Titanic Anniversary: Southampton, England Commemorates Cruise Tragedy

LONDON -- Exactly 100 years from the day when the ill-fated Titanic sailed from Southampton, the English port city is paying tribute with a series of events to mark the tragic anniversary.

Southampton was home to over a third of the more than 1,500 people who died when the ship hit an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912.

On Tuesday, more than 650 descendants of those on board gathered for a ceremony at the same berth on the city's docks where the Titanic set sail on April 10, 1912.

They threw flowers and wreaths into the water where the White Star liner left port, then a moment of silence was held to remember those who lost their lives in the tragedy.

A recording of the Titanic's whistle sounded on the docks at noon – the exact moment the RMS Titanic slipped her moorings – before a boat built in the same era re-enacted the doomed liner's departure.

The dockside service ended with the hymn "Nearer My God To Thee," which was said to have been played by the ship's musicians as Titanic sank.

Vanessa Beecham, from Southampton, paid tribute to her great uncle Edward Biggs, a firefighter aboard the Titanic who died at age 21. She said the ceremony was "tasteful and moving."

"It was a worry during the anniversary that the families would be forgotten in all the razzmatazz ... but this was lovely," she said.

Later, hundreds of Southampton schoolchildren paraded to the city center carrying placards with photographs of locals who had died aboard the ship.

Southampton also opened a new museum – SeaCity – on Tuesday. The museum tells the story of Southampton's connection to the sea, with a focus on the Titanic story.

The museum opening and tributes in the city are among the many commemorations and memorials to the reputedly unsinkable ship that have sprung up to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's final voyage.

On Sunday, Southampton saw off the MS Balmoral on a 12-day Titanic Memorial Cruise to retrace the route of the Titanic with the same number of passengers aboard.

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Comments

[stephvelander]

12:41 PM on 04/11/2012

Hmmm, maybe these people are the reincarnated souls of the titanic. Oh who am I kidding...who cares. I would like to celebrate an earthquake by covering myself in dust and scrapes. Anyone care to join?

[Patient Zero]

11:31 AM on 04/11/2012

OK. IT's 100 years. Give it a rest.

[tripcony]

08:47 AM on 04/11/2012

For someone whos father was a survivor of a sinking spending 36hrs in the water and also a grandfather who was also sunk and survived a battleship sinking in under 2minutes...I suggest we all dress up in period costume and float face down in the water....bloody stupid people get a life..and get over it many ships have gone to the bottom and never found or anyone survived but this one ship will never be allowed to rest in peace...its not a game

[tmdjr]

06:58 AM on 04/11/2012

If you have not had the opportunity to watch James Cameron's National Geographic network special regarding the Titanic, I highly recommend it. It shows what happened to the Titanic after it sank below the surface and landed on the ocean's bottom. It was a gathering of Titanic experts who investigated the wreckage as a "crime scene" to determine what actually happened.

[mhwyman7]

04:32 AM on 04/11/2012

Iceberg Dead Ahead.

[commento]

08:17 PM on 04/10/2012

Lesson from the Titanic tragedy: Always be prepared because there is no such thing as an Unsinkable Ship.

[wolfnus]

06:06 PM on 04/10/2012

Too bad that no survivors of the sinking lived to see the 100th anniversary. The last survivor, Miss Dean, died in 2009. As a former military officer, I have wondered how I would have reacted if I had been a ship's officer aboard the Titanic, Would I have maintained my honor and helped OTHERS into lifeboats, knowing that I was quite probably going to die? You never know until the situation arises. The only thing evrn remotely close for me was when I did NOT tell the draft board doctors during the Vietnam war that I had had a major back injury as a teenager thart would have exempted me from the draft. I even had x-rays of my back but tossed them away and passed the physical for induction and was later commissioned as a 2LT. Of course, if I had known I was going to be killed in the war, I would NOT have done it!

[LMPE]

02:47 PM on 04/10/2012

When I took a sailing class, I learned why specifically the Titanic went down.

One thing is that it was sailing way too fast for a ship its size, so of course it couldn't turn in time. But another thing was corruption. During the construction, they were supposed to use a certain type of metal to build the sides, so that in case of a collision the sides would just bend. But the people financing it decided to save themselves some money, so they used a weaker type of metal, and...well, we all know what happened.

[carlgt1]

05:47 PM on 04/10/2012

this was looked into i.e. the supposedly brittle steel and found not to be true. Any steel as part of a ship of that mass & speed (momentum) hitting a big iceberg would have been shredded.

[GrafZeppelin127]

06:30 PM on 04/10/2012

I have to concur with carlgt1; I don't think that's true. What -is- true is that the Titanic's steel was brittle compared to modern steel which typically contains fewer mineral impurities. But it was not particularly brittle by the standards of 1912 steel. The Titanic sank because while it could survive any number of underwater hull-breach scenarios, it could not survive the one that actually befell it.

The Titanic's inability to turn in time was a combination of factors, the ship's mass being one of them, but then again no large ship can "turn on a dime" (at least, not one with a traditional aft propeller/rudder configuration; modern ships have thrusters fore and aft to make them more maneuverable). The other factors included the size of the rudder relative to the ship; the configuration of the propellers, particularly the center turbine propeller afore the rudder; the stopping of the non-reversible center turbine/propeller and the reversal of the outboard reciprocating engines/propellers, disrupting the flow of water past the rudder.

[visconti24]

10:51 PM on 04/10/2012

GrafZeppelin127. An aside to you, Graf. My grandmother used to tell me stories of traveling from Brazil to Germany and back in the Zep. HER grandmother was German and she would go to Bavaria from time to time in the early '30s.

