Sinking the facts

Shipping companies lobbied cinema chains and the government to tone down or stop two British films about the sinking of the Titanic, accordi...

Shipping companies lobbied cinema chains and the government to tone down or stop two British films about the sinking of the Titanic, according to documents in an exhibition at the Public Record Office in London.

The director Alfred Hitchcock was one target of their behind-the-scenes attacks. Their bids to suppress material which might frighten away passengers continued for more than a quarter of a century after the disaster in 1912, which cost 1,500 lives.

They may also have influenced a third — and celebrated — film, A Night to Remember, made 46 years afterwards.

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The earliest documents show how infuriated were the Titanic’s owners, the White Star Line, in 1929 by a German newspaper article which blamed “English amateurism” for the catastrophe.The article, which White Star translated into awkward English, proclaimed: “The Englishmen, who still have in their veins the Norman blood, have always been and still are crossing the seven oceans at full speed with lack of consideration and merely trustingto their lucky star that everything will go well.”

The company reacted by demanding that Britain’s Board of Trade force the distributors of an early British talking picture, Atlantic, to carry disclaimers stressing that the disaster was unlikely to recur “as it is the practice of all shipping companies to provide (life)boats for all”.

The board replied that it had no power to do this. But White Star managed to force cinemas to delete its name from posters advertising the film. In 1938 the British Chamber of Shipping wrote to the board demanding that it “stop production” of a film planned by Hitchcock about the Titanic. Employers were still angry about Atlantic, which they said had been shown “with avidity in Germany in the form of a warning not to travel on British ships”.The 1939-45 war stopped Hitchcock’s film. In 1943 Hitler’s Germany produced a propaganda film, Titanic, blaming capitalist greed and cowardly British officers for the deaths.

A Night to Remember, though critical of the WhiteStar Line and filmed long after the company’s collapse, carried a version of the disclaimers about lifeboats which it had tried to impose on Atlantic.

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The exhibition displays the papers, well known to Titanic scholars, showing how the Foreign Office in London privately begged US President William Taft to ensure that the Senate disaster inquiry vindicated the Board of Trade. Taft replied that the senator in charge was a publicity hunter who would prolong the issue “as long as it will keep his name in the papers”. The exhibition is open to the public again on April 25.