthly Magazine

The Syren

The Titanic Commutator

The World’s Work

The Woman’s Protest

Barratt, Nick, Lost Voices from the Titanic: The Definitive Oral History (Arrow Books, 2009)

Beesley, Lawrence, The Loss of the SS Titanic: Its Story and Lessons (Heinemann, 1912)

Behe, George, On Board the RMS Titanic: Memories of the Maiden Voyage (Lulu.com, 20ii)

Jessop, Violet, Titanic Survivor, introduced, edited and annotated by John Maxtone-Graham (Sutton Publishing, 2007) Thayer, John B., The Sinking of the SS Titanic April 14–15,1912 (Philadelphia, December 1940)

Winocour, Jack, ed., The Story of the Titanic as Told By Its Survivors, Lawrence Beesley, Archibald Gracie, Commander Lightoller, Harold Bride (Dover, 1960)

Barczewski, Stephanie, Titanic: A Night Remembered (Hambledon and London, 2004)

Behe, George, Titanic: Psychic Forewarnings of a Tragedy (Patrick Stephens, 1988)

Behe, George and Goss, Michael, Lost at Sea (Prometheus Books, 1994) Booth, John and Coughlan, Sean, Titanic: Signals of Disaster (White Star, 1993)

Bryceson, Dave, ed., The Titanic Disaster, as Reported in the British National Press April–July 1912 (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997)

Davie, Michael, Titanic: The Full Story of a Tragedy (The Bodley Head, 1986)

Eaton, John and Haas, Charles A., Titanic: TriumphandTragedy:A Chronicle in Words and Pictures (Patrick Stephens, 1994)

Everett, Marshall, Wreck and Sinking of the Titanic (L. H. Walter, 1912)

Gibbs, Philip, The Deathless Story of the Titanic (Lloyds of London, 1985)

Heyer, Paul, Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth (Praeger, 1995)

Lord, Walter, A Night to Remember (Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1955)

------The Night Lives On (Penguin, 1986)

Loss of the Steamship Titanic, British Investigation (7Cs Press, 1975)

Marcus, Geoffrey, The Maiden Voyage (Allen and Unwin, 1969)

Marshall, Logan, Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters (John C. Winston Co., 1912)