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Titanic ‘down under’: ideology, myth and memorialization

2008; Routledge; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03071020802268348

1470-1200

Sarah Gregson,

Maritime and Coastal Archaeology

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1S. Wilentz (ed.), Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 1985), 3. 2As one small indication, my great-grandmother had this ‘In Memoriam’ published: ‘In loving memory of William Edward, dearly beloved husband of Emily Ellen. … Deeply missed by his wife and [five] children. Three long years have now passed by since this great sorrow fell. Yet in my heart I mourn the loss of one I loved so well. Time rolls on and years pass by, whatever be my lot. As long as life and memory last he will never be forgot’–Hampshire Independent, 17 April 1915. I am indebted to Brian Ticehurst for this information. 3G. Orwell, ‘My country right or left’ in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols (London, 1968), i, 536. 4S. Terkel, Hope Dies Last: Making a Difference in an Indifferent World (London, 2004), 87. 5Most notably, Gardiner and van der Vat claim that it was RMS Olympic, and not its ‘sister’ ship, Titanic, that sank in 1912, as part of an enormous insurance fraud on the part of the owner of the two ships, the White Star Line. See R. Gardiner and D. van der Vat, The Riddle of the Titanic (London, 1995); R. Gardiner, Titanic: The Ship that Never Sank? (Hersham, 2001). 6T. Bergfelder and S. Street (eds), The Titanic in Myth and Memory: Representations in Visual and Literary Culture (London, 2004), 2. 7P. Heyer, Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth (Westport, CT, 1995), x. 8S. Beder, Selling the Work Ethic (Carlton North, 2000), 41–6. 9H. Bradley, M. Erickson, C. Stephenson and S. Williams, Myths at Work (Cambridge, 2000). 10J. B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Cambridge, 1990), 7. 11R. Howells, The Myth of the Titanic (New York, 1999), 41, 46, 52–3. 13S. Biel, Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (New York, 1997), 132. 12S. Biel, ‘Unknown and unsung’: feminist, African American, and radical responses to the Titanic disaster’ in S. Biel (ed.), American Disasters (New York, 2001), 332–3. 14 ibid., 6, 333. 15J. Hawthorn, Cunning Passages: New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and Marxism in the Contemporary Literary Debate (London, 1996), 102, 118–19. 18 ibid., 56. 16Thompson, op. cit., 56. 17 ibid., 41. 19 ibid., 56–67. 20D. Gittins, Titanic: Monument and Warning, self-published e-book (2005), Appendix 3. These figures are the most recently published, but no numerical assessments of passengers, survivors and victims should be considered completely definitive. Also see R. Ballard, ‘How we found Titanic’, National Geographic, 168, 6 (1985), 696–701, D. Lynch and K. Marschall, Titanic: An Illustrated History (London, 1998), 193, and a rather thoughtlessly entitled book, D. Beavis, Who Sailed on Titanic? The Definitive Passenger Lists (Hersham, 2002). 21 Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 1912. 22Biel, Down with the Old Canoe, op. cit., 38–9. 23Howells, op. cit., 136–52. Although some White Star Line brochures made qualified claims that the ship was ‘practically unsinkable’, Howells argues that the narrow circulation of these sources could not account for subsequent widespread public belief in the ship's invulnerability. 24 Sydney Morning Herald, 2 June 1911, 20 April 1912. RMS Olympic, nicknamed ‘Old Reliable’, was sent to the scrapyard in 1935. 25Also see Hawthorn, op. cit., 114. He identifies a sense of fatalism in Thomas Hardy's poem, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, whereby divine will, human weakness and chance provided explanations that deflected blame from the captain, the ship's owners or the company that built it. 26T. Kuntz, The Titanic Disaster Hearings: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigation (New York, 1998), 220. 27 Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August 1912. Fellow telegraph operator, Harold Bride, perpetuated this vague and elitist story. Working aboard P&O's RMS Medina, Bride visited Australia in August 1912. In an article entitled ‘Titanic hero arrives in Sydney’, the telegraph operator was alleged to have said ‘I saw a stoker, or someone from the low decks, lean over Phillips and slip the lifebelt off his neck.’ Also see Biel, Down with the Old Canoe, op. cit., 50 and Heyer, op. cit., 87. Referring to ‘racialized’Titanic stories, Biel reveals that some accounts made the stoker thief an African American, although there were no known African Americans on board, while Heyer relates a story regarding Chinese stokers, although they were similarly scarce. 28Howells, op. cit., 101. 29T. Cliff and D. Gluckstein, The Labour Party – a Marxist History (London, 1988), 47–53. Indeed, immediately after the sinking, a two-week strike by RMS Olympic stokers prevented the ship's departure until confirmation that there were sufficient safe lifeboats for all on board had been received. 30Not a single engineer or bandsman survived, making these workers suitable ‘manly’ subjects for canonization. Even in my own family's mythology, my great-grandfather had always been described as an engineer – his actual position as stoker had been ‘sanitized’ at some point. 35J. Howard, ‘Foundering of the “Titanic”’ (Melbourne, 1912), 8, State Library of Victoria, Box ‘Voyages and Travel Pamphlets’, 9, 6. 