Titanic story still fascinates
It is well over 100 years since the Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic while on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.
Yet still the story of the illfated ship, at the time the largest and most luxurious in the world, continues to intrigue.
Hollywood has helped keep the myth alive with more than two dozen films made about the disaster.
The first, Saved From The Titanic, went on release just 29 days after the sinking.
Most people today know James Cameron’s 1997 version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, although it is generally agreed the 1958 film A Night To Remember starring Kenneth Moore was the most accurate.
The disaster has been so often filmed because the real-life story has all the elements of a classic story: the incredible stiff-upper-lip courage of many on board – we all know how the orchestra continued to play as the ship sank – the villains whose arrogance and incompetence led to the mishap which could so easily have been avoided and the human story of the survivors, of which there were around 750, mostly women and children.
The immense interest in the Titanic story has been proved once again with the enormous success of an exhibition about the ship now running in the Royal Victoria Place shopping centre in Tunbridge Wells.
More than 150,000 people have toured the show since it opened three weeks ago.
The centre’s marketing manager Marc Burchett said: “The exhibition has proved to be a huge hit.
“It really enables the viewer to immerse themselves in this amazing and moving story.” The exhibition includes some large-scale photographs of the ship’s interior, blown up to a size that makes the viewer feel they are walking inside the ship.
There are also 130 original artefacts recovered from the ship, or from her twin the Olympic, or that once belonged to Titanic’s passengers.
It includes photographs taken on board the rescue ship Carpathia.
There is a gold pocket watch dropped by a first class passenger as he rushed to secure a place in one of the last lifeboats to leave the sinking ship, only to be picked up by one of Titanic’s crew members.
There are chairs from the ship’s salon, the cartel clock from its lounge and perhaps most poignant, the original sheet music of the orchestra leader Wallace Hartley which he carried with him that night and was recovered along with his body 10 days later.
The exhibition closes this Sunday. Entry is free.
After leaving Tunbridge Wells, it will tour South America.