Original subtitles

On the evening of April 14th, 1912,

on its maiden voyage,

RMS Titanic is steaming

into drifting ice.

It looks for a second as if

the Titanic is successfully

going to dodge this enormous iceberg ahead of it...

..and then a tremor is felt

running through the ship.

Less than three hours later, the world's largest

and most glamorous ocean liner

is on the seabed,

many of the passengers and crew

going down with the ship.

One of the men in the group turned to my dad and he said,

"There's nothing for it now, lad. It's every man for himself."

You have reports of gunfire,

you have reports of fighting,

you have just sheer chaos.

This series reveals the Titanic,

and those on board, in their true colours.

Photographs and film footage of the Titanic

and her sister ships are colourised -

some, for the very first time.

It makes you realise that these people didn't exist

in a black-and-white world.

They existed in a world as colourful as ours.

Possessions and artefacts help tell the stories of

passengers and crew, victims

and traumatised survivors...

I don't think it's possible to experience

a disaster on that level and not be affected in some way.

..and bringing to life the horror

and the aftermath of one of

the 20th century's most notorious disasters.

It's only a month later that these photographs are taken,

and they're all still reeling from the fact that

their father won't be coming home.

Over a century after the sinking of the Titanic,

fascination with the ship shows no sign of waning.

In Wiltshire, in the south of England,

an auction of ocean liner and Titanic memorabilia is under way.

The bids will be from as far afield as Australia,

New Zealand, heavy presence in the United States,

UK, Middle East.

So it literally is a global phenomena.

The artefacts on sale include

a rare Titanic deck blanket,

a first-class dinner menu,

a promotional calendar,

and a Jewish passenger's

water-stained pocket watch.

What these objects do is,

if you look at the calendar, for instance,

it's a vivid, bright-red promotional item,

and it brings 1912 to life. It makes it real.

For the collector, each artefact

is a direct link to those on board.

The Hebrew watch instantly transports you back.

That came from someone, that was someone's story,

that was someone's history,

and you're straight in the room with that person,

and that gives you the chills.

For me, it's one of the most powerful objects that we have

in the sale. There's an old auction

cliche on what things will sell for,

and something is worth what two people are prepared to pay for it.

In this case, in my professional opinion, for what it's worth,

between £50,000 and £70,000.

Sunday, April 14th, 1912,

8am, Titanic's last day.

First-class passengers were woken by a bugle call.

Film shot nine years later by the White Star Line

of the Titanic's twin, the Olympic,

shows both ships' identical routines...

There are only very few differences between the two ships,

so this footage allows us to see

what the Titanic would have looked like as she sailed.

..but only in black and white.

Now, after expert restoration,

removing scratches,

sharpening the images,

and then adding colour,

the ships come to life.

Five days previously,

the Titanic set sail from Southampton

on its maiden voyage.

Her destination, New York,

is about 1,500 miles away.

Everyone's settled into their routines.

It's a bright, clear day.

There's a well-oiled machine going on at this point.

Passengers took the air on deck.

Alone at the bow was 54-year-old

American Helen Churchill Candee.

Helen broke conventions.

She was a divorcee, travelling alone,

and a pioneer of women's rights.

She literally wrote the guidebook for young women,

at the turn of the 20th century, on how to make it on your own.

Rosemary Gillham is Helen's great-granddaughter.

She describes standing at the bow of the ship, looking out

in this crystal-clear,

bright-blue sky at the waters parting from the bow of the ship,

and the sort of majesty,

and the glory of this boat cutting through the waves.

"The monarch of the seas", she described it.

On A-Deck, first-class cabin A36

was full of plans and blueprints of the ship.

Staying there was the Titanic's designer, Thomas Andrews.

Andrews is brought breakfast, as usual, by his steward.

He's a guy called Henry Etches.

And Etches sometimes makes suggestions

to his boss about how the Titanic and the Olympic

could actually be improved.

Now, some bosses might say to their steward, "go away",

but actually, Andrews - to his credit - always takes note of them.

