By early 1998, James Cameron's Titanic (1997) was well on its way to proving its critics wrong. Despite earlier uncertainty surrounding the film's delayed release and its spiraling costs, Titanic was breaking box office records and was on track to become both the highest grossing film to date (indeed, of all time, until 2010) and one of the most financially successful Academy Award winners.Footnote ¹ However, it appeared that Titanic was not everywhere equally popular. On 24 January, the Daily Mirror reported that viewers in Southampton had given the film “a wide berth.” In the opinion of the reporter, “[I]t seemed the action was a little too close to home for folk in Southampton.”Footnote ² This apparent sensitivity was also reported in the trade journal Screen International, but any consequent anxiety on the part of the film's distributors was soon assuaged as the film made £63,000 during its first week in the city.Footnote ³ After all, it seemed hardly likely that sensitivities, even in a city that suffered as much from the disaster as Southampton, would still be tender more than eighty-five years after the sinking.

But sensitivity about the disaster and its portrayal has proven remarkably difficult to eliminate completely, even where representations only indirectly depict the events of 1912. Later in 1998, for example, the BBC aired a spoof “making-of” documentary during the Christmas special of the comedy show French and Saunders. This show parodied several elements of Cameron's movie, focusing either on the director himself (who is shown as a foul-mouthed, gun-toting psychopath) or, tellingly, on the film's reputation for historical accuracy (including its computer-generated imagery, script, and costumes).Footnote ⁴ Notwithstanding the clearly parodic intent, the Broadcasting Standards Commission received a handful of complaints against the program's poor taste in allegedly making fun of the disaster.Footnote ⁵ Almost a decade later, Millvina Dean, the last living survivor of the disaster, unofficially complained about another indirect representation, as featured in the Christmas Day 2007 episode of Doctor Who.Footnote ⁶

If indirect representations of the disaster could provoke sporadic opposition after more than eighty years, then surely direct portrayals of the sinking in the early twentieth century would have produced a much louder and more sustained chorus of protest? Such indeed was the case. But why has this opposition been forgotten, and why was it so ineffective, given that we now remember the Titanic as the product of countless books, films, and radio and television broadcasts? These are crucial questions that few have asked, let alone sought to answer, despite their obvious importance: an appreciation of why and how forgetting (paradoxically, an extremely important element of “memory”) has taken place promises to further our understanding both of memory and of popular culture in the early twentieth century.

Attempts to address opposition to Titanic representations are bedeviled by several drawbacks in the scholarship on the cultural history of the disaster. First, this body of literature is of recent origin and hence limited in volume: the first works were published only in the mid-1990s, just prior to the release of Cameron's film.Footnote ⁷ Second, this scholarship tends to be somewhat divided along disciplinary lines. Works exist that treat film and literature separately and in great depth, but comparatively few tie them together and none consider broadcasting (despite widespread discussion of the importance of the wireless in the sinking).Footnote ⁸ Third, those scholars who do take a broader focus and encompass filmic and literary representations are practically all limited by a specific period and/or geographic interest. Steven Biel's Down with the Old Canoe (1996) concentrates almost entirely on the United States, whereas Richard Howells's Myth of the Titanic (1999) examines the immediate response to the disaster in Britain, ending with the outbreak of the First World War.Footnote ⁹ As a result of these limitations, there exists no cultural history of the disaster in Britain for the period from 1914,Footnote ¹⁰ even though there are several individual studies of literary and filmic representations of the disaster in a British context.

Fourth and finally, the consensus among scholars that interest in the disaster was periodic during the twentieth century has precluded study of the interwar and early postwar periods. Several Titanic scholars have confidently pronounced that interest on both sides of the Atlantic was periodic and confined to 1912–14, 1955–58, and from 1985 onward.Footnote ¹¹ The literary scholar John Wilson Foster explains that

This view of the periodicity of interest in the disaster has acquired near-universal assent. Echoing Walter Lord, the preeminent historian of the disaster, Biel has argued that “if the Titanic (the memory, that is, not the ship) never disappeared, its presence after 1913 was occasional or marginal until it was rediscovered for new audiences in the 1950s as a commercial phenomenon.”Footnote ¹³

This claim may well hold for the United States, but this article aims to prove that interest in the Titanic was far from marginal in Britain until the 1950s. On the contrary, the apparent paucity of representations of the disaster between the 1920s and the late 1950s arose from strenuous efforts to resist them. Resistance is here understood as direct or indirect efforts to substantially alter a portrayal of the disaster, obstruct its production, or prevent its distribution once produced; hostile reviews, although indicative of negative opinion, do not in themselves count as resistance. Such efforts were exerted by the press and government, but above all by industrial interests (particularly the Titanic's builders, Harland & Wolff, and its owners, White Star Line), for a range of motives and with varying degrees of success. Remarkably, the public rarely directly opposed (and occasionally even defended) representations of the disaster, despite the frequent claims of resisting parties to be speaking for them. While being in the vanguard of efforts to stifle portrayals of the Titanic, industrial interests relied upon the cooperation of the press or government for success; they were least likely to succeed when they acted alone. This was largely because they had difficulty convincing either would-be tellers of the Titanic narrative or the public that they had transcended their own narrow interests to represent national prestige or the feelings of survivors and relatives.

The ongoing importance of the story of the sinking was ensured by its flexibility—it was used to address a range of issues from gender politics to disquiet with modernity—as well as its potency as a symbol of Britain's maritime industry and, by extension, its national prestige.Footnote ¹⁴ Such a wide range of cultural applications meant, conversely, that broad cultural changes would be manifested in representations of the disaster. Indeed, by highlighting resistance (rather than neglect) as the key factor behind the supposed absence of the Titanic from British culture before the 1950s, this article engages with two key aspects of the cultural history of twentieth-century Britain, specifically the place of memory and media within British culture.

First, it makes a contribution to the wide and growing scholarship on memory and remembrance. This literature is understandably dominated by studies of the two world wars and the Holocaust, all of which make the efforts of some Titanic historians to assert the disaster's epochal significance appear absurd.Footnote ¹⁵ However, it remains the case that the Titanic exerts an enduring appeal and is a stubbornly persistent feature of British “cultural memory.” This term does not refer to the “communicative memory” of everyday life, constituted by each individual in connection with others to be sure, but quotidian, fragile, and concomitant with the individual/group that creates it.Footnote ¹⁶ Rather, it relates to a broader form of memory, in which memories of greater longevity and/or scope are materialized and transmitted in forms and practices such as rites, monuments, and myths.Footnote ¹⁷ For example, one particular focus of British memory of the disaster is an emphasis on the heroism and professionalism of the ship's crew (particularly its officers, engineers, musicians, and wireless operators), which was reified at an early stage in the form of memorials and monuments, and which recurred in later representations, particularly the film A Night to Remember (1958). If representations of the disaster (and the eventual conventions to which they gave rise) are the stuff of the cultural memory of the sinking, then attempts to resist such representations are at the same time efforts to prevent the transmutation of personal memories into cultural memory. This account of efforts to stifle discussion of the Titanic also therefore helps to delineate the cultural parameters within which individual memories could or could not become part of a wider cultural memory, one example being whether or not a given representation conformed to the imperative to portray heroism and professionalism.

