A Night to Remember: The Classic Bestselling Account of the Sinking of the Titanic

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By coincidence, four members of the cast, Peter Burton, Desmond Llewelyn, Geoffrey Bayldon and Alec McCowen, went on to play "Q" in various James Bond movies. A Night to Remember is a 1955 non-fiction book by Walter Lord about the voyage and sinking of the ocean liner RMS Titanic in 1912. The book was very successful, and is still considered a definitive resource about the Titanic. Lord authored a follow-up book, The Night Lives On, in 1986.

Lord traveled on the RMS Olympic, Titanic 's sister ship, when he was a boy and the experience gave him a lifelong fascination with the lost liner. [1] As he later put it, he spent his time on the Olympic "prowling around" and trying to imagine "such a huge thing" sinking. He started reading about and drawing Titanic at the age of ten and spent many years collecting Titanic memorabilia, causing people to "take note of this oddity." [2] He majored in history at Princeton University and graduated from Yale Law School before joining the New York–based advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. [2] Writing in his spare time, he interviewed 63 survivors of the disaster. [3] The film was one of the twenty most popular films of the year in Britain according to Motion Picture Herald, but it was only a modest commercial success due to the size of its original budget and its relative underperformance at the American box office. [47]At Queenstown he was a sort of super-Captain. He told Chief Engineer Bell the speed he wanted for various stages of the voyage. He also set the New York arrival time at Wednesday morning, instead of Tuesday night. He didn’t consult Captain Smith on this. As a non-fiction book, this is not a dry read at all. Sure, it's got a whole lot of facts about the ship, the sinking and the rescue efforts, but it's presented in an easy-to-read language, interspersed with amazing true stories.

