A Night to Remember

WALTER LORD

A Night to Remember

With a Foreword by Julian Fellowes and an Introduction by Brian Lavery

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Foreword by Julian FellowesIntroduction by Brian LaveryPreface

1 ‘Another Belfast Trip’ 2 ‘There’s Talk of an Iceberg, Ma’am’ 3 ‘God Himself Could Not Sink This Ship’ 4 ‘You Go and I’ll Stay a While’ 5 ‘I Believe She’s Gone, Hardy’ 6 ‘That’s the Way of It at This Kind of Time’ 7 ‘There is Your Beautiful Nightdress Gone’ 8 ‘It Reminds Me of a Bloomin’ Picnic’ 9 ‘We’re Going North Like Hell’ 10 ‘Go Away – We Have Just Seen Our Husbands Drown’

Facts about the Titanic Passenger List Illustrations Acknowledgements

PENGUIN BOOKS

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER

‘Absolutely gripping and unputdownable’

David McCullough, Pulitzer prize-winning author

‘Walter Lord singlehandedly revived interest in the Titanic … an electrifying book’

John Maxtone-Graham, maritime historian and author

‘A Night to Remember was a new kind of narrative history – quick, episodic, unsolemn. Its immense success inspired a film of the same name three years later’

Ian Jack, Guardian

‘Devotion, gallantry … Benjamin Guggenheim changing to evening clothes to meet death; Mrs Isador Straus clinging to her husband, refusing to get in a lifeboat; Arthur Ryerson giving his lifebelt to his wife’s maid … A book to remember’

Chicago Tribune

‘Seamless and skilful … it’s clear why this is many a researcher’s Titanic bible’

Entertainment Weekly

‘Enthralling from the first word to the last’

Atlantic Monthly

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

A graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law, Walter Lord served in England with the American Intelligence Service during the Second World War. His interest in the Titanic dates back to 1926 when, at ten years old, he persuaded his family to cross the Atlantic on the Olympic, sister ship to the doomed ocean liner. Lord was renowned for his knowledge of the Titanic catastrophe, serving as consultant to director James Cameron during the filming of Titanic. A Night to Remember was published in 1956 and has never been out of print. Walter Lord died in 2002.

Julian Fellowes is an actor, writer, director and producer. His film and television work includes Gosford Park, Downton Abbey and Titanic. His novels include Snobs and Past Imperfect.

Brian Lavery is Curator Emeritus at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is the author of books including Ship: The Epic Story of Maritime Adventure. He was consultant on the film Master and Commander and the BBC’s Empire of the Seas.

To my Mother

Foreword by Julian Fellowes

There are certain episodes in the past which fix like a burr on our imaginations, events in history which will not let us go. They are generally tragic ones: the destruction of Pompeii, the plague and fire in the London of the 1660s, the French Revolution. But few of these outrank that single incident, just a century ago, when a luxury liner, the very acme of its own type and time, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11.40 on the night of 14 April 1912, and sank just over two and a half hours later, thereby giving birth to books and films and memoirs and articles without number.

It is hard to pin down exactly why this tragedy still haunts us to the degree that it does, when the last of the infant passengers to survive have now gone to their reward. Maybe it is because the ship seemed, even then, to represent that proud, pre-war world in miniature, from the industrialists and peeresses and millionaires and Broadway producers who sat about the vast staterooms in first class, to the Irish and German and Scandinavian immigrants packed into third, carrying with them all they possessed, on their way to a new life in America.