Of all the variables involved in this communication of memories, perhaps most crucial were perceptions of the various media by which they could be transmitted and constituted. Indeed, resistance to Titanic representations depended in large part on the specific medium used to portray the disaster. This article makes its second contribution to the cultural history of early twentieth-century Britain by problematizing commonly accepted perceptions of modern “mass” media, which played a central role in one of the most urgent projects of interwar Britain: the creation of a culture fit for a modern parliamentary democracy, that is, for the production of informed, responsible citizens. As Dan LeMahieu and others have shown, these media—particularly radio and film—were uneasily assimilated by Britain's artistic elites, who sought to maintain cultural leadership at a time when the franchise was universalized (between 1918 and 1928). Many of these elites maintained a deep mistrust of new communications technologies and of their audiences.Footnote ¹⁸ Through control of a monopolistic broadcasting corporation, they sought to educate listeners, ascribing to radio a moral agency that film—still viewed as a grubby and commercialistic fad—manifestly lacked.Footnote ¹⁹

But portrayals of the Titanic disaster disrupted this comfortable hierarchy. As in wider culture, the printed word faced very little opposition, particularly once the sinking (though not controversies over its representations) had disappeared from the front pages of newspapers. However, the accepted hierarchy of radio and film was reversed. Broadcast media faced far greater and more widespread resistance than did film for reasons precisely to do with the genre of broadcasting that Britain's elites felt would most edify its audience: radio drama.Footnote ²⁰ The dangers of sensationalizing within representations, and particularly of using a range of realistic sound effects on a medium beamed directly into the listener's own home, provoked serious opposition in the half century after the sinking.

Such anxieties also point to the importance of authenticity (in terms of accuracy and provenance) as a factor in the successful communication of memories. Indeed, the concern with authenticity (as with heroism) was a hallmark of British portrayals of the disaster, and much resistance within Britain was provoked by the embellishment of the disaster narrative with fictional excrescences. Representations in broadcast media that overtly fictionalized were the most objectionable, whereas those confined to fact on the printed page were often so unexceptionable that they were in some cases even assisted by industrial concerns.

Study of the cultural history of the Titanic disaster in mid-twentieth-century Britain also provides deeper insight into the influence of international politics and economic anxieties on memory and culture. Many of the complaints about Titanic representations from industrial interests cited potential damage to the British shipping industry from publicizing its worst disaster and made direct reference to German competition and the straitened economic circumstances of the Depression. In addition, the immediate postwar context made a 1947 radio program on the disaster a subject of complaint, and a Nazi film that was rereleased in 1950 produced an angry press reaction in Britain, despite the fact that its themes—plutocratic greed and complacent faith in technology—were not new. Such issues of memory, media, economics, and politics all suggest that it is necessary to revise the straightforward view of Tim Bergfelder and Sarah Street, that “it is precisely the passing of time, the receding of personal involvement, memory and grief, and thus the event's abstraction from private and local histories, that have heightened Titanic's status as a mythical object and a symbolic event.”Footnote ²¹ The existence of strenuous resistance even in the 1950s, and the continued (ab)use by those resisting of “personal involvement, memory and grief,” indicate that the passage of time was not the primary cause of the Titanic's transition to myth. The following sections examine, respectively, a range of literary, filmic, and broadcast representations of the disaster in Britain between the late 1920s and late 1950s, to show how culture, contemporary concerns, and issues of memory interacted with efforts to resist portrayals of the Titanic in the half century after the sinking.

■ ■ ■

The sinking of RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912 came as such a shock that the most immediate concern on both sides of the Atlantic was to explain and reconstruct the event itself. The United Kingdom and the United States both held official inquiries into the disaster, and an immediate flood of sermons, pamphlets, books, essays, poetry, and newspaper reports was devoted to individual testimonies, forensic analyses of the sinking, and attempts to divine meaning from the catastrophe.Footnote ²² The public appeal of this printed material was profound. Luminaries of the literary firmament, such as Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Conan Doyle, all wrote in response to the disaster or the inquiries held in its wake. In portraying the catastrophe in textual form, they were joined by lesser lights such as Filson Young and Philip Gibbs, as well as survivors who penned their own accounts, of whom the most significant were Archibald Gracie and Lawrence Beesley.Footnote ²³ In addition, the British and American inquiries produced a mass of written documentation on the sinking, and the market for material on the ship prior to the outbreak of the First World War was enormous. Representing the disaster was at this time so far from being unpopular that, to give one example, Philip Gibbs's “Deathless Story of the Titanic” (a special number of Lloyd's Weekly News) ran to three editions, suggesting a huge readership.Footnote ²⁴ This material certainly encapsulated the full range of responses to, and meanings divined from, the disaster: the sinking as a warning against faith in technology, or as an exemplar of the marvels of the age (especially wireless); as an indictment of the prevailing social and gender order, or as a reassurance that all was well; as a parable against the worship of mammon, or as an embodiment of the complexity of Edwardian Christianity.Footnote ²⁵ Clearly, no single perspective on the disaster dominated in the period before the First World War.

While the enormous social and cultural demands of the war produced a severe contraction of the market for representations of the Titanic, there exists scattered evidence to suggest that it did not dry up entirely.Footnote ²⁶ After 1918, interest in the disaster within Germany and central Europe, discussed in the following section, ensured the occasional production of German-language texts during the entire interwar period.Footnote ²⁷ In English, however, printed material on the sinking was reduced to a trickle before the 1930s, at which point the culture of the disaster blossomed once more thanks to wider interest in individual memories of the sinking, something also reflected in radio broadcasts from these years. Among the prominent individuals to produce written memoirs were Sir Arthur Rostron, captain of the Carpathia, the vessel that rescued the Titanic's survivors (1931); Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, a first-class passenger who escaped with her husband (1932); and Charles Lightoller, Second (and senior surviving) Officer of the Titanic (1935).Footnote ²⁸ Lightoller's book was sufficiently popular to appear as an abridged edition in 1939 and for its section on the Titanic to be excerpted in full in a 1960 anthology of survivor memoirs.Footnote ²⁹ Even in the first decades after the sinking, when feelings would be most raw, it seems clear that written, factual accounts of the Titanic were popular, and resistance to this medium was nowhere in sight.Footnote ³⁰

This was also the case with fictional treatments of the disaster, even though—as we shall see—fictionalizing the disaster in other media was deeply problematic. Most of the novels on the sinking were European in origin, though one of these foreign-language texts was translated into English and published in Britain. Titanensturz (1937, tr. 1938) was written by an Austrian Jew, Robert Friedländer (pseud. Prechtl), and is a complex text befitting its equivocal title (“Fall of the Titans”), which evokes not only the eponymous wealthy plutocrats but also the name of the doomed ship itself.Footnote ³¹ Notwithstanding its publication in Britain during a period of increasing tension with Germany, the novel not only attracted positive comment but also was the basis on which one reviewer defended the use of fiction to represent the Titanic: “[I]t is natural that the wreck of the Titanic in 1912 should seize on a novelist's imagination, and Mr. Prechtl's method of linking authentic happenings and real people with imaginary ones is, no doubt, the only way of treating such a story.”Footnote ³² This strategy was to prove problematic with film, but the warm reception of the novel and the absence of wider complaint point to the acceptability of written fiction.

