posted on 21 Apr 2021

Tragedy At Sea: The Sinking of the Titanic by David Long

The epic and tragic story of the maiden voyage of the Titanic – the ‘unsinkable’ ship – has virtually become part of British folklore. The fact that it was a real event and that people died in large numbers can sometimes seem to get lost in the telling of an exciting tale of how the world’s most expensive passenger liner was sunk by a relatively humble iceberg.

Like all exciting folktales, the story has been told many times and in many formats and so when I picked up David Long’s new book for the excellent publishing house of Barrington Stoke, I wondered if we really needed another – surely there’s no way the story could be told again with any degree of originality?

Well, how wrong I was. Non-fiction expert, Long gives his young reader audience a fascinating and genuinely unusual spin on the tale of tragedy. Rather than to focus on the horror of the individual passengers and the desperate fight for survival, we are given what amounts to the life story of the ship itself. Step by step, Long takes us through the conception of the Titanic – from first idea to construction. Then we follow the building of this fabulous monster of a boat and its launch – an event that itself teetered on the edge of tragedy as it came down the runway and almost caused a collision with a huge, but much smaller, ship in its proximity.

The fatal encounter with the iceberg is dealt with in detached analytical detail, as is the failure of the ship’s ‘infallible’ water-tight internal compartments that were designed to avoid this very tragedy taking place. The evacuation of the ship, we discover, was something of a shambles and probably condemned more people to death than was necessary and despite the existence of radio communication, the location of the ship meant help was a long way off.

Long also addresses himself to the aftermath of the sinking and the lessons that were learned for the future safety of all liners. And he brings the story up-to-date with news on the more recent explorations that have been made of the ship as it lies broken in two on the seabed.

All of that would be a feast in its own right but there’s another dimension that we get with this publication – a set of illustrations by Stefano Tambellini, the London-based, Italian born artist. What he gives us that is so pleasing are some cross-sectional, almost technical, plans of the ship with the key facilities all labelled and the infrastructure of the Titanic set out for us all to see.

The book comes in the Barrington Stoke ‘super readable’ series and so is lean and to-the-point – just long enough to tell the story but not weighed-down by additional detail that might test a young reader’s patience.

It’s great stuff and if you know a reader who loves exciting true-life stories you can rest assured this will be a winner for them.

 

Terry Potter

April 2021