Elsewhere on the Titanic,

passengers were taking advantage of

the world's most luxurious ship.

Gymnasiums were the latest craze,

and Titanic's was state of the art.

It was open to first-class passengers,

men, women and children,

all strictly segregated.

There are a lot of people who are

travelling onboard the Titanic who are very aware that they are

being served thousands of calories every day, particularly at dinner.

In the first-class dining salon,

quite a few of the passengers make jokes about

the fact that they need the gymnasium, after a week at sea.

In the heart of the ship,

the squash racquet court was already in use.

This is the court in the Olympic, filmed in 1921.

Squash is a very popular game

with upper-class Edwardian men at the time,

and so it shows a shrewd awareness to the White Star Line

of who they're trying to market this to.

But many first-class passengers were preferring to take it easy

and relax in the comfort of the first-class lounge

on the promenade deck.

A hotel in Alnwick, in the North of England,

has the interior of the first-class lounge

from Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic.

It's really easy, being in this space, to imagine

the last day aboard the Titanic.

People would have been socialising, chatting, drinking tea,

drinking alcoholic drinks,

playing cards.

Below deck was a hive of activity,

as the 430-strong

Victualling Department,

who looked after the food and drink on board,

catered for over 1,300 passengers.

You have to have bakers producing enough bread

for all three classes and the crew.

The bedrooms have to be cleaned.

There's a mail room to sort the letters.

The wireless room is constantly sending telegrams to America.

The Titanic never really stops.

Jean Legg's father, 18-year-old Sidney Daniels,

worked as a steward.

On the Sunday, he said it was

such a lovely atmosphere on board.

It was bitterly cold,

so people tended to stay down below to keep warm, to stay inside.

So it was a very busy day.

But he said that was fine. Everyone was happy,

just thrilled to be there.

Breakfast was being served in

the second-class dining saloon on D-Deck.

Eating there was a couple,

Henry Morley and Kate Phillips,

travelling under the names

"Mr and Mrs Marshall".

Henry was a 38-year-old confectioner,

with a business and family

back home in Worcester. Kate was 19,

and one of his shop assistants.

They planned to start a new life together in San Francisco.

Beverley Roberts is their great-granddaughter.

They ran away together because they fell in love.

A man doesn't up sticks and leave his wife and child

for no reason at all.

Kate was pregnant.

Whether she conceived just beforehand, and they knew

and wanted to escape the scandal,

or she conceived on the Titanic.

But running away together,

OK, it was a scandal, but they loved each other

and their whole focus would have just been on each other

and enjoying themselves.

For many passengers like Kate and Henry,

the voyage was the start of

a new life, in a new country.

From the moment they step ashore,

they don't have to tell people about their past.

It's an opportunity for people to reinvent themselves,

and they can forget things that they don't

want to remember about their own past.

Many of those in third class -

sitting down to eat a breakfast of

porridge and vegetable stew -

were fleeing persecution or poverty

in Italy and the Middle East,

in the hope of making their fortune in America.

Most travelled as a family,

but one group of around 20 came from

the Lebanese village of Kfarmishki.

They carried the hopes of the entire community.

There would have been collective pooling of resources

to enable to buy the tickets.

The gamble was taken collectively, by the whole village,

on the understanding that then remittances would flow back,

that people would earn higher wages somewhere else.

They were also aiming to support

all the people who were back in Lebanon.

At 12 minutes past nine,

the Titanic's wireless room received

a message from the liner Caronia,

warning of icebergs ahead.

The Titanic's Captain,

EJ Smith, thanked them for their message.

He was used to the perils of the North Atlantic.

Smith has captained 17 White Star ships,

in a career that's lasted 30 years.

So when he's asked by a newspaper

to describe his time at sea,

he simply describes them as "uneventful".

Smith had no intention

of slowing his ship for the ice.

To do so would have significant repercussions

for White Star's reputation.

Having that regular, reliable service is everything.

Because much like today, where we would miss a flight

and then miss connecting flights,

passengers aren't ending their trip in New York.