Given the overall acceptance of the written word as a medium for representing the disaster, resistance came from an unexpected quarter. Shipping interests, which led campaigns against films and broadcasts of the catastrophe, were inconsistent in their responses to written portrayals. As he was completing his bestselling nostalgic masterpiece, A Night to Remember (US 1955, UK 1956), Walter Lord was able to secure the assistance of the Titanic's makers: “I didn't expect much when I wrote to Harland & Wolff. . . . After all, they did have the problem of explaining away the ‘unsinkable ship.’ Yet, yesterday I received from them a packet of beautiful photos taken on board.”Footnote ³³ By contrast, Cunard White Star (Cunard and White Star merged in 1934) was resolutely opposed to all representations of the disaster, including textual.Footnote ³⁴ As a company memorandum stated of Lord's book in 1956, “[W]ere it not for such books the whole matter would remain undisturbed as past history, but, as Lord himself seems to have dredged very deeply, it is unlikely that there will be any further book.”Footnote ³⁵

In contrast to the shipping industry's ambivalence, the only major instance of opposition to a Titanic representation from an individual member of the public was both late (beginning in 1958) and directed against this otherwise least questionable of media. Furthermore, it had its sights set specifically on the one text credited with provoking a new burst of interest in the Titanic disaster, Lord's A Night to Remember.Footnote ³⁶ This is despite (or more accurately, because of) the fact that Lord prided himself on having written an intensely factual account. Two years after the British publication of the book, Captain Stanley Lord (quondam master of the Californian, the ship accused of not responding to the Titanic's distress rockets, and no relation to Walter) read a review of the 1958 movie of the same name. He protested against his representation in the film to his trade union, the Mercantile Marine Service Association (MMSA). Leslie Harrison, its general secretary, wrote to the producers of the film to complain, and these (J. Arthur Rank) quickly passed this correspondence on to Longmans (the publisher), falling back on the argument that the screenplay was based on Lord's book, even though it was the wide publicity surrounding the film that had inflamed Captain Lord in the first place.Footnote ³⁷

Harrison objected that Walter Lord had made no attempt to get in touch with Captain Lord to allow his side of the story to be put forward, and he demanded that substantial revisions be made to the text. While defending his book, Walter Lord was as charitable as possible and offered to make some changes in light of the old age of the captain.Footnote ³⁸ Harrison held out for further concessions and demanded a meeting between the two Lords. After the refusal of Longmans and Walter Lord to concede further, the offered changes were finally accepted under protest some seven months later.Footnote ³⁹ Unsatisfied with this limited success but constrained by the wishes of the captain during his lifetime, Harrison renewed the campaign after Stanley Lord's death in 1962. He zealously policed observation of the concessions extracted from Walter Lord, protested against other supposedly unfair representations of Captain Lord, and vigorously campaigned in the press and on television for the reopening of those portions of the 1912 enquiry that dealt with the Californian.Footnote ⁴⁰ This campaign culminated in a reappraisal of this evidence by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch in 1992, which did not result in the hoped-for exculpation of Lord, even though it was admitted there was little he could have practicably done.Footnote ⁴¹

Over the course of this campaign, Harrison emphasized two things in particular. First, in his early dealings with Longmans, he insisted that had they or Walter Lord contacted the MMSA, the entire episode would have been avoided, since the organization could have placed Lord in touch with his namesake.Footnote ⁴² In fact, Longmans had been in touch with the MMSA in 1955, asking for more information to complete the book.Footnote ⁴³ The absence of a response to this approach demonstrates that the MMSA would not have opposed the book or the film without the approach of Captain Lord. Harrison's campaign was thus based on the individual case of the captain and not on any perceived danger to British shipping or national interests. Indeed, the Californian had been mentioned in BBC broadcasts of the 1930s and 1940s, and Lightoller explicitly referred to it in his book in more critical terms than had Walter Lord.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet neither the MMSA nor Lord had made any approach to the BBC or Lightoller.

Second, Harrison himself continued to emphasize that “the crux of the whole matter is, of course, the extreme emphasis in the publicity given to the book and the film on the story's alleged authenticity.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Thus, at the heart of this solitary case of significant public resistance to a Titanic representation is the question of facticity, or more specifically, the conflict between facticity and personal memory. Harrison and Captain Lord sought to prevent the Californian from becoming so embedded within cultural memory that the captain's name would be forever associated with inactivity in the face of disaster. It is ironic that Harrison's increasingly vocal campaign helped to achieve that which he most sought to avoid, simply by keeping the captain and his case in the public eye.

■ ■ ■

Questions of fact and fiction saturate the medium of Titanic representation that has garnered the most scholarly comment: film. These questions were posed and answered in national contexts, which were particularly important for film in three ways. First, as a medium organized around national industries but for which the export market was important, film became a significant conduit for national prestige. It was far more comprehensible to shipping interests that a foreign company might seek to exploit the Titanic disaster by producing a film than that a British firm should wish to do so.Footnote ⁴⁶ Second, the international dimension also had advantages for those seeking to resist representations. If, for example, the producer of a film on the disaster happened to be based abroad, the tactics of resistance broadened to include the possibility of approaching a foreign government or its embassy for help. Third and finally, national context had an influence on the content of representations, since there were national differences as to the acceptability or otherwise of fiction in films portraying the disaster. In general, British opinion—with its focus on authenticity and concern over national prestige—tended to be hostile to overt fictionalization, whereas this was more acceptable in Europe and America. However, a fine distinction emerged whereby fiction based on the sinking (but not purporting to be of the disaster) was acceptable within Britain, whereas fictionalizations of the sinking were not.

These trends were apparent within the first few weeks following the catastrophe. For instance, distributors of newsreels competed with magic lantern slideshows (still a going concern in 1912) to serve a wide audience hungry for images of the ship. Several producers of newsreels passed off moving images of the Olympic (the Titanic's sister ship) as the sunken liner and misled audiences that pictures of Captain Smith were actually taken on the Titanic.Footnote ⁴⁷ False claims that footage was of the Titanic provoked some serious complaint.Footnote ⁴⁸ Other filmmakers were able to avoid controversy over the authenticity of their images by making explicitly fictional moving pictures of the disaster. The first of these was the American Saved from the Titanic, starring Dorothy Gibson, herself a survivor. Released in the United States less than a month after the sinking, it was shown in Germany, France, and Britain in July. According to Stephen Bottomore, the British release was a full third shorter than the American film, and the delay in its appearance also suggests some nervousness among distributors about a fictional treatment so soon after the sinking, perhaps inspired by complaints made in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such concerns may have influenced the distribution of the first German film on the disaster, In Nacht und Eis (1912), which was copyrighted in America but apparently not released in the English-speaking world.Footnote ⁵⁰ Production of the film was announced less than two weeks after the sinking, pointing to the intense German interest in the disaster throughout the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵¹ From the outset, therefore, filmic responses to the sinking were closely tied to their national context, and reflected national differences concerning the acceptability of fiction.

