Introduction
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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Some changes in maritime regulation and procedure did result from the Titanic disaster. These will be described in Chapter 1. 2. A total of 4,375 people are believed to have died in the Philippines ferry disaster, compared with 1,490 on the Titanic. The precise figures for those lost and saved on the Titanic are a matter of some marginal dispute: in this study I have used those figures accepted by the British government inquiry of 1912, for the reasons explained in the following chapter. 3. Children at American grade schools and summer camps still sing ‘It Was Sad When the Great Ship Went Down’ (US traditional). 4. For example: ‘Waiter, I know I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous!’ 5. For example, on 21 December 1993, US Vice President Al Gore intro- duced the announcement of a Clinton administration package of legisla- tive and administrative proposals on telecommunications by telling the story of the radio operators on the Titanic. Source: Transcript of Vice Presidential address at the National Press Club Luncheon, Washington, DC. Meanwhile, metaphorical allusions to the Titanic remain legion in politics. For example, late and inadequate action is frequently compared to ‘rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic’. 6. Fictional casualties of the Titanic include Edward and Edith in Noel Coward’s play Cavalcade, and Lady Marjory Bellamy of BBC Television’s ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’. Fictional survivors include the assorted dwarves of ‘Time Bandits’, directed by Terry Gilliam, Handmade Films, UK, 1981. 7. Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man for Himself (London, 1996). 8. ‘Titanic’ opened at the Lunt-Fontanne theatre, New York City, on 23 April 1997. The book was by Peter Stone, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, and directed by Richard Jones. Production costs were estimated at $10 million. 9. ‘Titanic’, directed by James Cameron, Twentieth Century Fox/Paramount Pictures, USA, 1997. The film was released in the USA in 1997 and the UK early in 1998. 10. The Titanic feature films to date are: ‘Atlantic’, directed by E.A. Dupont, British International Pictures/Süd Film, UK, 1929; ‘Titanic’, directed by Herbert Selpin and Werner Klinger, Tobis Films, Germany, 1943; ‘Titanic’, directed by Jean Negulescu, Twentieth Century Fox, USA, 1953; ‘A Night to Remember’, directed by Roy Ward Baker, The Rank Organisation, UK, 1958; ‘SOS Titanic’, directed by Billy Hale, EMI Films, UK, 1979; ‘Titanic’ directed by James Cameron, Twentieth Century Fox/Paramount Pictures, USA, 1997. Additionally, ‘Raise the Titanic’, directed by Jerry Jameson, Martin Starger Productions for ITC, USA, 1980, concerns an entirely fictitious attempt to salvage the ship during the ‘Cold War’. 161 162 The Myth of the Titanic 11. ‘Titanic: Adventure out of Time’ marketed on CD-ROM in the UK from March 1997 by Cyberfix GTE Entertainment. 12. Rick Archbold and Dana McCauley, Last Dinner on the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner (London, 1997). Journalist Erica Wagner hosted a dinner party, based on the book, to ‘commemorate’ the 85th anniversary of the disaster. The result was reported in a full- page feature in The Times. See Erica Wagner, ‘Dinner as the Ship Went Down’ in The Times, 14 April 1997, p. 16. 13. Tim Radford, ‘Titanic Iceberg Is Innocent’ in The Guardian, 17 September 1993, p. 1. This is just one example of continuing media inter- est in the Titanic. 14. The American Titanic Historical Society was originally called Titanic Enthusiasts of America and today has nearly 5,000 members world-wide. A second American organization, Titanic International, has begun in competition to its predecessor, while the British Titanic Society has over 800 members. 15. Recent exceptions are Heyer’s account of media coverage of the Titanic and Stephen Biel’s study of the disaster in North American culture. See Paul Heyer, Titanic Legacy (Westport, Connecticut, 1995) and Steven Biel, Down With the Old Canoe (New York, 1996). 16. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984). 17. Roger Chartier, Cultural History (Cambridge, 1988). 18. Chartier (1988), p. 107. 19. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975; first paperback edition, 1977). 20. This expression is used by Fred Inglis in his discussion of Fussell in Fred Inglis, Media Theory (Oxford, 1990), p. 184. 21. Fussell (1977), p. ix. 22. Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer, Polar Research Series (London and New York, 1993), p. 3. 23. For an example of the sociology of representation in both theory and practice see Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London, 1997). Representation is, according to Hall, a key ‘moment’ in the ‘circle of culture’. Hall (1997), p. 1. The term ‘re- presentation’ is also term used by Chartier, which he defines as ‘the pro- duction of classifications and exclusions that constitute the social and conceptual configurations proper to one time or place’. Chartier (1988), p. 13. 