A lot of these people are going to other places in the US.

They've booked carriages, they've booked taxis.

It's all been prearranged.

Being delayed into New York is terrible PR for the White Star Line,

for the ship's maiden voyage,

and also, extremely inconvenient for the ship's passengers.

Captain Smith was trusted

by those onboard,

and his vast, speedy ship

seemed unstoppable.

Not all passengers were happy being on the Titanic, though.

A few days earlier,

fashion journalist Edith Rosenbaum wrote to a friend.

"It is a monster, and I can't say that I like it,

"as I feel as if I were in a big hotel,

"instead of on a cosy ship.

"I'm going to take a much-needed rest on this trip,

"but I cannot get over my feeling of depression

"and premonition of trouble.

"How I wish it were over!"

As Sunday drew to a close,

the Titanic was sailing through the icy water

faster than at any point in her voyage.

It was a perfect evening in the North Atlantic.

A lot of passengers had gone to bed early.

There is a sense of stillness throughout the Titanic.

However, there was

potential danger ahead.

Six other ships had sent the Titanic warnings about icebergs,

but Captain Smith was unmoved.

Because it's so unusually calm,

he figures that anything ahead will be spotted in time

and orders Titanic's bridge

to maintain speed and heading,

and takes the ship through the ice field.

The Titanic is going at 22 knots

as they approach the ice field. That's quick. I mean,

that means it's travelling at about, what, 38 foot a second?

At 11.40pm, Frederick Fleet,

one of the ship's two lookouts,

spotted an object high above the water.

Dorothy Kendle met Fleet in the 1950s.

What he saw, he said, was something black in front of him,

and he realised it was an iceberg,

and he called down to Officer Murdoch and told him,

"Iceberg ahead, iceberg ahead!"

46,000 tonnes of steel and wood

collide with half a million tonnes of ice.

The iceberg punctured the Titanic

below the waterline multiple times.

Now, those holes aren't big. I mean, they're only like an inch high,

but they are along 250 foot of the hull.

Five watertight compartments

were breached. Titanic could survive

damage only to the first four.

Dorothy Kendle's mother was asleep in second class.

It wasn't a bang, she said it was like a shiver,

a violent shiver that woke her up.

In her first-class cabin,

Helen Churchill Candee almost fell over with the force of the collision.

She opened the door and called for

the steward to say, "what's happened?", and he was saying,

"There's nothing wrong. Go back to bed.

"Don't frighten other people. There's nothing wrong."

As a precaution, the Titanic's engine stopped.

Her giant propellors were still.

The ship fell silent.

Many passengers realised, for the first time, something was wrong.

They've been on this liner,

this big sturdy ship,

with heaters, and music, and food,

and restaurants, and the constant hum

of that ship running underneath them has always been there.

At midnight, Captain Smith received

some chilling news.

Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall reports

that the mailroom on F-Deck is flooded.

There are letters floating around.

So by now, the ship has taken on about 7,000 tonnes of water.

Smith gave the order to "swing out the lifeboats"

and to get the passengers on deck.

Jean Legg's father, Sidney Daniels, was one of the stewards given

the task of getting first-class passengers to the lifeboats.

The reactions were varied.

One reaction was, "Oh! What does this young man know? He's 18.

"He's not much more than a boy.

"This is an unsinkable liner. Can this be right?"

He'd go to another cabin and they'd say,

"But our children are asleep in bed. They're warm in their bunks.

"If we take them up on deck, they could get a chill."

And yet another reaction would be, "We sort of understand what you say,

"but we'll just pack a few things and we'll come up.

"We'll follow you up later."

Many of those who do go up on deck took refuge in

the first-class lounge, encouraged by the Chief Purser.

To prevent the passengers having to go out on deck

in below-freezing temperatures,

he turns on the electric fireplace,

cocoa, brandies and coffee are being served.

The band arrives to play an impromptu concert.

So all of a sudden, the evacuation has taken on

the air of what one first-class passenger calls

"a very stupid picnic".

