A Night To Remember – Walter Lord, 1955 ★★★★

Disaster by Degrees

When the Titanic sank and took some 1,500 souls with her in April 1912, minds reeled at the enormity of the disaster. Some sought religious consolation. Others took pride in the behavior of those who perished, many of whom fell into the category of what we now call elites.

Facing icy extinction, it was said these elites behaved with singular aplomb. By calmly allowing women and children to board the all-too-few lifeboats first, these first-class passengers were a credit to themselves and their order.

“The coolness, courage, and sense of duty that I here witnessed made me thankful to God and proud of my Anglo-Saxon race that gave this perfect and superb exhibition of self-control at this hour of severest trial,” observed survivor Colonel Archibald Gracie, as quoted in a 2014 research paper by Andrea Bijan of Western Oregon University.

It is an enduring legend, much of it from a single book: Walter Lord’s A Night To Remember. In it, Lord presents images that endure today: Men dressing to die, captain going down with the ship, band playing on. Some did struggle to live a little longer; one donned female attire to board a lifeboat. But the focus is on those who kept a stiff upper lip.

Lord records a conversation at the lifeboats between a First-Class couple:

“Walter, you must come with me,” begged Mrs. Walter D. Douglas.

“No,” Mr. Douglas replied, turning away. “I must be a gentleman.”

She lived; he didn’t. Thus, the code of the time prevailed.

The Titanic as she made ready to leave Belfast on April 2, 1912. Though famously sunk on her maiden voyage, she did make port in Cherbourg, France and Cobh, Ireland before sinking. Image from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/coal-fire-may-have-helped-sink-titanic-180961699/.

Yet A Night To Remember is no mere rosy-colored remembrance of pre-Great War mores, but a hard-edged social commentary with elements sure to resonate with a woke scholar today. While tycoons did die, many more steerage passengers did, too; women and children as well as men. “Neither the chance to be chivalrous nor the fruits of chivalry seemed to go with a Third Class passage,” Lord notes.

There are other ways Lord’s first book about the Titanic disaster surprised me, years after I first read it. I had forgotten how specific and spare an approach Lord takes to chronicling the experience.

We begin at twenty minutes to midnight on April 11, at the crow’s nest where lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee observe a gray shape through the darkness. Immediately Fleet gives an iceberg warning, and despite an agonizing slow reaction time (due to the ship’s size, Lord notes, rather than a slack bridge crew) the ship avoids a head-on collision:

At the last second the stem shot to the clear, and the ice glided swiftly by along the starboard side. It looked to Fleet like a very close shave.

Walter Lord's book begins with this man, Frederick Fleet. He was one of six lookouts aboard the Titanic, all of whom survived the sinking. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Fleet.

Others aboard the Titanic knew better. They had felt the scraping of the berg against the ship’s hull; heard the clatter of falling pots and pans in the kitchen. Still, for a while, most saw it of little concern. So the Titanic dinged an iceberg. She was unsinkable, wasn’t she?

The title is a bit of a misnomer. Technically, it should be A Morning To Remember, given it was only after midnight that the gravity of the situation was known. The cover of my vintage paperback describes this as “the minute-by-minute story;” it’s not quite that regimented but it does focus exclusively on the sinking and its immediate aftermath. No flashbacks to the launch in Belfast, or the pit stop taken near Cork. The berg connects with the ship on page one, and it’s all forward from there.

Another unique approach Lord takes, one not possible today, is to tell a story filtered through the consciousnesses of the survivors. According to his Acknowledgments, Lord approached 63 of them preparing this book, and most “came through handsomely” with anecdotes and observations.

"...and looking down on them all, an incredible wall clock adorned with two bronze nymphs, somehow symbolizing Honor and Glory crowning Time," is how Lord describes the famous Titanic's staircase clock. This reproduction by Alan St. George is set beside a photograph of the original. Image from https://www.alanstgeorge.com/titanic. 

Thus we get a slew of memories regarding what it was like on the ship; from the first hour when people reacted playfully to the novelty of broken ice on deck (“…in the Second Class smoking room someone facetiously asked whether he could get some ice from the berg for his highball”) to the jolts of panic which gradually descended upon passengers and crew:

No one was asking questions along the working alleyway on E Deck. This broad corridor was the quickest way from one end of the ship to the other – the officers called it “Park Lane,” the crew “Scotland Road.” Now it was crowded with pushing, shoving people. Some were stokers forced out of boiler room No. 6, but most were steerage passengers, slowly working their way aft, carrying boxes, bags, and even trunks.

A freak thing about the Titanic was how its cataclysmic fate was sealed not by the fact she hit an iceberg but because the man at the helm had heeded Fleet’s warning and tried to turn: by hitting against it sideways, along the starboard side, the hull was gashed 300 feet across, flooding five otherwise watertight compartments from its stem.

