CQ

We spent pretty much the whole day at the Titanic exhibition. It was awesome. A lot to take in, and certainly to summarise but I'll try..

The photo shows the exhibition centre taken from the Nomadic, the last White Star Line ship still in existance and the ferry used to take second and first class passengers out to the Titanic and Olympic. Third class passengers traveled on the smaller Traffic. This was a very interesting tour on its own.

We took a guided tour of the centre before going in to the exhibition and saw in the beautiful Harland and Wolff  drawing rooms where the ships were designed. The slipway where the Titanic and Olympic were built have the outlines of both ships engraved into them. At night they are lit up although being in the middle of summer we weren't too inclined to stay up late to come back and see it! It is pretty impressive to walk round them though and get an idea of the scale. Where the Olympic once stood is a garden where decking alternates with grass, the decking being the survivors and the grass being the deaths from each class and from the staff. The building doesn't even come close to the height of the gantries (228ft!) that were made to enable the construction by the way. 

Then it was in to the exhibition proper to see how those huge ships were built. The scale of the operation was incredible. After the plans were drawn on paper, they were actually chalked out at full size in cross section and quarter size in length in a huge loft. There, mistakes could be corrected. One of my extra photos shows riveting in the contemporary Nomadic though the larger rivets are newer, fitted after an accident.. It took five people to bang in each rivet. One to heat, one to pass the hot rivet over, one to hold it in and two to hit it with hammers in turn. Can you imagine the thousands of workers on the two huge gantries? And the noise? Incredible. Once the shell was built, they were launched and taken round to a graving dock for fitting of which more on Thursday.

Replicas of first, second and third class cabins were on display as well as a "fly through" of each deck. The internal design was incredibly complicated in order to keep the classes apart, the staff out of the way and in some cases men and women apart too, though there were only two bathrooms available to third class passengers. Eek!

The scale of the Titanic and her construction can be eclipsed only by the scale of the disaster and the lives lost when she struck an iceberg four days into her maiden voyage and there were many tales of heroism and cowardice. I am glossing over that bit a little since it is quite difficult to think about. The exhibition ends with a robotic camera going round the wreck and showing fittings such as baths and heaters as well as personal items like shoes and a comb.

Sorry for the long post but my mind was blown and that really is the brief version! The other extra photo is the Big Fish (Salmon of Knowledge) with the two Harland and Wolff cranes in the background

The title of the post is the last message broadcast by the Titanic. The common distress message at that time was "CQD".