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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2009 12:18:03 GMT
On April 15,1912 the Ocean liner Titantic met it's horrible fate and became one of if not the most famous sinking of a ship in nautical history. As child growing up I was always intrigued with this historical event(well before the Oscar winning movie) and would read anything I could get my hands on about it. The mystique and romance of the ill fated voyage was fodder for my imagination and has always held a certain fascination. Curious to hear you share on this.
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Post by tillystar on Apr 15, 2009 14:25:48 GMT
Yes, I have always been fascinated by it as well.
A friend's great (great-great?) uncle was an officer on board. He ensured that lots of people got onto lifeboats and then refused to take space on one and threw himself into the water. The people on one of the lifeboats that he had filled dragged him on board. When he died my friend was helping to clear an old chest of drawers that had belonged to him and it was filled with thank you letters from people he had saved.
What an absolutely amazing find!
I also find it interesting that the scene in the movie where the 3rd class passengers were trapped below deck was an invention. Not of Hollywood as I would have guessed but of strikers in the shipyards a few years later trying to stir up support amongst the workers.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2009 19:28:19 GMT
Speaking of the movie, I turned down a job as an extra in it. I might have been pretending to eat in the grand dining room, or I might have been floating dead with fake ice cubes, but I did not want to go to Mexico at the time. (So strange to think that that movie was filmed in Mexico.)
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Post by Jazz on Apr 15, 2009 19:41:05 GMT
I have always been intrigued as well. When I was a little girl I saw a movie, A Night to Remember, which affected me far, far more than the later extravaganza with Leonardo. I still watch any documentary that comes along.
That is a great story about your friend's great, great uncle, what a man!...did you have a chance to read any of the letters? (they belong in a Maritime Museum) That is fascinating that it wasn't true that the 3rd class passengers were trapped below deck, and the reason for the story. I have never heard this before. What did your friend do with the letters?
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2009 1:38:57 GMT
I too remember the movie A Night To Remember and how much more effectively it was portrayed than the later Hollywood over the top one. I was fairly young myself when I saw it but I remember it so well. I did later go on to read the book from which it was adapted. I would love to hear Tilly what did happen to the letters? The scene with the musicians lingers in my mind.
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Post by tillystar on Apr 16, 2009 7:54:19 GMT
I will have to ask what happened to the letters, I never thought to ask... the conversation taking place halfway through a bottle of rum. I imagine they were kept in the family though as they are all sailors and very interested in all things sea and ship related.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2009 11:56:00 GMT
Maybe you could get copies for our Maritime Museum here!! Anyway,thanks for the telling. Fascinated with this stuff.
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Post by hwinpp on Apr 24, 2009 7:52:10 GMT
There was an article in an online magazine recently which said the last known survivor is having to sell off her last mementos to pay for her nursing home bills.
That movie made me instantly hate the guts of Leonardo. I refused to see any movie with him in it until Gangs of New York. His role in Blood Diamonds completely reconciled us.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 4, 2009 14:15:21 GMT
Last Survivor of Titanic Dies in England
Death Comes on 98th Anniversary of Launch of Famous Ship By Jill Lawless, AP LONDON (May 31) -- Millvina Dean, who as a baby was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat in the frigid North Atlantic, died Sunday, having been the last survivor of 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic. She was 97 years old, and she died where she had lived — in Southampton, England, the city her family had tried to leave behind when it took the ship's ill-fated maiden voyage, bound for America.
Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the sinking of the Titanic, died in southern England Sunday at the age of 97. Traveling with her family, she was just 2 months old when the ship hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, sinking within three hours.