At 12.30am, word reached the passengers on deck that

the squash court close to the bow

was now ten feet underwater.

The fact that the squash court is flooded is a portent

of Titanic's doom.

It means water is now flooding

through spaces that shouldn't be flooding. These aren't

machinery spaces, these are now passenger spaces.

The Titanic's designer, Thomas Andrews,

knew his ship was doomed.

He saw stewardess Annie Robinson

not wearing a life preserver.

Andrews absolutely insists,

he pleads with Annie to put a life belt on,

because he really wants her to set an example

to all those many passengers

who simply do not realise

the danger they're in. Now, Annie's really reluctant,

but Andrews just says, "If you value your life, put your belt on."

Helen Churchill Candee and a friend

headed up to the lifeboat deck.

They were about to step on a stairway that was a ladder,

but they had to stand back, because the stokers were coming up from

the engine room - in a line,

faces blackened with soot.

Grim faces, anguished faces.

As if they knew what nobody else knew,

and that the boat had been badly damaged.

And then she heard the captain shout, "Halt!",

and made them turn around and go back down into the engine room,

where they knew that they would not survive.

At the auction of Titanic artefacts in Wiltshire,

Lot 275 is about to go under the hammer -

a rare Titanic deck blanket, taken into a lifeboat by

a passenger fleeing the sinking ship.

So, away we go,

and we start off at £60,000.

It's an iconic Titanic moment,

I think, to imagine particularly

the first-class passengers on a chair on deck.

They've got their cup of warm tea

and their blanket on. But of course,

the night of the sinking, the blankets took on

a completely different use and meaning.

A lot of passengers have left their rooms, grabbed their life belts.

They are not dressed appropriately.

People are in pyjamas, people are in night dresses.

And so, blankets become this weird symbol.

They represent survival, they represent warmth.

75.

76.

76. Is there 77?

At £76,000, for the last call...

An hour after the iceberg hit, the first lifeboat

was lowered into the cold Atlantic.

The Titanic had 20 lifeboats.

Together, they could hold just 1,178 people.

That was barely half the number on board.

But for 1912, the ship was considered well-equipped.

It had four more lifeboats

than regulations required.

Other liners had even fewer lifeboats.

If the German ship Amerika, for example, had sunk,

You would have had 2,000 passengers and crew who would have

very quickly discovered there were no lifeboats for them.

The first lifeboats were launched half-empty.

Many passengers refused point-blank

to leave the security of the ship.

Lucy Duff-Gordon, a passenger in Lifeboat 1, wrote...

"I shall never forget how black and deep the water looked below us

"and how I hated leaving the big, homely ship

"for this frail little boat."

Beverley Roberts knows very little about what happened that night

to her great-grandparents, Henry and Kate.

But their daughter, Beverley's grandmother, gave her one clue.

When she was being chastised as a child, Kate would say,

"Don't give me that look. Don't look at me with those eyes,

"because that's how your father looked at me

"when I was going down into the lifeboat."

It was almost two hours since the Titanic hit the iceberg.

Lifeboat 14 was being lowered down

the side of the ship.

Passengers were wrapped in overcoats

and blankets against the cold.

Dorothy Kendle's mother

and grandmother were on board.

As they were going down in the lifeboat,

they were looking through the portholes,

and they could see passengers just grabbing what they could

and then making their way to the boat deck.

And then the next one down,

they were doing the same.

And then when they got right to the bottom,

there was water already in the cabins.

Meanwhile, in the wireless room,

the two operators were sending out desperate pleas for help.

One liner, the Carpathia,

had responded and was heading for them, but it was 60 miles away.

On the Titanic, panic was setting in.

You have reports of gunfire,

you have reports of fighting,

you have reports of just sheer chaos.

This picture, drawn within weeks of the disaster

for the newspaper The Sphere,

is one of the most realistic depictions

of the drama on the boat deck.