Lord notes how the vessel could have still floated with any four of those compartments gone; but not five. Less than three hours after hitting the berg, the Titanic was gone. No, one can’t imagine the Titanic going anywhere with a smashed-in nose, but at least with some of its forward compartments intact, it would have floated much longer than it did.

The Titanic goes under. When A Night To Remember was first published, it was not known whether the vessel sank intact. Investigation of the wreck found in the 1980s revealed it cracked in two first, as depicted here. Image from https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/sinking-of-the-titanic/. 

Another popular historian of his time would have used the Titanic disaster to probe the larger culture of the period, ruminated over mankind’s arrogance or the fallacious confidence in scientific advancement being so cruelly exposed. Lord’s Joe-Friday approach grabs you for its immediacy. “Just-the-facts” is a winning formula when the facts are as stark as these.

To be sure, not everything Lord writes holds up. One glitch involves how the Titanic signaled for help. “The clock in the wireless shack said 12:45 A.M. when the Titanic sent the first SOS call in history,” Lord writes, which was not the case unless the clock also said “1909,” the year the first-ever SOS call did in fact go out.

A fascinating website, “Encyclopedia Titanica,” includes robust comment threads where people discuss the pros and cons of Lord’s reportage, both here and in his 1986 follow-up The Night Lives On. Even fans of the book question the accuracy of at least one chapter, Chapter VII, “There Is Your Beautiful Nightdress Gone.”

But Lord was working at a time when the Titanic did not have the cultural cachet it does a hundred years or so after the fact. James Cameron was still in diapers when A Night To Remember was first published; Celine Dion wasn’t even born. Lord’s source materials were periodicals and the often-clashing recollections of those who survived.

Was this the iceberg? Photographed by the captain of a cable ship in the vicinity of the Titanic's sinking, it is marked by red paint that suggests a sidelong collision with a ship's hull. A good write-up of this story can be found here. Image from https://www.navcen.uscg.gov.

For example, was there a sounding spar that caused problems with the launch of one of the lifeboats? He says so in the book but acknowledged decades later some valid questions about that matter.

What Lord captures so vividly in fact was the confusion that reigned during the Titanic’s last two-plus hours, up to the moment when the ship finally went down, dragging those who remained aboard her to a screaming end:

Individual voices were lost in a steady, overwhelming clamour. To Fireman George Kemish, tugging at his oar in Boat 9, it sounded like a hundred thousand fans at a British football cup final. To Jack Thayer, lying on the keel of Boat B, it seemed like the high-pitched hum of locusts on a midsummer night in the woods back home in Pennsylvania.

The bottom line: I would not hesitate in recommending A Night To Remember to anyone with an interest, however small, regarding what happened. In its open-ended, subjective way, it raises key concerns and plunges you into the story so vividly you feel you are there.

Author Walter Lord. A Night To Remember was only his second book, written in his 30s while a copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Later in life, he consulted on the famous 1997 film Titanic, the biggest box-office success of the 20th century. Lord died in 2002. Image from http://www.titanic-titanic.com/titanic-articles-obituary-walter-lord/.

Walter Lord’s defenders on “Titanica” describe themselves as “Lordites;” ironic given much of the criticism directed at him centers on defending another Lord, Captain Stanley Lord, who commanded the Californian, a vessel Walter Lord notes was closest to the Titanic when it was calling for help, and didn’t render aid until it was too late.

Monday-morning quarterbacking? Perhaps. Walter Lord allows the Californian was likely too far away to have made a difference; the point was Captain Lord waited hours before trying, by which time the Carpathian was on the scene doing what could be done.

A Night To Remember vividly depicts the quick actions of the Carpathian’s captain, Arthur H. Rostron, ordering his ship’s resources on the fly to save who was left. Seven hundred and twelve were found on the Titanic’s scattered lifeboats; to get there Rostron redirected his ship’s steam power entirely to his engines.

Captain Arthur H. Rostron being presented a token of gratitude by Margaret Brown, a Titanic survivor. Better known as "Unsinkable Molly," Brown was one of a handful of survivors who tried unsuccessfully to get her lifeboat to turn back to where the Titanic sank and pick up who was left. Only one boat did so, according to Lord, by which time only four survivors were found. Image from http://www.scoopyweb.com/2017/12/the-true-stories-that-inspired-titanic.html.

Lord records the Carpathian’s passengers’ worries when they noticed the crew preparing for a sudden maritime emergency, and that the hot water in their rooms was suddenly gone.

It’s all vivid stuff, and a fitting capper to a memorable story well-told. A short book, yes, but one that packs an incredible punch. One only wishes it lasted a bit longer, for their sake as well as ours:

From the boats they could see the people lining the rails; they could hear the ragtime in the still night air. It seemed impossible that anything could be wrong with this great ship; yet there they were out on the sea, and there she was, well down at the head. Brilliantly lit from stem to stern, she looked like a sagging birthday cake.