Human heart of a tragedy

HISTORY: FRANK McLYNNreviews Titanic Lives: Migrants, Millionaires, Conmen and CrewBy Richard Davenport-Hines HarperPress, 404pp. £20

THE BASIC FACTS about the sinking of RMS Titanicare well known. On its maiden voyage the vessel hit an iceberg in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean at 11.40pm on April 14th, 1912, and sank at 2.20am on April 15th, taking 1,514 souls to their deaths. In this centenary year there has already been a tsunami, to use an oceanic metaphor, of books on the sinking, and Richard Davenport-Hines's volume is one of the best. He delivers a committed and engaging story in which the interest rarely flags. His main concern is the human personalities on the doomed liner – not just the casualties but the 711 survivors.

He makes the tactical mistake of serving the best wine first, as the first chapter, “Boarding”, promises an exciting, minute-by-minute narrative, but not until the actual sinking does the author regain the same level of tension and excitement. Part of the problem is that the human stories have all been trawled over so many times before. And so we get minibiographies of the grandees aboard: John Jacob Astor IV, the industrialist Ben Guggenheim, the Macy’s owner Isador Strauss, the Denver millionairess Margaret Brown, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, the businessman John Borland Thayer, the journalist WT Stead, the US presidential aide Archibald Butt, the White Star Line’s managing director, J Bruce Ismay, and dozens of minor celebs.

Details about the second- and third-class passengers tend to be sketchier, so here we get generic studies of emigrating Jews, Armenians, Scandinavians, Germans and so on, complete with familiar tales of the gauntlet at Ellis Island through which the US put the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Much of this is in the category of deja vu.

Davenport-Hines has interesting things to say about the skewed class and gender ratios of the survivors. Altogether 74 per cent of women on board and 52 per cent of children survived, but only 20 per cent of men. This was because the crew misinterpreted Capt Edward Smith’s order of “women and children first” into the lifeboats, when the order to abandon ship was given, to mean only women and children: 33 per cent of first-class males had the money and clout to secure themselves berths, but only 8 per cent of men in second class lived to tell the tale; curiously, in an anomaly the author mentions but does not explain, 16 per cent of third-class males survived.

The consequence of officers’ misguidedly thinking they were applying the laws of chivalry was that many of the lifeboats launched from the davits were half-empty; the first one to be lowered into the ocean – Lifeboat No 7, launched at 12.45am – had a capacity for 65 people but contained just 28. Once at sea, all but two of these minimally occupied craft refused to pick up those who jumped into the ocean when the liner sank. The treatment of all this is rather rushed.

In particular Davenport-Hines does not unpick the old argument about whether the greater survival rate of Americans compared with Brits was because the Britons queued politely for the lifeboats whereas the more ruthless Yankees pushed and shoved their way aboard. Yet in general his treatment of the survival epic is sophisticated and nuanced. The author, a noted Proustian and biographer of Auden, has the reputation of being an elitist, Establishment figure, well connected in London's literary mafia – an impression reinforced by the endorsement on the jacket from plus royaliste que le roiJulian Fellowes, of Downton Abbeyfame. Yet the sympathy and insight he displays for the wretched of the earth in third class is worthy of a Marxist.

Finally, Davenport-Hines revisits the oldest question of all: why did the tragedy happen? He rightly dismisses the canard, so prominent in James Cameron’s 1996 movie, that Ismay forced Capt Smith to go dangerously fast in order to set a transatlantic record. He points out, as hundreds have before him, that it was a major scandal that in a ship certified to carry 3,547 passengers there were lifeboats for only 1,178. And he underlines the “pilot error” involved in the officer of the watch’s orders for evading the iceberg.

Had the ship hit the berg head-on or continued at its previous speed, Titanicwould not have sunk. The mistake was to order "hard a starboard" with reverse engines. The resulting 10-second impact loosened the rivets and bolts and opened up the first six compartments; sadly, the ship had been designed on the premise that no more than four compartments would ever be destroyed in a single collision.

It used to be thought that the iceberg ripped open the side of the vessel like a can-opener, but the less sensational truth was that the entire design of the ship was faulty: the steel plates used were unsuitable for cold-water conditions and the rivets holding the hull together were too fragile. At 21 knots the ship was going too fast, but luck was against her. The sea was exceptionally smooth for this part of the Atlantic, for in the normal choppy conditions the waves would have broken over the base of the iceberg and alerted the lookouts sooner.

Davenport-Hines nails the myth that the White Star Line dubbed Titanicunsinkable, but such an assumption was implicit in its thinking. Needless to say, the company's directors had no idea of the greatest danger to their liner, from 30m waves that have since sunk better ships than Titanicand had already accounted for SS Waratah, in 1909, but in those days nobody had the remotest idea that such monsters existed. Our author is a bit amateurish in his treatment of oceanography, but in his defence it can be said that this is not his stated field or his acknowledged intention.

The book is something of a landlubber’s volume, with sights set firmly on the United States’ 400 millionaires (the 1900 figure, up from just three at the end of the American Civil War). But within his self-imposed limits the author has provided a good, lively read that can be recommended to a wide audience.

Frank McLynn is the author of 30 books, including, most recently, Captain Cook: Master of the Seas. His The Road Not Takenwill be published in June by Bodley Head