To make it as accurate as possible,

the artist - an Italian called Fortunino Matania -

spoke to a steward from the Titanic at great length

to get the details just right.

The steward remembered

the single shoe on the deck

and the man in the dinner jacket,

not wearing his life belt.

Second-class passengers

Joseph and Juliette Laroche,

and their two young girls,

were caught up in the confusion.

Juliette got separated, and then

she's thrust onto this lifeboat

with one of her children. But apparently, Joseph is seen holding

his other daughter above all the chaos.

Everyone's panicking,

but he wants to get her safe.

So he finds his wife and his other child, puts her in,

assures his wife that there'll be other lifeboats.

I wonder if he knew at that point

if there would be another lifeboat, but it's about getting

his wife and children to safety.

As second-class passengers,

the Laroche family could join

first class on the lifeboat deck.

But those in third class were hindered by

American regulations, concerning

the spread of disease on liners.

You have a crew that have been told they need to keep third class

separate from first and second class,

unless in an emergency,

and that even when they do realise it's an emergency,

they're struggling to communicate with them.

And many passengers in third class -

indeed, many passengers on the Titanic - belonged to

an inherently conservative and respectful generation.

And in this particular set of circumstances, that is

to their disadvantage, in that

they are waiting to be told what to do.

And as no firm instructions are coming,

many of them simply sit and wait, until it's too late.

By 2.17, all the lifeboats had gone.

Hundreds fought their way up the sloping deck to the stern.

The massive funnels started to fall

towards the people in the water.

SCREAMING

These incredible pieces of machinery, standing about

as high as a four or five-storey building, were coming down onto

the very heads of the passengers who once looked at them

as a symbol of Edwardian might.

Steward Sidney Daniels

jumped into the water and swam

towards an upturned lifeboat,

photographed here a few days later.

Already, there were more than 20 people on.

As he got nearer, he could see that

there was just enough gap for one person -

maybe two, at a pinch - to get on.

So he clambered on and he managed

to get onto that space.

The Titanic pointed towards the sky,

in the words of one passenger, "Like a sinister finger".

Titanic was never designed to have

an entire third of her length out of the water.

And of course, it becomes too much.

Right at the very end, the lights snap out,

and round about the same time,

Titanic's back is dramatically broken.

The submerged bow section started to slowly pull

the rest of the Titanic down.

Dad said there was an explosion,

like a big noise, and then the stern came up, almost vertical.

And he said it was quite an experience to watch.

And she was gone.

The pride of the White Star fleet

slipped below the waves,

two hours and 40 minutes

after the iceberg hit.

For those in the water,

the ordeal wasn't over.

First-class passenger Archibald Gracie

was on the same upturned lifeboat as Sidney Daniels.

"The shrieks of the terror-stricken

"and the awful gaspings for breath of those

"in the last throws of drowning,

"none of us will ever forget to our dying day."

The lifeboats drifted for four hours,

until the liner Carpathia came into view at dawn.

The National Maritime Museum

in London has a collection of photographs

taken by a passenger on the Carpathia.

They essentially just show

the minute size of these boats

against the vastness of the ocean.

And it brings to light

just how lucky these people are

to have survived the disaster.

One photograph shows Lifeboat 14,

skippered by Fifth Officer Harold Lowe.

Despite there being almost no wind at all,

he was the only man who decided

to raise the sail in the boat.

It's here, just capturing

a tiny gasp of wind

as it's on the horizon.

On board were Dorothy Kendle's grandmother and mother.

My mother said the bitter cold

seemed to get through to their bones, you know?

The lifeboat was surrounded by bodies in the water.

Officer Lowe turned them over, some of them,

to see if they were still alive,

but my mother said they were frozen to death.

"They didn't drown," she said. "They were frozen."

The Titanic had been designed

to keep each social class apart.

In the lifeboats,

that segregated world disappeared.

Everyone was thrown together for the first time.

So you've got

interactions between people

who would not normally have interacted

on board the Titanic itself.

Everyone is cold,

everyone is frightened.

But on board, you get

small-scale domestic dramas.