31Lynch and Marschall, op. cit., 115; Colonel A. Gracie, Titanic: A Survivor's Story (Gloucester, 1985; first published 1913), 20. 32B. J. Ticehurst, ‘Titanic's Memorials, World-wide: Where they are Located’, 23rd reprint of monograph (Southampton, 2003), 2. 33J. W. Foster (ed.), The Titanic Reader (New York, 2000), 222. 34Also see K. S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Carlton South, 2001), 49. 36Ticehurst, op. cit., 2. 37E. L. Rasor, The Titanic: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT, 2001), 137. 38P. Hamilton and P. Ashton, ‘On not belonging: memorials and memory in Sydney’, Public History Review, viii (2000), 24; B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1991). 39Hamilton and Ashton, op. cit., 28. 40M. Agulhon, ‘Politics, images, and symbols in post-revolutionary France’ in Wilentz, op. cit., 177. 41D. Harvey, ‘The urban process under capitalism: a framework for analysis’ in M. Dear and A. J. Scott (eds), Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society (London, 1981), 117. 42K. Darian-Smith and P. Hamilton (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia (Melbourne, 1994), 2. 45R. F. Hoxie, ‘Trade unionism in the United States: general character and types’, Journal of Political Economy, xxii (1914), 201–17. 43See ABC's Dimensions in Time, broadcast 15 April 2002. Available online at: http://www.abc.net.au/dimensions/dimensions_in_time/Transcripts/s532922.htm (accessed February 2008). 44D. Blythell, ‘Class, community, and culture – the case of the brass band in Newcastle’, Labour History, lxvii (1994), 144, 150, 152. 46Agulhon, op. cit., 178. 47Blythell, op. cit., 153. 48 Barrier Miner, 2, 7 August 1916. 49 ibid., 17 August, 1 September 1916. 50 Kadina and Wallaroo Times, 22 March 1913. 51K. Bailey, Cornets on the Copper Fields: A History of Brass Bands in the Copper Triangle (Adelaide, 1998), 19. 52W. Kidd and B. Murdoch (eds), Memory and Memorials: The Commemorative Century (Aldershot, 2004), 7. 53 Barrier Miner, 15, 27, 28 May 1913. 54 ibid., 2 September, 14 October 1913; Barrier Daily Truth, 6 August 1913. However, the Progress Association noted that there was a distinction between surface and underground workers, with the less radical surface workers more amenable to its objectives. 55 Barrier Daily Truth, 31 July, 1 August 1913. 56 ibid., 9, 19 August 1913. By ‘outside’ he meant those companies operating in Broken Hill with head offices principally in Melbourne. 57 Barrier Miner, 19 July 1913. 58 ibid., 2 September 1913. 59MMA minutes, Melbourne University Archives (30 May 1912), 113, Broken Hill South Collection, Box 357. 60 Barrier Daily Truth, 27 May 1912. 61 Barrier Miner, 27 May 1912. News of the memorial to the engineers was also reported in the Ballarat Courier, 7 May 1912. 64 ibid., 22 April 1912. This outburst took a similar stance to that of trade union leader, Ben Tillett, and other socialist writers, who sheeted home the blame to capitalist interests. 62 Barrier Miner, 22 June 1912. 63 Barrier Daily Truth, 12 June 1912. 65 ibid., 4 July, 6 August 1912. 66 ibid., 3 July 1912. 67 Barrier Miner, 5, 10 December 1912. A dispute arose over an offer of assistance from the Operative Masons, Bricklayers and Plasterers' Society. The union claimed it had offered half a day's pay from each union member, but the committee alleged that the union officials had offered to build the rotunda and then reneged. At this point, the committee opted for a more expensive design by a well-known architect, so the union withdrew all offers of assistance. 68 ibid., 17 November 1913. Descriptions of the Titanic memorial committee meeting over this issue were high farce indeed. The president was reported to have remarked that ‘goodness only knew … none of the committee really wanted their names on the monument. (Cries of No, No!) But the committee had worked for 18 months on the monument, and only after very strenuous work had been able to raise £129.’ 69 Barrier Daily Truth, 19 December 1913. 70Between 1893 and 1917 inclusive, 390 men were killed in the mines: G. Dale, Industrial History of Broken Hill (Melbourne, 1918), 150, 269. 71 Barrier Miner, 18 March 1913. 72 ibid., 22 December 1913; Barrier Daily Truth, 22 December 1913. 73B. Hammond, ‘The Spuds and Onions Strike: The Origin and Course of the Broken Hill Strike 1919–1920’ (Honours, University of Melbourne, 1970). 74 Ballarat Courier, 19 August 1912. 75W. Bate, Life After Gold: Twentieth-Century Ballarat (Carlton, 1993), 8. 76R. Pattie (compiler), ‘The history of the city of Ballarat municipal brass band 1900–2000’, Ballarat Municipal Library (Ballarat, 2000). 77 Ballarat Courier, 18 November 1913. 78The bandstand's importance is derived primarily from its ‘complex roof form’ with its ‘half hipped roofs covered with timber and terracotta shingles’ that ‘culminate in square ventilating louvres capped by a concave metal-clad turret’. A weather vane is ‘fittingly adorned by a small silhouette of the ill-fated Titanic’. See W. Jacobs, N. Lewis, E. Vines and R. Aitken, Ballarat: A Guide to Buildings and Areas 1851–1940 (Ballarat, 1981), 44. 79Ballarat Municipal Library, Mayor's Annual Report (1916), 8. 80C. Moriarty, ‘“The Sea Goeth It All About”: maritime themes in British public sculpture’, paper presented to Mémoire sculptée de l'europe (Council of Europe, Strasbourg, December 2001), 3. Even in Liverpool, home to many Titanic crew, the construction of a memorial to the Titanic engineers and firemen was delayed until 1916 by the outbreak of war. 81 Ballarat Star, 23 October 1915. 82 Ballarat Courier, 23 October 1915. 83 ibid.