24. Hall (1997), p. 15. 25. This study does not attempt an account of the political economy of the media during that period, nor does it engage itself with the socio- logy of reception of late Edwardian popular culture. These are both valid courses of inquiry, but lie beyond the deliberate focus of this examination. 26. Some authorities such as Jonathon Rose, take the Edwardian period as extending as far as 1919. See Jonathon Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919 (Athens, Ohio, 1986). 27. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1948), p. 41. Notes 163 28. Eliot (1948), p. 31. I am aware, of course, of the dangers of extending the concept of culture so far that it loses any real or particular meaning. My point here (as indeed was Eliot’s) is simply to remind us of the greater dangers of constricting that definition. 29. Colin MacCabe, ‘Defining Popular Culture’ in High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film, edited by Colin MacCabe, Images of Culture (Manchester, 1986), p. 8. 30. Eugene Weber, France: Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1986), p. 4. 31. James Monaco, How to Read a Film (New York and Oxford, 1981), p. 211. 32. Robert Warshow The Immediate Experience (New York, 1962), p. 28. 33. John Brinkerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, 1984) pp. ix–xii. 34. See especially T.W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry as Mass Deception’ in The Dialectic of Enlightenment translated by John Cumming (London, 1979). 35. T.W. Adorno, Notes on Literature, Volume II (New York, 1992), p. 245. 36. Inglis (1990), p. 6. 37. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, translated by Peter Winch (second edition, Oxford, 1980), p. 80. 38. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ, 1947, fifth printing, 1974), p. 5. 39. Kracauer (1947), p. 272. 40. John Dunn, ‘Practising History and Social Science on ‘Realist’ Assumptions’ in Political Obligation in its Historical Context (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 81–111, 110–11. 41. Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ in The Interpretation of Cultures (London, 1975), p. 452. 42. Adorno (1969), p. 348. 43. Geertz (1973), p. 16. 44. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London, 1977). 45. Geertz (1973), p. 444. 46. Geertz (1973), p. 444. 47. The term derives from the Greek ‘hermeneus’: an interpreter. 48. Geertz (1973), p. 453. 49. Geertz (1973), p. 5. 50. Terry Eagleton, The Crisis of Contemporary Culture (Oxford, 1993), p. 17. Eagleton claimed, in the same lecture, that because cultural theory threatened the current division of academic labour, it was considered to be a nuisance by the ‘Establishment’ (p. 17). 51. Henry Louis Gates, originally quoted in a letter to Harvard alumni and alumnae from Jeremy R. Knowles, 20 September 1996. Permission to requote granted in author’s correspondence with Gates, 1 November 1996. 52. It is reasonable, I think, to suspect that a significant item on the agenda of male survivors’ accounts in particular is the justification of their own survival in a context which applauded the concept of ‘women and 164 The Myth of the Titanic children first’ and which had correspondingly heaped odium upon male survivors with flimsy excuses for saving their own skins. J. Bruce Ismay, the Managing Director of the White Star Line, for example, survived and was pilloried in the press, effectively lost his job, and lived out the rest of his life as a recluse in Ireland. 53. Interview with survivor Eva Hart, conducted at her home at Chadwell Heath, Essex, 21 October, 1990. Miss Hart died in 1996. 54. John Kenneth Galbraith, A Tenured Professor: A Novel (London, 1990), p. 50. 55. The complex variety of theories of myth is both acknowledged and inves- tigated in the chapter in question. 1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TITANIC 1. Michael Davie, The Titanic: The Full Story of a Tragedy (London, 1986), p. 9. 2. Any ship carrying more than 50 steerage passengers sailing from a British port to ports outside Europe was classified by the Board of Trade as an ‘Emigrant Ship’. As such, form ‘Surveys 27’, ‘Report of a Survey of an Emigrant Ship’ was completed for the Titanic on 12 April 1912, while form ‘Surveys 32’, ‘Certificates of Clearance of an Emigrant Ship’ was completed by emigration officers as the Titanic left each of its ports of call in Europe. See Public Record Office reference MT 9/920 F (No. 356). 3. First-class fares remained generally stable, but steerage rates fluctuated considerably due to keen competition. C.R. Vernon Gibbs in British Passenger Liners of the Five Oceans (London, 1963), p. 540, gives exam- ples of fares and describes a ‘rate war’ which temporarily reduced Liverpool to New York fares to £2.