Some women complain that men are drinking.

Others complain that people are smoking.

So these small-scale incidences

get amplified in the extraordinary

circumstances of the lifeboat.

Rosemary Gillham's great-grandmother, Helen Churchill Candee,

was in Lifeboat 6.

In the stern was Robert Hichens,

who had been steering the Titanic

when she struck the iceberg.

Helen described Hichens

as "a brute of a man", who was just out to take care of himself.

He'd borrowed one of the steamer rugs,

which he'd wrapped himself up in.

He refused to turn back to pick up

any other passengers.

They were already in the water.

He said that the nearest land was 1,200 miles away,

that they didn't stand a chance anyway,

so he didn't want to turn around.

Simonne Laroche was only three when she was rescued,

but remembered it for the rest of her life.

Simonne talks about getting on board

the Carpathia and being hoisted in sacks. And she remembers that,

and perhaps not about the actual Titanic itself.

So that bit must have been the most traumatic for her.

And obviously, being hoisted

and being away from her mother,

and the trauma of that.

Reports of the disaster

reached Britain and the United States

within hours.

The news had the greatest impact in Southampton,

home for three quarters of Titanic's crew.

A remarkable book in the city's archives shows

the effect of the sinking on the lives of local children.

Historian Julie Cook's

great-grandfather was a stoker

who went down with the ship.

This is the logbook from Northam Girls School,

which was in Northam, the area of Southampton

where many of the crew lived.

And Annie Hopkins, the headmistress,

wrote various journal entries throughout the year.

And in this particular entry on April the 15th, 1912, she wrote,

"A great many girls are absent this afternoon, owing to

"the sad news regarding the Titanic.

"Fathers and brothers are on the vessel, and some of

"the little ones in school have been in tears all the afternoon."

There was a lot of confusion at the time as to whether

the Titanic had sunk, whether everybody was saved.

There were lots of different newspaper reports coming,

in different editions of the local newspaper.

And yet, this headteacher knew from somewhere what had happened,

or these children knew from somewhere, and there was

a great deal of word of mouth in those communities

back in Southampton.

Two days later, Annie Hopkins wrote another entry in the logbook.

"I feel I must record the sad aspect in school today,

"owing to the Titanic disaster. So many of the crew belong to Northam

"and it is pathetic to witness the children's grief.

"In some cases, faith and hope of better news.

"The attendance is suffering."

Everyone was in mourning. Children would often play

in the street with their hoops. They didn't. There wasn't a sound

in the street. Everyone stayed inside. Many children were in grief,

some are still hopeful, some don't know if their father's coming home.

And yet, they were still at school.

They were still attending and hoping, clinging to hope, perhaps,

that their father would come home.

For most, their hope was short-lived.

The Carpathia picked up

only 212 crew members

out of a total of almost 900.

The Titanic story now became about helping the survivors

and recovering the dead.

After a three-day voyage,

the Carpathia reached New York

with over 700 survivors

of the Titanic on board.

The American press had chartered a boat,

competing amongst each themselves to get a scoop.

As the Carpathia steamed past,

reporters with megaphones are making offers of $50

or $100 for eyewitness accounts.

When the reporters were eventually allowed on board,

they interviewed anyone with any form of connection with

the disaster. Even the Carpathia's young, and very excited,

waiters and stewards.

One of those filmed for cinema newsreels

was 18-year-old English waiter Robbie Purvis.

Pauline Weeks is Robbie's daughter.

They've got their life jackets on, from the look of it.

It looks like they're all having a good time,

showing off in front of the camera.

I'm lucky to have film footage of my dad when he's young.

Not many people have film footage

of their fathers like this.

Robbie had a memorable tale to tell.

A baby, close to death, had been rescued.

Its clothes were wet, it was

icy cold, and he tried to save it.

And he took it to the hot plate,

which was used for keeping food hot,

and lowered the heat so that it was just warm,

and the baby got warm through and it survived.