The importance of the nation for filmic representations gives the German fascination with the Titanic particular significance.Footnote ⁵² The Reichstag, while expressing its sorrow at the disaster, was uncertain that “Germany as well had not suffered very severely.”Footnote ⁵³ German interest in the disaster was heightened by a sense of involvement, resulting in the convention of a conference “to consider the provision for the safety of passengers in Transatlantic liners.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Thanks to Germany's intense naval and mercantile marine rivalry with Britain, the British press was sensitive to the possibility of schadenfreude, for which they kept a close lookout.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the mercantile sphere, a good deal of this competition focused on attempts to capture the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, and one particularly long-lasting Titanic myth is that it was making an attempt for this record when disaster struck.Footnote ⁵⁶

Criticism of the British for just such recklessness influenced memory of the disaster so profoundly that the myth of the Titanic's excessive speed has featured in discussions of the tragedy up to the present.Footnote ⁵⁷ It was a particular preoccupation of German representations of the sinking, featuring as early as In Nacht und Eis, and provided British shipping interests with the opportunity to present themselves as selfless guardians of national prestige. One early example of this was the reaction to an Anglo-German coproduction, Atlantic (1929). In March 1929, a stage play based on the disaster (titled The Berg) opened in London and proved such a success that the screen rights were sold while it was still playing.Footnote ⁵⁸ British International Pictures (BIP) soon began work on the film, which was released in November.Footnote ⁵⁹ Once White Star Line heard that the film was being produced, one of its managers wrote to the studio asking it to drop the project. BIP responded to say that production was too advanced to be cancelled but offered the consolation that neither White Star nor the Titanic would be mentioned by name and that the audience would be informed—by notices preceding and following the film, and on publicity material—that such a disaster could not happen today.Footnote ⁶⁰ This was cold comfort, especially since the association with the Titanic was unmistakable, but because the film did not purport to be of the Titanic—however strongly it was based on the disaster—reviewers within the United Kingdom were largely positive about the film and tended to ignore the association.Footnote ⁶¹

This was not, however, the case in Europe, where Atlantic was widely released and its links with the Titanic were just as widely discussed. With the advent of “talkies,” films could no longer be automatically exported, so studios in the early 1930s often produced several versions of the same film in different languages, before excessive cost led to the perfection of dubbing and subtitling.Footnote ⁶²Atlantic was the first multiple-language film, with versions in English and German released in 1929, and in French in early 1930.Footnote ⁶³ This wide European release, coupled with the Continental emphasis on its association with the Titanic, led White Star to renew its campaign against Atlantic. Writing to Julian Foley at the Board of Trade in March 1930, Arthur Cauty (general manager of White Star) enclosed a clipping from a recent German newspaper which claimed that the Titanic would not have sunk had it been a German vessel since it was recklessly attempting to recapture the Blue Riband from Germany (actually held by the British Cunarder Mauretania from 1907 to 1929).Footnote ⁶⁴ Cauty ignored the opposition to Atlantic apparently shown by the Norddeutscher Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika Lines also mentioned in the article, preferring to paint European opinion as uniformly anti-British. For his part, Foley felt he “need hardly say how keenly we feel the exhibition of this film,” but “the fact that it is a British film makes it very difficult to take action.”Footnote ⁶⁵ As he later confirmed, the decisions of the Board of Film Censors (an organization established voluntarily by the film industry in 1912) were not legally binding, and local authorities could independently prohibit or permit exhibition of films.Footnote ⁶⁶ In addition, there was no power to prevent the exhibition of a British film abroad.Footnote ⁶⁷ White Star admitted defeat, despairingly commenting that “it is extraordinary that a British company should have produced a film so inimical to British interests.”Footnote ⁶⁸

The case of Atlantic illustrates several features typical of efforts to resist filmic representations of the disaster. First, the danger of portraying the sinking in a popular medium is clear. As a dramatic production in the West End, White Star was either untroubled by or, more likely, unaware of it. The risk to its business only emerged once the portrayal threatened to spill over into a mass medium. Second, this threat was made explicit by a foreign—particularly, a German—response to the film. This allowed White Star's instinctive opposition to representations of the disaster to transcend its own industrial concerns to address issues of national prestige. Third, while the twin strands of national prestige and industrial competition were interwoven motivations for White Star's campaign, the company attempted to bolster its arguments with reference to the feelings of the public. The subordinate place given to such concerns is clear from a letter of 28 March 1930, in which White Star stated that portraying the disaster “reflects upon the reputation of British shipping all over the world, quite apart from the unnecessary pain that such a revival of unhappy memories must give to the relatives of those who lost their lives on that occasion.”Footnote ⁶⁹ These arguments, including the use of survivors' and relatives' feelings, would emerge from the shipping interests with tedious inevitability. Third and finally, the government expressed sympathy but did little to intervene, holding rather to its long-established distaste for official censorship. This attitude was not to survive the Second World War.

Most of these features were also present in a controversy of 1938, where considerations of national and maritime interest were heightened due to the recent experience of the Depression and the impending confrontation with fascist Europe. In July, rumors began to circulate about Alfred Hitchcock's move to Selznick International Pictures (SIP). It was widely believed that Hitchcock's first picture was to be on the Titanic.Footnote ⁷⁰Today's Cinema excitedly reported that “producer [Selznick], director [Hitchcock] and subject seem to offer every assurance for something special out of the deal.”Footnote ⁷¹ The suggestion of public approval meant little to H. M. Cleminson of the Chamber of Shipping, who wrote to Foley, explicitly appealing to national interest in the face of German (ab)use of the sinking. As Cleminson wrote, Atlantic “was shown with avidity in Germany in the form of a warning not to travel by British ships. It would therefore be very desirable to stop the production of such a film if possible.”Footnote ⁷² Foley felt that Cunard White Star was oversensitive, but he struck the same sympathetic yet reticent note of his earlier correspondence with Cauty: the Board of Trade would consider what steps could be taken, but very little had changed since 1930.Footnote ⁷³

This controversy differed especially from that over Atlantic because the proposed film was to be the product of an American studio. This broadened the range of tactical alternatives for Cleminson, who switched from lobbying the British government to pressing the case with the US embassy, confident that the film, which had not yet entered production, could be prevented.Footnote ⁷⁴ To begin with, all appeared to go well: he was able to report triumphantly to Foley at the end of July that the Americans would help. Apparently, Ambassador Kennedy felt

