Titanic: How can a disastrous ship be celebrated?
 

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More than 1,500 people died when the Titanic sank. So why is the centenary of its launch being proudly celebrated in Northern Ireland, asks Tom de Castella.

No other ship comes close to rivalling the gigantic shadow cast by the Titanic. A hundred years after its completion, it's still the most iconic vessel to have set sail.

Its tragic maiden voyage has become shorthand for catastrophic hubris - the "unsinkable" ship that hit an iceberg and sank, causing the deaths of 1,503 passengers and crew. And yet in one corner of the UK, the Titanic is a byword not for disaster but a source of pride and nostalgia.

When its hull was launched at Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyard on 31 May 1911, it was the largest ship in the world, measuring 886ft (270m) long.

And in Northern Ireland that's where the story ends, says Mick Fealty, editor of the news site Slugger O'Toole.

Rather than a maritime disaster, the Titanic is an engineering triumph. There's a common Belfast joke, says the Irish writer Ruth Dudley Edwards, that taps into this feeling: "It was fine when it left us."

Behind the joking there's a serious point, Fealty says. The shipyards in those days employed tens of thousands of workers while Belfast also had the world's largest rope works and the huge textile machinery firm Mackies.

"The pride is about looking back to the golden days. The Titanic was the pinnacle of Belfast's industrial glory," he says. This was in the days before partition when the majority Protestant city wore industrialisation as a badge of pride, differentiating itself from the agrarian, Catholic and rural south.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13593391


Note: 31 May 2011 Last updated at 10:53 GMT

I'm getting married on the 100th anniversary of her sinking. Thank God I haven't booked a cruise across the Atlantic as a honeymoon. :yep:

Classic :DL

http://www.theonion.com/audio/titani...-member,18731/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new...-of-view,5754/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/april-16-1912,10645/

Perhaps commemorate would be a better word.

It's interesting, the mythos surrounding the Titanic; many people still believe it's the largest ship ever built and set sail. When I first visited the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, I was surprised to hear the tour guide say the Queen Mary was larger than the Titanic. I knew there were larger modern ships (a glance out at the nearby port proved that point), but I thought ships, particulary passenger ships were attenuated in size following the sinking of the Titanic until the WWII era. By the way, after seeing a lot of tankers, container ships and the like when I was growing up, I found the Queen Mary to be rather small...

Congratulations on you wedding:yeah:

Commemorate. Celebrate.
Whatever word you chose.
Two words as to why:
Human Nature.
/thread

Too soon.

"Too soon",for what ;) ...I see :yep:

To me the Titanic desaster represents more the end of an era. The era of blind faith in technology, that technology can beat nature, that technological progress is unlimited and that it will eventually lead to progress for humanity. Especially as said desaster happened on the dawn of WW1 where (industrial) technology was massively used to kill each other in a previously unimaginable scale.

To answer thread title = Ahem, with the smashing of a bottle on the titanics hull, prior to launch. :shifty:

I do hope you are not flying, either!

http://www.celebitchy.com/wp-content...rash-1-web.jpg
Hey, honey, is this York?

Hey, I resemble that remark! :haha::salute: