By John Welshman
The latest news for period drama fans is that Julian Fellowes, creator and writer of Downton Abbey, has created a four-part ITV mini-series commemorating the centenary of the Titanic sinking. Publicity indicates that ‘Titanic’ will feature a mix of real and fictional characters.
However, what many viewers may not realise is that there was a real Fellowes on board the ship in 1912. But rather than being an ancestor of the popular writer, Alfred J. Fellowes was a humble crew member and one of the estimated 1,514 people to perish in the maritime disaster.
It was Walter Lord, in A Night to Remember (1955), who described the sinking of the Titanic as ‘the last night of a small town’. And small town it was, for as we have seen, the ship had all the occupations and characteristics of an urban centre. The tragedy affected those from First, Second, and Third Class, and the crew.
To different degrees, women as well as men; children as well as adults; crew members as well as passengers; both the privileged and the poor; and people from countries as diverse as Britain, the United States, Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Belgium, the Lebanon and others, confronted the same fate.
Not everyone was as anonymous as Alfred Fellowes. But like him they perished, and it is only because of what happened to the Titanic that the human detail of their lives was laid bare.
John Welshman is the author or editor of several books on twentieth-century British social history and has held posts at the Universities of Leicester, Oxford, and York. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University. His latest book, Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town, publishes this month. Read his previous post on the cross-section of society who perished in the Titanic disaster.
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: http://blog.oup.com/2012/03/fellowes-and-the-titanic/
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