But the continuing reluctance of the British government to become involved in film censorship undermined these efforts. In early September, a few days prior to a meeting with Hitchcock, Cauty, and Arthur Houghton (Kennedy's adviser on film matters), Cleminson anxiously telephoned Foley to ask whether SIP's claim that the Board of Trade had no objection to the film was true. The board had throughout emphasized that there was no question of the board approving or disapproving of a film, for such actions were beyond its remit, but Cleminson recognized the danger that this attitude posed for his efforts. As he put it on the telephone, “[H]e thought the American Embassy would have exerted itself to prevent the production of the film if the Board of Trade had not wished the film to be produced, but if the producers could claim that the British government did not object to the film he doubted whether the American Embassy would press the matter.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Cleminson's tactics backfired not merely because of this continuing reluctance by the British government to commit itself against a Titanic film. SIP also defended itself by promising to protect the national prestige that shipping interests claimed was under threat. At the September meeting, which went ahead, Hitchcock emphasized that “the picture would glorify British seamanship and heroism and would point out that the sacrifice of lives during the sinking of the Titanic was not in vain, inasmuch as Great Britain led the way in improving and revising safety measures and devices for seafarers.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Unbeknownst to the director, this was exactly the assurance that Cleminson himself had stated would be a second-best alternative to the abandonment of the picture and that Foley had recommended he should seek from its makers. If it was impossible to enlist the US ambassador, Cleminson had written, “we might at least persuade them [SIP] to make it clear in their own way that since the ‘Titanic’ all these International Convention arrangements have been made to prevent a recurrence of such a disaster.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Foley agreed that this would be the best course of action and hoped for success; after all, Hitchcock “is a wellknown [sic] British producer and so far as we can judge he is thoroughly British in his outlook.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Cleminson may have been disappointed that his primary goal—the abandonment of the film—had not been secured at this meeting, but he must have been doubly so that his alternative demand had been satisfied: with the protection of British prestige guaranteed thanks to the promises of the “thoroughly British” director at the helm, there was now absolutely no chance that the Board of Trade would intervene.

But SIP were not to know this, and Selznick's anxiety that there existed substantial British opposition to the film played a large part in the abandonment of his Titanic project.Footnote ⁸⁰ Not only was grumbling audible from London, but the British embassy in Washington (with whom the shipping interests had been attempting to establish contact during the summer of 1938) had apparently threatened to ban the film throughout the British Commonwealth, a huge export market and Selznick's primary audience for the film.Footnote ⁸¹ At no point, however, did the shipping interests lay claim to be representing public feeling on this matter, and the fragmentary surviving indicators of public opinion suggest no disquiet.Footnote ⁸² Having already been given a subordinate place in their arguments in 1929–30, the feelings of the public were not discussed by shipping interests in 1938, possibly due both to the change of resistance tactics (lobbying a foreign government through its embassy) and to the prevailing international context. With war against Germany on the horizon, it is probable that shipping interests felt that emphasizing certain damage to national prestige was more likely to gain a sympathetic ear in Whitehall than appealing to the feelings of survivors or victims' relatives. They overplayed their hand, however, since this danger was effectively neutralized by the emphasis on heroism and advances in shipping that Hitchcock promised would be made in the picture. Maritime heroism so infiltrated British cultural memory as to feature heavily in the first British film on the sinking, A Night to Remember, and demonstrates how deeply integrated with national identity was the mercantile marine before the Second World War.Footnote ⁸³

The first postwar case of opposition to a Titanic film would differ somewhat from these interwar examples, not by moving away from an emphasis on national prestige, but by being unquestionably successful, by decisive government action, and by a surprising silence from shipping interests. The German film Titanic (1943) was a response to the propaganda conundrum posed by the need to attack Britain in wartime despite earlier efforts to cement an Anglo-German alliance. To complicate matters further, the Nazis openly envied Britain's empire and viewed the British population as racial equals. The solution hit upon by Goebbels was to emphasize the evils of British plutocracy and class society as opposed to the supposed unity of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft.Footnote ⁸⁴ Filmed in 1942 and released outside Germany in 1943, Titanic explained the sinking as a result of amoral profiteering, and in so doing chimed with a good deal of the initial reaction to the sinking in 1912 and subsequent representations.Footnote ⁸⁵ Bribing the captain to make a record crossing, “Sir” (J.) Bruce Ismay (managing director of White Star in 1912) hoped to arrest a seemingly terminal decline in the value of White Star stock, which he belatedly realized was being engineered by John Jacob Astor, the richest man on board. The only officer to express concern at the reckless speed of the ship is the (fictional and German) First Officer Petersen. The film culminates in Ismay attempting first to bribe and then to bully his way onto a lifeboat, only to be placed there by Petersen in order to answer before the “Maritime Board” for his criminal recklessness. The final scene depicts Petersen denouncing Ismay as the man responsible for the disaster, only for the inevitable whitewash to acquit him. The closing titles state that “the death of 1500 people remained unatoned for, an eternal condemnation of England's thirst for profit.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The film premiered in Prague on 24 September 1943 and was deemed “of artistic merit” (künstlerisch wertvoll) and “of political merit” (staatspolitisch wertvoll), so it remains unclear exactly why it was not shown in Germany.Footnote ⁸⁷ Indeed, the book on which the screenplay was based, Joseph Pelz von Felinau's Titanic: Die Tragödie eines Ozeanriesen (1939), was reissued in both 1940 and 1944. Possibly because it was not released in the Reich, the film slipped through the assessment of wartime films undertaken by the occupation authorities after the war and was released within Germany only a few months after censorship responsibilities were formally transferred to the Federal Republic in late 1949.Footnote ⁸⁸ The film, with the most offensive anti-British elements removed, began showing in Stuttgart in February 1950. It had a successful run in several German cities in the French and American zones, and its appeal should have been on the wane when the story of the film broke in Britain. The angry press reaction, both to the German decision to approve the film for exhibition and to the Americans, the French, and the Foreign Office for not protesting, led to calls for an immediate ban.Footnote ⁸⁹ This was unwise, since it led the popularity of the film within Germany to skyrocket, but the Attlee government had been sufficiently shaken by the recent general election to bow to popular pressure for a ban. With its majority cut from 146 to 5, it could scarcely afford pointed questions in Parliament and an outraged reading public.Footnote ⁹⁰ The ban came into effect on 1 April but naturally had no influence in the GDR, where reportedly the film was shown in two large cinemas less than a week later.Footnote ⁹¹

That the Nazis chose to attack Britain through a Titanic representation demonstrates clearly just how closely the catastrophe had become identified with the country. But most remarkable is the absence of comment from shipping interests during this episode, given that accusations of their purported corruption and negligence had been used by the Nazis to attack Britain as a whole and that shipping companies had shown—and would continue to show—little hesitation in attacking even the suggestion of representing the sinking. It is quite possible that they simply did not have sufficient time to organize a response before the press had orchestrated a campaign against the film: after all, the interval between the first press comment and the implementation of the ban was just eleven days.

