Just Finished Reading: Shadow of the Titanic – The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived by Andrew Wilson (FP: 2011)

The first thing that struck me about this often interesting book was that it was obviously written by a journalist rather than a historian. The difference in style between this and the previous Titanic book was rather stark. Shadow of the Titanic is, in a word, far more sensationalist than Titanic Lives and this author focused upon and, I believe, consciously or not heightened the apparent after-effects of the tragic sinking of the great liner.

The author was quite right in his preamble that most books on this most famous ship close with the sinking itself or at best with the recovery of the lifeboats on the 705 survivors by the Carpathia the following morning. Little is mentioned of the two official inquiries in New York and London or what happened to those rescued after they returned to dry land. Although the blurb on the back of the book implies that all 705 survivors’ stories would be told I did think that such a Herculean task in only 350 pages. Such was the case and actually only 20-30 follow ups where attempted. Typically, as you might expect from a non-historian, much of what followed was the low hanging fruit of the lives (by and large) of the rich and shameless with hardly a mention of those from 2nd and especially 3rd class. From then on we were treated to numerous tales of divorce, madness, suicide of those ‘cursed’ by their survival. We have stories of those who believed that something very bad was going to happen to them when they heard the name Titanic for the first time and even one 1st class passenger who had a warning from a psychic she encountered whilst on holiday in Europe. We even have suicides 20 or more years after the event (precluded by divorce and/or death of beloved children) attributed, without as far as I could see a shred of evidence, to the horror experienced by that fateful night. Certainly I am not questioning the fact that surviving the sinking of the Titanic was a traumatic event in the lives of over 700 men, women and children. Many survivors never spoke of the incident again during their lives and never wrote about it. Others wrote newspaper articles, books and even starred in some of the early films recreating their own experiences on board ship. Others, it seemed, simply left the Carpathia never to be heard of again. How interesting would it be to find out what happened to those people rather than the spoiled teenage wife of an Astor?

My overall impression of this book was, unlike the ‘dizzyingly impressive’ comment from the Mail on Sunday (coincidently a paper that the author also writes for) was disappointing. It certainly had a good idea to follow and apparently filled an obvious gap in the Titanic narrative. Unfortunately it didn’t have the depth, heft or scholarship to follow this idea through to a decent conclusion. Oddly what I found most interesting about this book, which to be honest was by no means a total loss, was when the author moved beyond the survivor stories to what happened to the Titanic story itself as the years and decades went by – the stories that circulated at the time, the imposters who tried to claim compensation for losses or who made ‘scenes’ grieving for people they did not know, the misidentified infant who only found out she was a Titanic survivor decades later, the survivors who related their stories to Walter Lord and who assisted him in the production of the movie ‘A Night to Remember’, and the bizarre legal wrangle over a kimono that may, or may not, have been worn that night. Each of these stories could have made an interesting book in themselves but had been brought up as flotsam at the end of the book almost as an afterthought.

Taken with a few good pinches of salt this is a reasonable telling of ‘what happened next’ in the Titanic saga. If you do still feel like reading it (after my hatchet job above) you’ll pick up a lot of interesting side stories that might be possible to follow up elsewhere just don’t expect to be all that enlightened.