She died in her sleep early Sunday, her friend Gunter Babler told the Associated Press. It was the 98th anniversary of the launch of the ship that was billed as "practically unsinkable." Babler said Dean's longtime companion, Bruno Nordmanis, called him in Switzerland to say staff at Woodlands Ridge Nursing Home in Southampton discovered Dean in her room Sunday morning. He said she had been hospitalized with pneumonia last week but she had recovered and returned to the home. Staff nurse at the nursing home said late Sunday that no one would comment until administrators came on duty Monday morning. Dean just over 2 months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. The ship sank in less than three hours. Dean was one of 706 people — mostly women and children — who survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died. Babler, who is head of the Switzerland Titanic Society, said Dean was a "very good friend of very many years." "I met her through the Titanic society but she became a friend and I went to see very every month or so," he said. The pride of the White Star line, the Titanic had a mahogany-paneled smoking room, a swimming pool and a squash court. But it did not have enough lifeboats for all of its 2,200 passengers and crew. Dean's family were steerage passengers setting out from the English port of Southampton for a new life in the United States. Her father had sold his pub and hoped to open a tobacconists' shop in Kansas City, Missouri, where his wife had relatives. Initially scheduled to travel on another ship, the family was transferred to the Titanic because of a coal strike. Four days out of port and about 600 kilometers (380 miles) southeast of Newfoundland, the ship hit an iceberg. The impact buckled the Titanic's hull and sent sea water pouring into six of its supposedly watertight compartments.
Dean said her father's quick actions saved his family. He felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its third-class quarters and toward the lifeboat that would take them to safety. "That's partly what saved us — because he was so quick. Some people thought the ship was unsinkable," Dean told the British Broadcasting Corp. in 1998. Wrapped in a sack against the Atlantic chill, Dean was lowered into a lifeboat. Her 2-year-old brother Bertram and her mother Georgette also survived.
"She said goodbye to my father and he said he'd be along later," Dean said in 2002. "I was put into lifeboat 13. It was a bitterly cold night and eventually we were picked up by the Carpathia." The family was taken to New York, then returned to England with other survivors aboard the rescue ship Adriatic. Dean did not know she had been aboard the Titanic until she was 8 years old, when her mother, about to remarry, told her about her father's death. Her mother, always reticent about the tragedy, died in 1975 at age 95. Born in London on Feb. 2, 1912, Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean spent most of her life in the English seaside town of Southampton, Titanic's home port. She never married, and worked as a secretary, retiring in 1972 from an engineering firm. She moved into a nursing home after breaking her hip about three years ago. She had to sell several Titanic mementoes to raise funds, prompting her friends to set up a fund to subsidize her nursing home fees. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the stars of the film "Titanic," pledged their support to the fund last month. For most of her life Dean had no contact with Titanic enthusiasts and rarely spoke about the disaster. Dean said she had seen the 1958 film "A Night to Remember" with other survivors, but found it so upsetting that she declined to watch any other attempts to put the disaster on celluloid, including the 1997 blockbuster "Titanic." She began to take part in Titanic-related activities in the 1980s, after the discovery of the ship's wreck in 1985 sparked renewed interest in the disaster. At a memorial service in England, Dean met a group of American Titanic enthusiasts who invited her to a meeting in the U.S. She visited Belfast to see where the ship was built, attended Titanic conventions around the world — where she was mobbed by autograph seekers — and participated in radio and television documentaries about the sinking. Charles Haas, president of the New-Jersey based Titanic International Society, said Dean was happy to talk to children about the Titanic. "She had a soft spot for children," he said. "I remember watching was little tiny children came over clutching pieces of paper for her to sign. She was very good with them, very warm." In 1997, Dean crossed the Atlantic by boat for the first time, on the QEII luxury liner, and finally visited Kansas City, declaring it "so lovely I could stay here five years." She was active well into her 90s, but missed the commemoration of the 95th anniversary of the disaster in 2007 after breaking her hip. Dean had no memories of the sinking and said she preferred it that way. "I wouldn't want to remember, really," she told The Associated Press in 1997. She opposed attempts to raise the wreck 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) from the sea bed. "I don't want them to raise it, I think the other survivors would say exactly the same," she said in 1997. "That would be horrible." The last survivor with memories of the sinking — and the last American survivor — was Lillian Asplund, who was 5 at the time. She died in May 2006 at the age of 99. The second-last survivor, Barbara Joyce West Dainton of Truro, England, died in October 2007 aged 96.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
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Post by distantshores on Jun 8, 2009 19:58:33 GMT
I have seen photos of a beautiful little cemetery in Canada, Nova Scotia I believe, of where some of the deceased passengers were buried. The tombstones were distinct and unique if memory serves me right. I wonder how many different places, besides "buried at sea" the initial deceased are buried. I think many were taken back to England.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 8, 2009 20:57:00 GMT
Speaking of the movie, I turned down a job as an extra in it. I might have been pretending to eat in the grand dining room, or I might have been floating dead with fake ice cubes, but I did not want to go to Mexico at the time. (So strange to think that that movie was filmed in Mexico.) Filmed in Mexico so the film stars wouldn't suffer hypothermia wading around in the water-filled boat, perhaps? When I saw the recent movie, I was struck by how unrealistic it was that they were in supposedly ice-filled waters for so long without dying of exposure... BTW, my grandpa was in the process of immigrating to America when his boat passed through the flotsam from the wrecked Titanic...
