Are we all onboard for Titanic II?
RMY GRANDFATHER was born in 1899. Queen Victoria was still on the throne. He was a teenager when the Titanic sank. In fact, grandad had vivid memories of how news of the sinking arrived in his tiny Shropshire village.
“The local bobby pedalled slowly down the main street holding a tin megaphone,” he told me.
“He just kept shouting, over and over, ‘the Titanic has sunk! The Titanic has sunk!’”
Grandad took his own bike and pedalled furiously into Wem, the nearest town that sold newspapers, bought as many as he could carry back and then flogged them door-to-door at a tidy profit. Every cloud, I suppose.
Grandad died long before the Titanic was discovered, miraculously preserved, at the bottom of the Atlantic. I wonder what he would have made of that.
And I found myself wondering this week what he might make of advanced plans to build an exact replica of what was, back in 1912, the largest ship ever built.
Australian billionaire Clive Palmer (worth roughly £12.5billion thanks to major holdings in the Australian mining industry) is poised to sign contracts with one of four major shipyards dotted around the world.
For almost a quarter of a century now he’s dreamed of re-creating the most famous ship that ever sailed. It’ll cost around £530million, loose change to Palmer.
The project is an obsession with him, partly, he freely admits, because of James Cameron’s blockbuster 1997 movie about the liner’s doomed attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in record time. It was travelling too fast to swerve around the iceberg that patiently awaited their deadly rendezvous.
I’m not sure what I think about this project. I wrote here recently that I was unsettled by plans to re-float Donald Campbell’s fully restored Bluebird speedboat on Coniston Water, where he died violently while attempting the world water speed record in 1967.
The actual boat? On the actual lake Campbell perished? Something indecent about it, if you ask me. But maybe re-floating the Titanic is different, not least because it’s not the real thing, somehow dragged up from its watery grave (along with bodies, inevitably) and restored.
Anyway, Palmer’s Titanic won’t be precisely the same as the original (although the sumptuous interiors; that great curving balustraded staircase, the first-class quarters and sumptuous dining room, and of course THAT chandelier are to be faithfully reproduced).
But Titanic II will be a little wider than the original to accommodate a full complement of lifeboats.And it will be powered by diesel, not coal.
But once delivered from the construction yard, its maiden voyage will be from Southampton to New York, just as the original intended. Launch date provisionally set for 2027. Might you be a passenger?
Rather depends on where you stand on the concept of tempting fate, doesn’t it?