Unsinkable drama

The last hours of the Titanic were a perfect tragedy. No wonder we’re still obsessed

What with the centenary coming up next month, it was hard to imagine anything that could make the Titanic loom larger in the popular consciousness. But that was before Julian Fellowes’s new series, to be broadcast this month. It’s the lot: period detail, a snobbish countess, class resentment and a darkish-blue iceberg. Each and every episode ends with the sea coming in. And all those important details get a mention. I’ve only seen two episodes but it’s already touched on the number of lifeboats, the absence of binoculars, other ships’ ice warnings, iron versus steel rivets, exit opportunities for first class versus steerage passengers, the speed and the bad ship California that didn’t respond to distress flares. If you think Downton Abbey gave the nitpickers a field day, wait till you see the Titanic obsessives getting to grips with this.

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But that’s the thing about the Titanic. It has everything. It was a hideous human catastrophe that cost 1,490 lives: the deaths of those trapped inside the Titanic still don’t bear thinking about. The dramatis personae were remarkable: the millionaires J.J. Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim; the most celebrated journalist of the day, W.T. Stead; even a movie star, Dorothy Gibson. The event took about the same real time as a play, two hours and 40 minutes. And it had so many of the elements of a play, only more and better. The clichés about the Titanic, most of them, were true: women and children did go first; the band did play as the ship sank — from ragtime to a melancholy walz called Autumn (and yes, Nearer, my God, to Thee); Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet did change into evening dress to drown; steerage did fare far worse than first class; the vessel was indeed described as ‘practically unsinkable’.