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Post by distantshores on Jun 8, 2009 21:04:07 GMT
Kimby,
Can you imagine the thoughts that went thru your Grandfathers mind as they passed thru what was left of any visible trace of a huge oceanliner! He probably never did forget that experience!
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Post by distantshores on Jun 10, 2009 13:08:35 GMT
Here is a website that has a lot of photos and information about the Titanic victims buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And if you scroll down, it tells of another disaster. The Great Halifax Disaster of 1917 where 1,900 people wee killed in a collision of two ships. And below that photos of one of the oldest cemeteries in Canada probably. The symbolism on the stones is fascinating! www.nejman.com/todiefor/halifax.htm
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 10, 2009 13:25:33 GMT
Fascinating link, DS. How strange it is that the Halifax Disaster is not as generally known as the sinking of the Titanic. I certainly never heard of it before. Interesting to see that the gravestones in that Canadian cemetery are so similar to ones in the US from that era. I wonder if those from England of that time period are the same, or were these a new-world style.
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Post by distantshores on Jun 10, 2009 14:40:00 GMT
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Post by Kimby on Jun 10, 2009 15:47:37 GMT
I don't know why the Titanic holds such mystery and intrugue over other disasters. Media coverage has a lot to do with it I'm sure. Perhaps it has something to do with hubris, and the fact that the ship was deemed "unsinkable". Also, lots of prominent and/or rich people were aboard...
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Post by BigIain on Jun 10, 2009 17:22:43 GMT
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futility,_or_the_Wreck_of_the_Titan I have always been strangely intrigued by the novel "Wreck of the Titan" written long before the Titanic was built which has remarkable simularities to the subsequent disaster.
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Post by BigIain on Jun 10, 2009 17:31:43 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Jun 10, 2009 17:39:44 GMT
One of the first people I ever encountered on line used the screen name Titanic, and we are still friends in real life more than 20 years later.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 10, 2009 17:44:42 GMT
Oh ~~ that's creepy, Iain! If you hadn't said what it was, I would have assumed that the name "Titan" at the end of the piece was a typo. "Titanic" is a handle that would intrigue. How did you all manage to meet in real life, Kerouac?
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Post by Deleted on Jun 10, 2009 18:00:47 GMT
Back in the days of the primitive French 'Minitel' (pre-internet chat!), we would organize dinners in restaurants for 50 or 80 people. France Telecom distributed them free starting in 1983 to people who accepted not to receive paper telephone directories. I think it took people about 2 months to discover that the message zones of various companies could be turned into chat rooms.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 10, 2009 18:12:57 GMT
That's fascinating. What was the motivation for France Telecom? Was the idea that the Minitel would be a one-time cost for the company because it could be updated automatically?
What do you mean, y'all organized restaurant dinners -- as a job, or as get-togethers for the underground Minitel users.
God, this is like talking to someone who was there when the ability to make fire was discovered!
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Post by Deleted on Jun 10, 2009 18:31:48 GMT
No, there were organizers who loved doing that sort of stuff. They probably got a commission for the restaurants.
France Telecom was just ahead of its time, because the Minitel became so wildly popular that it took forever for the internet to take off in France. For things like train schedules or ordering out of a catalogue, it was fast and practical. In fact, Minitels still exist, even if they are not distributed anymore. But so many people are still using them that they don't dare pull the plug yet.
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Post by BigIain on Jun 11, 2009 6:46:50 GMT
Did it make up for every third phone call either going to the wrong number or getting cut off? France Telecom used to have an awful reputation
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Post by Deleted on Jun 11, 2009 6:59:47 GMT
France Telecom did indeed use to be disgraceful, and it is the one major improvement for which I will give credit to that otherwise useless president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. He arrived in office in 1974 and pointed out how bad the phone system was. France was something like the 4th or 5th economy in the world and around #80 in telecoms. So he put a ton of money into changing that and by the beginning of the 1980's, all was well.
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