Book Review - Titanic: Nine hours to hell, the survivors' story

An unsinkable account of a night to remember

David Randall

Titanic: Nine hours to hell, the survivors' story by WB Bartlett

Titanic

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The centenary of the sinking of the Titanic looms, and, with it, the prospect of book after book marking the anniversary. Students of the subject have long since discovered that new books about it are liable to be written to prosecute ever more arcane theories. So what cock-eyed "revelation" would the latest one be peddling?

Er, none. Instead, we have here quite the best and most level-headed telling of the whole story I have ever read. Not only can Bartlett, unlike the authors of many Titanic books, actually write, he also brings to the controversies which still surround the sinking a judicial sense of what constitutes conclusive evidence, and what does not.

But on some issues, the evidence is overwhelming and allows him, for instance, to dismiss the idea that the White Star Line was flogging the Titanic full-pelt through an ice field in an effort to break the Atlantic speed record. Where the company was culpable, of course, was in the lack of provision of lifeboats. And this book describes with greater clarity than any before the amateur bungling that night: a captain who skulked rather than led, officers who thought it unsafe to load boats designed for 65 with more than a few dozen, an officer who decided that "women and children first" meant "women and children only" – the whole procedure made up as it went along, the result of which was the loss of hundreds of extra lives.

Titanic: Nine hours to hell, the survivors' story
By WB Bartlett
Amberley, £20, 448pps