Two years ago, I was asked by an American production company if I would take part in a documentary about the OceanGate expeditions to view the Titanic.
I was invited to take the trip myself, down almost two and a half miles to the seabed in the very submersible we now know so much about.
They asked me because my great-grandfather, William Bessant, had died on the ship while working as a stoker and I’d written a book about the crew and their families.
I accepted — but then the documentary was cancelled because of various problems involving the post-pandemic world, travel visas and so on. Now, listening to news of the tragic disappearance of the sub, I feel sick with relief.
In truth, although I said yes at the time — I had a book out about the Titanic and felt it was a good opportunity to promote it — I had reservations, too. I worried about the safety of the vessel.
The journey, I was told, would take seven to eight hours as a round trip. There was a tiny ‘toilet’ behind a curtain, with no real privacy.
I was anxious about feeling claustrophobic down there, nearly 4,000 metres under the sea in a 6m by 2.8m vessel with no way out, literally bolted into it from the outside.
But there was another concern nagging at me — the fact that this was a grave site. Not only was it the final resting place of my great-grandfather but it was where 1,500 other souls met their end, too. Part of me wondered if this was macabre. Inappropriate. Wrong.
The Titanic sinking was a real-life tragedy, not a film. If we stop for a minute and imagine what it was really like for those on board, we can’t help but feel a visceral kind of horror at their plight — just as we do now, while we imagine the situation faced by those inside the missing sub.
As the ship went down, husbands tried to remain stoic while they shoved their terrified wives into lifeboats. Children were ripped from their fathers’ arms and dragged into boats with their mothers.
Heartbreakingly, I discovered while researching my book that when a bellboy aged 16 tried to clamber into a lifeboat, he was told to ‘be a man’ and stay on board.
Just a year older than my own son, he had no choice as a crew member in 1912 but to perish alongside the others.
Indeed, writing my book was a way of remembering the crew who died, those men and youths so often erased from glossy films such as James Cameron’s Titanic, or who appear for brief seconds in the background as nameless extras.
But I also found I had no idea just how much Titanic had become part of our cultural lexicon, and how distorted the story of those who perished has become.
Over time, the disaster that claimed so many lives has become worse than the stuff of legend — it is the butt of jokes, the theme of fancy dress parties.
There are Titanic computer games; simulations where you crash into icebergs. There is even an event in America where people dress up as ‘Titanic zombies’.
These things turn my stomach. As I contemplated my abortive trip aboard the sub, I also wondered how I would feel if I came across any sign of human remains.
Like many other descendants, we feel a sadness and a connection to the ship. But was it really my place to visit?
My great-grandfather William was 40 when he lost his life — a short, miserable life stoking the furnaces on steam ships — leaving my great-grandmother a widow with five children to feed.
Without his pay, she had to take in laundry and was plunged into poverty. Her sons had to leave school and get jobs.
Titanic’s tragedy didn’t just end when it sank — hundreds of dependent family members of the crew were widowed or left fatherless.
In the end, the documentary didn’t happen so the choice was made for me. But now I believe I was wrong even to consider it.
Many descendants feel the same way about the wreckage and the Titanic industry as a whole. Mhairi Derby-Pitt is the great-niece of Robert Millar, Fifth Engineer, who was only 26 when he died aboard the Titanic.
One of the engineers who kept the ship’s lights on so more people could be saved, he went down as a hero.
She keeps his memory alive by doing talks and attending events that focus on remembering with respect rather than ghoulishly playing make-believe.
Like me, she thinks we have gained as much knowledge as we can from the doomed ship, and the site should simply be left alone.
That said, she knows several people involved in this expedition and tells me her heart is breaking for them all.
In 1912, the wives and families of missing crew members gathered at Southampton Docks, by the White Star Line building, where they faced an agonising queue to find out whether the names of their loved ones appeared on the ‘survived’ or ‘lost’ lists.
We desperately hope and pray that the similarly dreadful wait for the families of those missing aboard the submersible ends with good news soon.
But it is high time we stopped this Titanic tourism and left the ship and her dead to rest.