I heard a graphic account of how the Titanic up-ended herself and remained poised like some colossal nightmare of a fish, her tail high in the air, her nose deep in the water, until she dived finally from human sight.” The second adaptation was the 1958 British drama film A Night to Remember starring Kenneth More, which is still widely regarded as "the definitive cinematic telling of the story." [21] The film came about after its eventual director, Roy Ward Baker, and its producer, Belfast-born William MacQuitty both acquired copies of the book – Baker from his favorite bookshop and MacQuitty from his wife – and decided to obtain the film rights. MacQuitty had actually seen Titanic being launched on 31 May 1911 and still remembered the occasion vividly. [22] He met Lord and brought him on board the production as a consultant. [23] The film diverges from both the book and the NBC TV adaptation in focusing on a central character, Second Officer Charles Lightoller, played by More. Its conclusion reflects Lord's world-historical theme of a "world changed for ever" with a fictional conversation between Lightoller and Colonel Archibald Gracie, sitting on a lifeboat. Lightoller declares that the disaster is "different ... Because we were so sure. Because even though it's happened, it's still unbelievable. I don't think I'll ever feel sure again. About anything." [19] Collection [ edit ] All the way forward, there was more trouble at Collapsible C, which had been fitted into the davits used by No. 1. A big mob pushed and shoved, trying to climb aboard. I'm sure it's his interviews with so many survivors that makes this book so realistic. His descriptions are vivid and made me feel like I was almost there. I listened to the audio version of this book. A combination of Lord's story-telling and Fred Williams excellent narration kept me engrossed in the story from start to finish. I have read many many books on the Titanic, watched movies, listened to podcasts....for me, it's a story I just seem obsessed with. It's horrific...and mesmerizing at the same time. Lord makes the story about the people....not just the event. He tells the story of an Italian woman crying for her children on board the Carpathia, only to be reunited with them both; the first class passenger who refused to leave her Great Dane on board the ship so perished with her dog; and the stunned silence of the women in the lifeboats as they realized they had just witnessed more than 1000 people drown. It's about more than a luxurious boat that didn't survive its first Atlantic crossing.....it's about the loss of more than 1,500 people and the story of the last 3 hours of their lives. James Cameron's vision of the Titanic decided that the most compelling and lucrative story would focus on two young lovers who had just met. Looking at the passenger manifest, where survivors are listed in italics and the dead are not, suggests how blandly offensive this vision is. It's hard to argue with the chivalry of "women and children first," but for family after family, particularly among first class passengers, fathers and husbands went down with the ship while mothers, wives, and kiddies (and often the female servants of the very wealthy) rowed away in lifeboats. Arthur Ryerson, scion of the steel and iron family, took off his lifebelt when he saw that his wife's maid, Victorine, didn't have one. Ryerson, his wife, and three of their children were returning from France to the U.S. for the funeral of his son, who had been thrown from a car the week before. Ryerson Senior perished. John Jacob Astor asked if he could accompany his wife, who was pregnant, into a boat; request denied. She and her maid survived; Astor and his manservant died. A strange calm descended over the doomed elite: Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet changed into their evening clothes so they could "go down like gentlemen." Mrs. Isador Straus refused to leave her husband (the founder of Macy's) and they watched the hubbub, arms entwined, as in another part of the ship steerage passengers, many of whom didn't speak English, clutched rosaries and prayed. But character was not uniformly spread amongst the nobility. As the ship disappeared beneath the waves, Lady Cosmo Duff Gordon in Lifeboat 1 remarked to her secretary: "There is your beautiful nightdress gone."In the freezing water, many people die of hypothermia. Lucas' dead body floats by an overturned collapsible, as Yates, unwilling to overcrowd the boat, swims away to his death. Lightoller takes charge on the boat as Murphy and Gallagher make it aboard, though Farrel is lost. Chief Baker Charles Joughin, after having given up his lifeboat seat and turning to the bottle to ease his ailments, also climbs aboard. The men are saved by another boat. The Carpathia arrives to rescue the survivors, as a shaken Lightoller tells Colonel Archibald Gracie, "I don't think I'll ever feel sure again, about anything." Barczewski, Stephanie (2006). Titanic: A Night Remembered. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-85285-500-0. Kenneth Moore recalled the production of the film in his autobiography, published 20 years later in 1978. There was no tank big enough at Pinewood Studios to film the survivors struggling to climb into lifeboats, so it was done in the open-air swimming bath at Ruislip Lido, at 2:00 am on an icy November morning. When the extras refused to jump in, Moore realised he would have to set an example. He called out: "Come on!" Se aprende muchísimo con este libro, no solo de la tragedia en sí, sino del impacto que tuvo para la sociedad del momento y cómo sirvió de preludio para hechos que vinieron a continuación, como la caída del Imperio Británico, la desaparición de las clases sociales o el estallido de la IGM. De todas formas, hay dos cosas que me han gustado mucho del libro de Lord: en primer lugar, la forma en que mantiene el enfoque en los supervivientes, y como pone en relieve lo que os he dicho antes: que hubo muchas personas, tanto pasajeros como trabajadores del barco, que se esforzaron por salvar el mayor número de vidas posibles. Y en segundo lugar, la manera en que su autor expone como era la ideología y la sociedad de la época. Si hubo algo que me impactó mucho de esta lectura fue como simple y llanamente se ignoró a la tercera clase, como todos los esfuerzos se enfocaron en salvar en primer lugar a las mujeres y los niños, sí, pero también a los pasajeros varones de la primera, e incluso, de la segunda clase. Y como esta idea era algo fuertemente incrustado incluso en las mentalidades de los pasajeros de la clase más humilde del buque, para los cuales era un privilegio inesperado que les permitían acceder a la zona destinada a las clases más ricas para poder subir a un bote. Y también son dignas de mucha atención las relaciones que se establecían entre los ricos y los trabajadores del barco, la forma en que los segundos se preocupaban de forma muy amistosa por sus señores, y estos les correspondían con familiaridad y hasta cierta camareria (pero sin perder de vista nunca la diferencia de clases, obviamente).

Perhaps, I became cynical after reading a lot on history, mainly about what one human being can do to another, but this book didn't touch me emotionally. I remember crying over the 'Titanic movie and the long, arduous book that covered excessively the first days after the disaster (the last third of that book was dedicated to the White Star Line's handling of the incomplete information and media coverage). Perhaps, I got lost in the vastness of personal stories where names merged into one: I'll remember the details but not the people. Or the audio version didn't play out well for me. Thus, A Night to Remember gets three stars from me as a classic. a b "Widow of Titanic Officer visits Chorley". Encyclopedia Titanica. 30 January 2005 . Retrieved 2 September 2017. The book received widespread praise from contemporary critics. The New York Times called it "stunning ... one of the most exciting books of this or any other year". [6] The Atlantic Monthly praised the book for doing "a magnificent job of re-creative chronicling, enthralling from the first word to the last." [6] Entertainment Weekly said that it was "seamless and skillful... it's clear why this is many a researcher's Titanic bible", while USA Today described it as "the most riveting narrative of the disaster." [6] Actually Guggenheim almost outdid himself. Gone was the sweater that Steward Etches made him wear. Also his life belt. Instead he and his valet now stood resplendent in evening clothes. “We’ve dressed in our best,” he explained, “and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.”When I was about 15, I was completely obsessed with the Titanic (yep, that's the year the movie came out!), and I brought every book I could find about it. And at the time, hyping up the movie, there was a lot of books available. Norman Rossington, who appears as a steward who loses his temper with non-English speaking passengers just after the collision, also appears as the Master-at-Arms in S.O.S. Titanic (1979).