We were always proud of him

for looking after the baby because

somebody of his age would not necessarily have thought about it.

Back out at sea, a steward

on a German liner photographed

an iceberg streaked with red paint.

It's believed to be the one that sank the Titanic.

A few miles away,

hundreds of bodies were still in the water.

The White Star Line chartered a ship - the Mackay-Bennett -

to recover them. She sailed from Halifax,

Nova Scotia, two days after the sinking.

On board were hastily-built coffins,

a priest,

a team of undertakers and an embalmer.

The Mackay-Bennett retrieved

306 corpses. After almost a week

in the water, 116 were either

too disfigured or decomposed

to be identified,

and so were buried at sea.

Today, possessions from Titanic's

passengers are highly sought after.

At 75,000. At 75.

At the auction in Wiltshire, a water-stained pocket watch

is coming under the hammer.

Is there any more?

At £75,000 on the saleroom, going...

..and gone.

It was found by the crew of the Mackay-Bennett

on the body of Jewish passenger Sinai Kantor,

and given back to his grieving family.

He was headed from

what was then Russia, we now know as Belarus,

with his wife, Miriam. They were in second class.

They were headed to the United States to study medicine,

to start these new lives. And unfortunately,

he did not survive. She did.

Her husband's life is stopped in that moment

when the pocket watch stops,

and it's a very powerful image.

I think there's a real poignancy to thinking about people's

hopes and dreams, and the fact that you can't take very much with you

when you make a journey like that. So everything that they carried

must have had a value or a meaning or a reason for being packed.

To me, it makes them more poignant than the first-class passengers,

in the sense that there was so much resting on this journey for them

and so many hopes invested in what they were doing.

710 people survived the sinking of the Titanic.

Just over 1,500 died.

Among those who perished was Joseph Laroche,

heading home to Haiti...

..Henry Pugh's great-uncle,

Titanic stoker Percy...

..Dorothy Kendle's grandfather, Thomas,

hoping to start a new life in America...

..and Beverley Farmer's great-grandfather, Henry.

Nine months after the loss of the Titanic,

his partner, Kate, gave birth to baby Ellen.

Jean Legg's father was one of the lucky ones.

Sidney went on to have a long career

as a steward for the White Star Line.

His signing-on book is testament to how highly

the company thought of him.

He went back to sea and he sailed the same route,

from Southampton to New York, that Titanic would have taken.

He sailed that on his favourite liner, the Olympic.

The Mackay-Bennett retrieved

wreckage, as well as bodies.

The Titanic was the most opulent

and colourful ship of her age

and, yet, all that the Mackay-Bennett

collected on its gruesome voyage

were chairs and fragments of wood.

The loss of the Titanic prompted

an outpouring of public sympathy.

Concerts were held

to raise money for bereaved families.

There was even a charity record

called Be British.

# Be British was the cry

# As the ship went down

# Every man was steady at his post... #

In May 1912, in Northam School in Southampton,

over 100 pupils were taken out of class to be photographed by

a local paper to raise awareness of the appeal.

There are two photographs here of the older girls

and the older boys who'd all lost a father or a loved one

on the Titanic. And this photograph

would have been taken right here,

against this wall, this part of

the building. We're used to having

our photographs taken as schoolchildren and lining up with

our school friends, but this is something else. This is

completely different. This is

children who united in grief.

They've lost a father,

and they're all still...

It's only a month later that

these photographs are taken,

and they're all still reeling

from the fact that their father won't be coming home.

An official Titanic Relief Fund was set up to collect

and distribute the money.

Soon, over £418,000 was raised -

around £30 million today.

Julie Cook's grandfather was a stoker who died on the Titanic.

She's looking at the Fund's account books in the Southampton Archives.

It reveals the Titanic's class divide

didn't end when the ship sank.

The money raised was not evenly distributed.

It was arranged in Class A to Class G.

So if you were Class A,

you were the wife or dependant of an officer.

And if you were Class G,

you were the wife or dependant of a stoker or a boiler room man,

such as my great-grandmother was.