[gardenkaveri]

02:19 PM on 04/10/2012

Very sloppy article indeed. The Titanic was not a cruise ship - it's maiden voyage was not a "cruise." People cruise now because airplanes exist to take travelers to where they need to go and ships are purely for fun - hence the word "cruise." Planes didn't exist in 1912, so people took ships. One doesn't "cruise" to Europe on an airplane. It's amazing how anybody can publish anything these days.

[carlgt1]

05:47 PM on 04/10/2012

yeah, hence the "steerage" section with the poor immigrants; most of whom were killed.

[visconti24]

10:46 PM on 04/10/2012

You are right. Very sloppy article.

[JeffNewman]

01:38 PM on 04/10/2012

Edward Biggs was a fireman aboard the Titanic. A fireman is not a firefighter.

A fireman's job was to CREATE fire by stoking the furnaces, not to extinguish it. Similar to a fireman on board a steam locomotive.

Really sloppy writing and editing.

[Cactus Cat]

02:03 PM on 04/10/2012

That's interesting, thank you for the info. You're right, HP has some seriously poor writing and editing,

[JeffNewman]

01:30 PM on 04/10/2012

Titanic's voyage was not a "Cruise," and Titanic was not a cruise ship. She was a transport vessel. The term "liner" is a more correct term.

[omobob]

12:54 PM on 04/10/2012

> Titanic sailed from Southampton But was built in Belfast. It seems both locations have some claim to the Great Ship. I am loving all the bios and recreations.

[GrafZeppelin127]

12:12 PM on 04/10/2012

The Titanic was actually the second in a series of three ships, and was essentially identical to the first, the Olympic, which entered service a year earlier. The two ships were built side-by-side from the same set of blueprints. Changes to the Titanic's interior configuration created more "indoor" space, particularly on A and B decks, and thus the second ship registered about 1,000 more gross tonnage (which referred to capacity, not weight) than the first, so the Titanic could be called the "largest ship in the world" even though in terms of dimensions (length, width, height, draught) the Olympic was the exact same size. Indeed, the White Star Line's contemporary advertising touted the -two- ships, plural, as "The Largest Steamers in the World."

The Titanic was -not- called the "Ship of Dreams." It wasn't really called "unsinkable" either, at least not officially; a British trade journal in 1910 used the phrase "practically unsinkable" in describing the safety features of of the forthcoming Olympic-class liners. Since the two ships were structurally and mechanically identical, the Olympic was no less "unsinkable" than the Titanic was, but there was no media hype in 1911 about the "unsinkable Olympic." Only after the Titanic sank did the word "unsinkable" gain traction in the public mind, and only in connection with the Titanic, not the Olympic (which, of course, never sank).

[omobob]

12:52 PM on 04/10/2012

> The Titanic was actually the second in a series of three ships, and was essentially identical to the first, the Olympic, which entered service a year earlier. 

Very true, although i read Titanic was more luxurious in her appointments.
Well noted. great info. faved. cheers

[GrafZeppelin127]

01:36 PM on 04/10/2012

That's what's always been said and accepted, and I don't really doubt it, although "luxuriousness" is a highly subjective quality and difficult to define. That said, the Titanic did have some amenities that the Olympic lacked, many of them attributable to those enclosed spaces I mentioned above. The Olympic had an open promenade on A Deck and an enclosed promenade on B Deck. On the Titanic, the forward half of the A Deck promenade was enclosed, and the B deck promenade space was filled by extending the First Class cabins to the side of the ship, so they had windows looking out onto the ocean; the two parlour suites just aft of the Grand Staircase had private promenade decks. The Olympic's open B Deck promenade aft (Second Class) was filled on the Titanic by extending the à la carte restaurant on the port side, and installing a French sidewalk café on the starboard side.

Many of these features were built into the Olympic during its later service life.

I've also read that the Titanic had rather more sumptuous carpeting, furniture, etc. in some places, but that's really a matter of taste and it's impossible to know for certain. For the most part, the Titanic's interiors were not photographed before she sank; White Star used photos of the Olympic's interiors to represent both ships.

[HowietheScreamer]

03:12 PM on 04/10/2012

Olympic sunk too. She was torpedo'ed in WW1.

[GrafZeppelin127]

03:56 PM on 04/10/2012

No, that's wrong. The Britannic, third ship in the series, struck a mine during WWI and sank in the Aegean Sea. The Olympic survived the war and remained in service until 1935, when she was scrapped at Jarrow and Inverkeithing.

[jbmorgen1]

12:05 PM on 04/10/2012

There's no joy about the sinking of the RMS Titanic because the whole event was a folly from the start--not enough life boats, poor construction and design;plus, a delusional attitude of the powers that be....

[MerryMayhem]

12:30 PM on 04/10/2012

I totally agree. In other years, I've read some small blurb in the newspaper section "What Happened on this day in History." but other than that nada. I don't even "celebrate" or know what day any of my relatives died on. If anything, there's a nod to their birthday and a chat of fond memories.

[thereisonlyoneparty]

01:01 PM on 04/10/2012

Poor construction and design? Perhaps. Though I would state that it was more a result of limited knowledge and abilities.

This was an early attempt to build what was viewed as a safe ocean going vessel. Turns out they were wrong. Recent findings state that the ship was likely unable to sustain minor forces without catastrophic failure. Was it a "poor design?" Yeah, but only by when judged by the standards and knowledge of today. You know, a time when we can use computer models to examine the effects of stress upon materials and whole objects...

I doubt that you will want the people living one hundred years from now claiming that your work was a "folly" because you lack the knowledge and technology that is common then.

[jbmorgen1]

01:50 PM on 04/10/2012

Of course, that implies to every engineered design for its time, however, a lot has improved in maritime/naval construction during the mid-20th century, among with additional improvements of this century. A lot was learned from the Titanic sinking, which better ocean liners were built afterwards....