A Night to Remember

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There are certain episodes in the past which fix like a burr on our imaginations, events in history which will not let us go. They are generally tragic ones: the destruction of Pompeii, the plague and fire in the London of the 1660s, the French Revolution. But few of these outrank that single incident, just a century ago, when a luxury liner, the very acme of its own type and time, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11.40 on the night of 14 April 1912, and sank just over two and a half hours later, thereby giving birth to books and films and memoirs and articles without number.

It is hard to pin down exactly why this tragedy still haunts us to the degree that it does, when the last of the infant passengers to survive have now gone to their reward. Maybe it is because the ship seemed, even then, to represent that proud, pre-war world in miniature, from the industrialists and peeresses and millionaires and Broadway producers who sat about the vast staterooms in first class, to the Irish and German and Scandinavian immigrants packed into third, carrying with them all they possessed, on their way to a new life in America.

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