Titanic - 107 years on

107 years ago tonight, RMS Titanic met its much publicised doom. 1,500 passengers lost their lives, 700 were saved. If the recommendations of the sinking of the SS Norge, 8 years previous, had been made law, the number of lifeboats on the Titanic would have been sufficient for every man, woman and child on board. Titanic would still have sunk, but the loss of life would possibly have been much lower.

Survivors from the Norge were put ashore in Stornoway a few days after the sinking in June 1904. Nine did not survive the ordeal and lie buried in Sandwick Cemetery, just over a mile from Stornoway. 700 others perished in the sinking of the Norge. Nobody has heard of that tragedy. They were dirt poor migrants, forced out of hearth and home in Russia, Poland and Ukraine by pogroms. Anti-semitic raids on Jewish neighbourhoods. But who cared about them, back in 1904?

The Titanic is one of thousands of ships to have fallen peril to the sea over the millennia that man has sailed the seven seas. She's no special case. Ships have sunk with far greater loss of life. Nonetheless, my thoughts tonight are with her hapless passengers, as they steamed to their fate, that cold night in the North Atlantic, 107 years ago.