The Titanic & Brit Crime Shows
What I Learnt:
My mom tells me that when I was a small child, I often asked her to tell me the story of the Titanic. She also jokes that after I first heard it, I would point to each ship in a harbour and ask, ‘Will it sink?’. Talk about having a macabre imagination!
I listened to Tim Maltin, arguably the world’s leading expert on the Titanic, on Dan Snow’s amazing podcast – History Hits. And learned some fascinating things about the tragedy that I wasn’t aware of. Here they are:
The ship almost had a collision whilst leaving Southampton harbour with another large passenger ship, the New York. Ironically, she was saved by the excellent seamanship of her captain.
The crew didn’t realize that there was an emergency until 47 minutes after the collision. Which led to a series of unfortunate incidents that has given rise to the legend that third class passengers were sacrificed to save first class passengers.
The reason the Titanic had very few lifeboats is because her designers thought she would sink so slowly that people could be ferried to other passenger liners that would have been around in the transatlantic route.
The bottom of the Titanic was flat, and it was this flat section that ran aground on an underwater spur of the iceberg. This resulted in 5 watertight compartments getting ripped open. If it had been 4 compartments instead, the ship wouldn’t have sunk.
Shocking as this may sound, there was some aspects of good luck in this whole tragedy:
The RMS Carpathia only heard the Titanic’s distress call because she was trying to contact her to let her know that there was mail aboard that needed to be delivered to passengers.
The Titanic’s crew gave the Carpathia the wrong distress coordinates, which were 10 miles away. Luckily the actual position of the Titanic was between the Carpathia’s path and the wrong coordinates. Otherwise, the rescue might have come too late, and many more people would have drowned.
Because the sea was so calm, the lifeboats didn’t capsize and sink. If the seas had been rough, there may not have been any survivors.
For more information about Time Maltin, please check out his site https://timmaltin.com.
What I Like:
I think British crime shows are the best in the world. They rely on layered and realistic characters (DCI Vera Stanhope, DI Jimmy Perez), interesting settings (Shetlands!), strong storylines that often take their time to reveal themselves (Unforgotten, Line of Duty) and a great balance between sarcasm and wit (Inspector Lewis, Father Brown).
All of this is possible thanks to brilliant writing of course. Hmmm, no wonder I like them. :-)