Emily, in Class G, received

12 shillings and sixpence a week.

The widow of an officer

would get as much as £2 a week.

The money came with conditions.

An official named Ethel Maude Newman

cycled around Southampton,

checking on the recipients.

She became known as the Lady Visitor.

She would go around the houses

of those who were the dependants on the Fund to check how they were

living, to check where they were spending the money,

to check they still needed the money, to check they hadn't

remarried. Because some of the women, if they did remarry,

they were then no longer eligible for the Fund

from their husband's death. I can imagine these women hurriedly

cleaning their home, cleaning their children's dirty faces,

hiding the liquor bottle, perhaps,

and making sure everything was up to Ethel Newman's standards.

But Mrs Newman wasn't only checking

to see whether a widow had remarried.

There is an entry here of a lady called Mrs Biggs who, unfortunately,

due to her loss, she turned to alcohol.

And there's an entry here that says,

"It was reported that Mrs Biggs has again been before the magistrates

"on a charge of drunkenness. It was reluctantly decided to suspend

"her allowance for a period of three months."

And of course, this wasn't fair because Mrs Biggs,

although she may have been buying alcohol

to get over her grief or her trauma,

she still needed money to pay her rent, to feed her children,

to feed herself. And so, it seems incredibly unkind by our standards

that she would have been cut off in this way.

Those who had survived the sinking

faced a different kind of trauma.

Many had to deal with survivor's guilt,

and the men often faced public shaming.

There was a lot written in the press.

A very common commentary about if a male survived,

did they survive in the place of

a woman, in the place of a child?

Men were expected to explain

why they survived. They were

expected to defend their survival.

Some felt compelled to tell their story.

Charlotte Collyer, who had lost her husband, Harvey,

was photographed with Marjorie, her daughter,

and was interviewed by an American newspaper.

I think her first interview was just

a couple of days afterwards.

She'd just lost her husband.

She'd just seen all these people perish.

It's my opinion that she was getting her counselling.

She was getting her counselling before counselling was a thing.

If that's how she wants to deal with it, then that's fine.

But I think at the time, she was criticised for that,

no-one could really understand.

Many couldn't cope with the trauma.

At least 11 Titanic survivors took their own life,

including stewardess Annie Robinson,

who jumped off a ship in Boston Harbor,

and the lookout, Fred Fleet,

who hanged himself in 1965.

For over a century, the sinking of the Titanic has gripped

the public's imagination - thanks, in part, to films

such as A Night To Remember

and James Cameron's Titanic.

The iceberg gave the Titanic its immortality in popular culture,

but it is the silver screen

that made that enduring.

It also is a crucial ingredient to why the Titanic remains so popular,

such a source of fascination.

Because it is something that continues to appeal

to people beyond simply an interest in history.

It appeals to an interest in humanity and keeps the focus on

the human tragedy of the Titanic.

The enduring fascination with the Titanic

encouraged many searches for the wreck.

That came to an end in 1985,

when the painstaking work of

a team of marine archaeologists,

led by American Robert Ballard, paid off.

It was the first time anyone

had seen the Titanic in 73 years.

Rusting and slowly being lost

to the ocean, the Titanic was

once again seen in colour.

But that colour is fading.

When Titanic sails out in April, 1912,

she's this gleaming, colourful ship

that really catches the eye.

But now she's on the bottom of the seabed, all that colour

is just draining away. And soon,

there won't be a wreck at all,

because soon, there will not be a Titanic.

Such is the power of

the Titanic story, the legend

will endure, even when

the wreck is no more.

The Titanic continues to be

a source of fascination for us for so many reasons.

Because let's face it, there have been other sinkings.

But I think with this one,

it took them two and a half hours

to sink, so we have

all those stories.

Whether it's the richest person in the world,

whether it's cabin crew,

it will continue to thrill us

and enthral us for years to come.

This drama, this soap opera,

played out as the ship sank.

And we like to imagine ourselves

on the deck, and we wonder,

what would we have done?

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