But it is also likely that they felt that intervening in the controversy was simply unnecessary. The blaze of press outrage against the film, stoked by lingering hostility to Germany, would undoubtedly have been comforting to the shipping interests, whose allies in the 1930s had been few. However, the vulnerability of the Attlee government was perhaps the key factor behind the success of this lightning press campaign. Although there was some debate in official circles as to the real offensiveness of the film, the government's readiness to intervene was signaled, first by a press conference held the day after the story broke, then by approaches to Konrad Adenauer himself, before the Allied High Commissions proceeded to ban the film. This activity marks a distinct contrast to the government's noninterventionist attitude of the interwar years. It is clear from the instructions banning the film that it was in response to the perceived threat to the prestige of the British merchant marine, which in the context of immediately postwar Germany meant a grave threat to the prestige of Britain as a whole.Footnote ⁹²

But the disaster was not as controversial in other contexts. Barely three years later, the release of the first Twentieth-Century Fox film named Titanic (1953) occurred without resistance, if not without criticism. In particular, it was attacked within Britain for not observing the fine distinction between fiction based on the disaster and its overt fictionalization.Footnote ⁹³ In a piece titled “Fact and Fiction on the Screen,” for example, the reviewer for the Times stated that

The reference to Atlantic in this review makes it clear that it had carefully trodden the line of the fiction/fictionalization distinction, whereas Titanic (1953) had blundered straight across it. Many of the reviews of 1953—as of James Cameron's Titanic (1997)—scoffed at the artificial melodrama, and British comment on A Night to Remember (1958) took pride in its greater authenticity.Footnote ⁹⁵

The absence of direct resistance to Titanic (1953), however, does not imply the abandonment of efforts to stifle filmic representations of the disaster, nor any change in the arguments used to this end. When William MacQuitty, producer of A Night to Remember, sought to procure a ship for filming the exterior scenes, he hit a wall of opposition. Possibly due to connections with the Ismay family, arrangements with the Shaw Savill line fell through, and moves behind the scenes led to refusals from other shipping lines. Finally, a Clyde firm of ship breakers signed an agreement with MacQuitty for the use of one of the ships it was demolishing, barely hours before receiving a telegram warning against assisting the filmmakers. Although unsuccessful in this instance, the shipping interests remained determined. MacQuitty later attempted to gain permission to film in the yard of Harland & Wolff, and given his personal connections with the chairman of the company (MacQuitty was best man at his son's wedding), he felt confident about his chances. But Sir Frederick Rebbeck was adamant: “‘You surely don't intend to make money out of this tragedy!’ he roared. ‘You can make it in a hundred years’ time when all the relatives are dead.'”Footnote ⁹⁶

Despite over forty-five years of filmmaking on the disaster, the shipping interests continued to claim to represent public feeling in maintaining their opposition. But by the late 1950s they were alone. Not only were they never again successful in opposing representations but also they came in the final third of the twentieth century to embrace connections with the Titanic, eventually acknowledging that no publicity is bad publicity.

■ ■ ■

This development was a long time coming, and before the 1960s the opposition of shipping interests was maintained along a broad front. However, it was only successful when joined by the press and/or government; solitary resistance always resulted in failure. The merest glance at attempts to broadcast on the Titanic in the 1930s and 1940s would have taught shipping interests this valuable lesson. Several efforts were made to prevent broadcasts on the disaster, of which only one was unequivocally successful, largely due to the involvement of the press and, crucially, its use of those personally involved with the disaster. Despite both the undoubted popularity of broadcast radio and the BBC's efforts at “public service” (read “education”) under its first director-general, John Reith, portraying the disaster over this new medium was fraught with controversy.Footnote ⁹⁷ In February 1932, a radio play was proposed to the BBC by the author Filson Young, a regular contributor to The Listener and a paid adviser and radio critic for the corporation.Footnote ⁹⁸ He had also written an early book on the disaster and intended his play “to represent this historic happening as pure heroic tragedy,” stating explicitly that he wished “people to be moved by this programme, but no-one shall be harrowed by it.”Footnote ⁹⁹ On 23 February the Daily Herald and the Evening Standard both ran the story. According to the Herald's front-page article, “[T]he B.B.C. is planning to give its vast public a night of horror which, in gruesome realism, is likely to surpass anything given before.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Both newspapers used reactions of survivors, rescuers, or relatives to enhance the impact of the story. The Standard obtained comment from Sir Arthur Rostron, erstwhile captain of the Carpathia, and the Herald heard from the sister of Jack Phillips, the senior wireless operator who died in the disaster.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In addition, the Standard featured a statement by BIP, which, with almost breathtaking hypocrisy, admonished the BBC for producing a play on the disaster while explaining that

Letters of protest from industrial interests arrived at the BBC, many of which claimed to represent public feeling. That from White Star was typical in citing, first and foremost, the effect that the broadcast would have on survivors, before outlining the now familiar arguments on the likely consequences to British shipping.Footnote ¹⁰³ Scattered public voices in support of the play, including those of survivors, struggled to make themselves heard.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Unwilling actively to court controversy over a play as yet unwritten, the corporation quickly announced that it would abandon the production.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It placed an exculpatory notice in the Radio Times and a peevish comment on the episode in its Year-Book.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The BBC might have been spared much embarrassment by looking across the Channel: in 1922 a radio play titled “Maremoto,” which depicted the shipwreck of an ocean liner, was banned by the French Ministre de la Marine as possibly inopportune and too realistic on the tenth anniversary of the Titanic disaster.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Indeed, the key objection to portraying the disaster by radio appears to have been the danger of realistic sound effects. As the Manchester Guardian noted in its coverage, “[I]t may be admitted that the theme would provide ample opportunity for the use of a whole armoury of sound ‘effects.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The damage these could do was explained for readers of the Daily Herald by a “West-End specialist”: “To anyone who is at all neurotic, definite damage is likely to be caused. . . . If revolver shots and the shrieks of the terrified and the pitiful cries of the drowning are to be reproduced, I say it is a form of cruelty to put such a programme before countless listeners who may have had no warning.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This controversy is a valuable reminder of the nature of the final sinking of the Titanic as an aural event, something easy to overlook with the wealth of images now available, some even beamed live from the seabed. After the lights were finally extinguished on the ship, moments before its final plunge, most of those in the lifeboats could only experience the disaster through its sounds. Many had rowed away from the ship to avoid any potential suction when it sank, and the darkness of the moonless night had facilitated the collision in the first place. Survivor testimonies point to the noise of the sinking and its immediate aftermath, followed by hours of silence as survivors awaited rescue.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As the Manchester Guardian clearly recognized, “[T]he story of the Titanic is a story in sound, and silences more memorable than sound.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Almost ironically, Young himself (as well as other pioneers of radio drama) pointed to the use of darkness to enhance the experience of listening to radio drama in his regular column for the Radio Times, republished in collected form in 1933.Footnote ¹¹² The power of sound alone to evoke memory and/or imagination was feared by those resisting Young's play, even if some were supremely hypocritical: BIP's warning against a “sensational point of view” was particularly rich, given that the closing seconds of Atlantic are of complete darkness as the destruction of the ship and the screams of its passengers are audible.

In addition to realism and its ability to conjure awful memories or images, another danger of radio was that it was a medium located within the home, over the content of which the listener had comparatively little control. Unlike film, which the viewer must consciously decide to view, radio presented the possibility of subjection to undesirable programming within one's own home. As a 1935 study stated, “[T]he radio is designed for the home, whereas the talkie provides an escape from the restraints of the home. For this reason the radio is a more ‘moral’ agency.”Footnote ¹¹³ This exalted status of radio compared to film heightened its dangers, for

The medium was still novel and its full potential not yet explored at the time when Young produced his synopsis. Radio became markedly domesticated during the 1920s as people moved away from listening predominantly in public, and as solitary headphone usage gave way to the loudspeaker within the home, it becomes more understandable why representing the disaster would seem so shocking on the radio.Footnote ¹¹⁵

That this was particularly the case when the representation was dramatic can be seen from a notably successful broadcast on the disaster produced only four years later. Lightoller himself contributed a talk to the “I Was There” series, broadcast in November 1936. Given the opposition roused in 1932, the BBC was understandably cautious about this topic for a talk, but it ultimately decided to go ahead with the program.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Despite this initial apprehension, the broadcast attracted no comment in the press. The BBC felt sufficiently confident to repeat the broadcast in October 1937 and to invite Lightoller to talk again in April 1938 on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the sinking, inevitably a sensitive date for survivors as demonstrated by the 1922 and 1932 episodes.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But because Lightoller numbered among this group and because his talk was confined to fact rather than fiction, there emerged no opposition of any kind.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Lightoller's credentials as a survivor giving a factual talk meant that the medium in which he did so was comparatively irrelevant.

Radio remained, however, a problematic medium for representations with even a hint of fiction or drama. In November 1946, Cunard White Star learned that the BBC planned another broadcast on the disaster and immediately protested to the director-general, Sir William Haley. As in 1932, this was primarily couched in terms of representing the public (i.e., the feelings of survivors and victims' relatives) before concentrating on more hard-nosed questions of damage to industry.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Unlike 1932, however, the BBC was not as supine, possibly due to the success of the Lightoller broadcasts. Laurence Gilliam (director of features) wrote to the acting controller (entertainment) in December to state that

Gilliam's determination to proceed was based partly on this defense of national prestige but also largely on the factual nature of the broadcast, and it was to enhance the facticity of the program that he recommended several changes in January 1947. By removing “invented ‘popular’ dialogue and fictional characters,” it was hoped Cunard would be unable to sustain its objections.Footnote ¹²¹

The nature of the program may have stoked the opposition of the shipping interests; since it was a “feature” to be broadcast on the Light Programme as part of the “Sensation” series, they feared a lurid and fictional treatment of the disaster. For Gilliam, “features” dealt with fact, drama with fiction, and “owing something to the radio play, something to the radio talk, it is a synthesis different in essence from either.”Footnote ¹²² Cunard White Star was aware of the series title and that the program was to be a feature from the very beginning, but it was not aware of the fundamentally factual basis of the radio “docu-drama” format that Gilliam was pioneering. As Cunard protested, “[T]he pretence ‘Sensation’ stimulated by an imaginative script can give offence, or at least seem lacking in taste, to living people and to those concerned in the current activities in the White Star and Harland and Wolff companies.”Footnote ¹²³ Despite this hostility, the BBC remained immovable and countered the objections of Cunard White Star—particularly its claim to be representing the public—by stating openly

The BBC offered to allow Cunard to comment on the script, but this offer was ultimately declined.Footnote ¹²⁵

Throughout, the corporation spoke with a confidence noticeably absent in 1932. Among the many probable reasons for this, four stand out. First, the relationship between the public and radio had been transformed by the war years in terms of the growth of the BBC, diversity of programming, and influence of broadcasting within the United Kingdom.Footnote ¹²⁶ Second, the “feature” was geared around fact, which was a far less problematic mode of treating the disaster for the wider public, if not for industrial interests. Third, the sheer passage of time meant that the disaster could be even more legitimately deemed a historical event. The 1930s were a key decade in the transition of the Titanic from memory to history. Not merely had the bulk of Titanic memoirs been published by 1936, but a symbol of the shift was provided by the tagline of the “I Was There” series: “talks by men who saw the making of history.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Fourth and finally, also starting in 1936, the BBC actively engaged in audience research and was demonstrably more knowledgeable about its audience even before the outbreak of the Second World War.Footnote ¹²⁸

Confident in the justice of its case, the BBC nonetheless courted disaster through sheer lack of organization. In mid-February, the shipping interests learned that the program was due to be broadcast on 25 February. On this date, Harland & Wolff was set to launch its first Cunard White Star liner since the 1930s. Embarrassingly for the BBC, an outside broadcast unit was covering this event. Realizing that their own approaches to the corporation were likely to be rebuffed, Cunard White Star and Harland & Wolff quickly mobilized an impressive cast of lobbyists to press for a postponement of the broadcast. On the same day as Cunard White Star wrote to the BBC to inform the corporation of the problem, a telegram to the same effect was received from the prime minister of Northern Ireland, Basil Brooke.Footnote ¹²⁹ Before it had a chance to respond, the home secretary telephoned the corporation for information, after receiving representations from Cunard and the Northern Ireland government.Footnote ¹³⁰ That same day (24 February) the BBC informed all the interested parties that the broadcast was to be postponed for a week.

Government involvement had been sufficient to postpone the broadcast, but not to prevent it. The press remained uninterested, although this was perhaps due to the winter weather and the fuel crisis of 1947, which saw the numbers of the Radio Times that would have advertised the “Sensation” program go unpublished. Still, the absence of press comment left Cunard White Star and Harland & Wolff without allies until the BBC's poor timing meant that the prestige of a key employer in Northern Ireland was jeopardized, compelling the government to intervene. It appears that the shipping concerns finally learned that lone and frontal opposition to the BBC was unlikely to lead to success.

