TITANIC WATCH
The first moment was when Robert Douglas Norman, a second-class passenger on the maiden cruise of the most famous steamship of the day, submerged. Robert was in the water because his ship, the Titanic, had hit an iceberg and sunk.
The wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985 at a depth of 3.8km below the surface, and hundreds of items, including numerous watches, have been recovered. Interestingly, they all tell a slightly different time and therefore represent entirely different and personal stories of this renowned disaster. They do not represent the time that the ship sank but the time that the passenger submerged, and the two are by no means the same.
Some jumped overboard early on, others struggled into lifeboats as the huge liner was sinking, some were trapped inside, some chose to stay on board until her last dramatic moment when, with her bow deep underwater and her stern saluting the sky for one last time, this enormous steel ship of 46,328 tons split in half like a twig.
Those watches are also a reminder that the sinking of the Titanic was a painfully slow event. The iceberg was first spotted at 23.39 and the collision happened only a few minutes later; preparations to abandon ship were not made for another thirty minutes and they lasted for a further forty minutes; the lifeboats started to leave the ship an hour after she struck the iceberg and the last was not launched until 02.05; her final moments came fifteen minutes later, at 02.20, when her bow plunged into the sea and the remaining passengers on board had to jump for their lives. Only a handful of those who were forced to swim in the minus 2 °C water survived. In those moments everyone’s watches would have stopped, frozen in time by ice-cold water, the sound of ticking now drowned out by an extraordinary noise created by more than a thousand people in the water. One of the few who survived recalled a dismal moaning sound which I won’t ever forget; it came from those poor people who were floating around, calling for help. It was horrifying, mysterious, supernatural.
Stopped watches remain among the most valuable of Titanic memorabilia bought at auction, and exhibitions of objects from the wreck of the ship that have toured the world have all featured stopped clocks or watches as centrepieces . For many of the thousands of people who have visited those exhibitions, the story of the Titanic has become forever linked with a stopped watch.
Source ~ ‘History of Unexpected ‘ by Sam Wills and James Daybell
Page: 113 – 115
Imagine 📸
Credit line: © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Object: ZBA0004
Artist: Richard James Oliver; John Evan Edwards
Date: circa 1874
Medium: steel; gold
Size: 16 mm x 54 mm x 46 mm
