Remembering the Titanic -100 years on

The bow of Titanic

The 15th April 2012 marks 100 years to the day when the world's largest ship at the time, the passenger ship RMS Titanic sank in the Atlantic after a collision with an iceberg on her maiden voyage to New York.  On board the Titanic were 2,224 men, women and children of whom only 710 were finally rescued in the early morning of 15 April 1912 - there had been only enough lifeboats for 1,178 persons and these had not all been filled to capacity. The loss of the ship is one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters and led to International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS).

The Titanic has been the subject of books, documentaries, plays, readings, exhibitions and films including the better known ones "A Night to Remember" and "Titanic". The tragedy of Titanic's story is layered with irony, courage, compassion, duty and errors - Titanic had the latest design of the era with watertight compartments, remotely activated watertight doors and a powerful wireless telegraph yet the collision fatally compromised too many compartments; the Captain and most of the crew went down with the ship; the Titanic's band famously played on to the end and the evacuation order of women and children first, was followed by the ships officers. The Titanic rests 3,784 metres down and has been continuously visited by souvenir hunters and tourists since rediscovery in 1985. It should however remain undisturbed as a maritime memorial to those lost.

The Titanic in 1912