But they proved resourceful in finding ways to resist. As the Titanic became ever more an object of history, broadcasts on the disaster moved in the direction of historical documentary, and the cooperation of the ship's owners and builders became more important. These then had the opportunity to subvert, rather than openly attack representations. The British TV début of the Titanic in 1956 is a case in point. The BBC was initially approached by Longmans with a copy of Walter Lord's typescript of A Night to Remember for consideration as a possible dramatic production.Footnote ¹³¹ Unlike NBC in the United States, BBC executives felt that a TV production of the book was beyond them, saying that it was “quite fascinating, but quite impossible for television at our present state of progress.”Footnote ¹³² However, the Talks Department appears not to have been approached and independently decided to pursue its own Titanic program as a mix of interviews, archive footage, and forensic analysis.Footnote ¹³³ Harland & Wolff declined to assist in any way, and the BBC did not bother approaching Cunard directly.Footnote ¹³⁴

Once it learned of the program, however, Cunard worked to undermine it, pressuring current and retired employees not to assist the BBC. As its general manager, F. H. Dawson, stated:

Undefeated, the BBC even organized a meeting with Cunard (through third parties), because it felt that the participation of an expert in the program was required to outline the advances made since 1912 and once again safeguard national prestige. Cunard was determined to decline any invitation and was gratified to learn at the meeting, held on 15 November 1956, that Harland & Wolff had not assisted either.Footnote ¹³⁶ But it did discover that Rank was considering a film of Lord's book, which it hoped would be the last on the sinking.Footnote ¹³⁷

Not merely would there be countless further books—and films besides—but the effort to sabotage the BBC program ended in failure. Broadcast on 27 November, it was extremely popular, with an audience of 23 percent of the adult population of the United Kingdom (46 percent of the adult TV-viewing public). An Audience Research Report completed one month later indicates that the program was only marginally less popular than a repeat of Lightoller's 1936 talk broadcast on 9 April. Seventy-six percent of respondents graded the TV program in the two highest of five possible ratings. Most viewers thought “it had thrown a great deal of new light on a fascinating subject.” Several would not have recognized the picture painted by later cultural historians, of the mid-1950s as a renaissance in Titanic interest, because they felt that enough had been said on the ship and that “it is time it was put into cold storage.” Importantly, though, “it was particularly appreciated that the story of how the ‘Titanic’ went to her doom was told, as far as possible, at first hand.”Footnote ¹³⁸ In other words, witnesses and facts were the only legitimate means of telling the story of the disaster for the viewers of this program, reflecting the previous forty years of British opinion on film and broadcast representations of the Titanic. Small wonder, then, that the makers of A Night to Remember (1958) were determined to make the ship itself the star and to embellish the film as little as possible with fictionalized excursions.Footnote ¹³⁹

■ ■ ■

In the first half century after Britain's largest peacetime maritime disaster, efforts to represent it were subject to determined resistance. For most of this period, the narrative of the catastrophe acted primarily as a vehicle of national rivalry, industrial competition, and media criticism, even if some of the old wine (the morals drawn in 1912) continued to be poured into new bottles.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The most determined party to resist tellings of the disaster was, understandably, the British mercantile marine. Shipping interests used a range of different tactics to prevent, delay, or obstruct representations. Most frequently, they directly lobbied producers or the British government, and used two particular arguments: that representing the Titanic was bad for the shipping business, and thereby for British prestige as a whole; and that it was cruel to remind survivors or victims' relatives of the sinking. They never managed to obtain support on the basis of their claim to represent public feeling, and they often came across—especially to the BBC but also to the British government—as somewhat self-serving in their concerns for their own industry.

But they were sometimes able to transcend this suspicion and appeal directly to national prestige. Their ability to do so was largely dictated by the medium in which a representation was to appear. Questions of national prestige were almost entirely absent for written representations and were of questionable relevance for broadcasts (controlled by a monopolistic and national corporation), but they were of supreme importance for film. The international dimensions of film could provoke resistance—as when German commentators used Atlantic to attack British maritime competence—but it could also enhance the range of tactical options open to those seeking to resist representations, as when the Chamber of Shipping attempted to enlist the US government against the Selznick project. Awareness of these issues, and the consequent defense by filmmakers (and other producers of Titanic representations) that they would emphasize heroism and professionalism during a moment of crisis, may well have influenced the overall content of portrayals of the disaster, since heroism and stoicism have become a mainstay of British discourse on the Titanic.Footnote ¹⁴¹

The medium of a given representation was also important for several other reasons. First, it dictated what exactly was being resisted: in the case of film, it was often the content that was opposed (especially with the 1943 film), but with radio, it was also the nature of the medium itself. The potential for realistic sound effects, coupled with the fact that these might stealthily intrude upon the peace of the household, caused serious anxiety in the first decade of broadcast radio. Second, the medium often determined the acceptability of fiction in representations of the disaster. Within written portrayals, such as Prechtl's Titanensturz, fiction was so interwoven with the broad disaster narrative that it even managed to garner praise as the only way authentically to represent the catastrophe. For film, fiction was acceptable only if the story was based on the disaster, as was the case with Atlantic. When a film purported to be of the Titanic, however, fictional elements were problematic, albeit less so with innocent melodrama (Titanic, 1953) than with National Socialist propaganda. Where fiction became more or less taboo was within broadcast media. The dangers of sensationalism were not simply a product of the infancy of radio, as the audience report for the 1956 TV documentary showed: facts and documentary reconstruction were widely recognized as the only way to discuss the disaster.

The fundamental importance of factual authenticity to the cultural history of the Titanic indicates the significance of the sinking for an understanding of memory and of the development of British culture in the early twentieth century. Issues of memory are densely interwoven with all others in Titanic representations: radio's realism was dangerous because of its possible effects on the memories of survivors or victims' relatives; concern for such memories became one of the less convincing grounds on which shipping interests attempted to resist representations; and the dangers of substituting fiction (for such was Walter Lord's account of the Californian, according to Harrison and Captain Lord) for authentic memories were at the heart of much opposition.

Above all, however, memory is tied particularly closely to international concerns and to resistance efforts. The German attempt to emphasize maritime incompetence or plutocratic corruption was central, both to mercantile marine competition (during the interwar years) and to wartime anti-British propaganda. Shipping interests in the 1930s, then the press and government in 1950, were resolutely opposed to certain representations because of the deleterious effect they would have on the prestige of British shipping and of the nation at large. The German effort to “remember” (which often meant “invent”) and emphasize certain features of Titanic memory was incompatible with those elements that the British merchant marine and government sought to highlight. This shows little sign of abating, since in more recent years the Hollywood emphasis on British incompetence or malevolence resulted in the lukewarm reception of certain aspects of Titanic (1997).Footnote ¹⁴² But the importance of different national emphases in memory of the disaster, at least in the half century since 1912, appears clear.

Finally, the transition of memory to history exercised a great influence over the nature and tactics of resistance. As the years went by, there was less public and press support for opponents of representations (except where these representations sought to besmirch the nation at large). As such, those seeking to portray the disaster grew bolder, and opponents were forced to change their tactics. By the mid-1950s these tactics were characterized by a haughty refusal to cooperate and a sinister effort to apply unseen pressure to would-be participants. Ironically, it is as memory of the disaster has transmuted to history that memory itself features more heavily in representations. By the time of the 1997 film, it had become so central to the Titanic narrative that Cameron's story is effectively narrated by a 101-year-old survivor, whose indomitable personality shows a moment of emotional weakness only when confronted with an image of a door (beamed from the wreck), which brings a powerful memory flooding back. It is, perhaps, remarkable that the status of memory should be so enhanced by the projection of images that nobody before 1985 can have seen—Titanic on the seabed—but what we seem to remember is perhaps less important than what we have tried to forget.