I don’t remember where I came across this week’s piece, but I believe it to be from a newspaper of the time, possibly the ‘Sunday Express’, describing the last hours of the ‘Titanic’ in 1912. It seems to me a very fine piece of journalism, restrained and moving, with just the one touch of purple prose at the end. Of course, one must always beware of myths springing up around such events, and it is the British way to extract what heroic capital they can from total disasters – look at Dunkirk – but there does seem to be plenty of corroboration from eyewitness sources for its general veracity, and if one is tempted to smile at the self-conscious heroism of some of the participants, then remember this: they put their lives where their mouths were.

‘Benjamin Guggenheim appeared on deck with his male secretary, both resplendent in evening clothes. He told a steward: ‘I think there is grave doubt that the men will get off. I am willing to play the man’s game if there are not enough boats for more than the woman and children. We’ve dressed in our best and we are prepared to go down like gentlemen. If it should happen that my secretary and I both go down and you are saved, tell my wife I played the game out straight and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward’.

Mrs Isidor Strauss also refused to go. ‘I’ve always stayed with my husband, so why should I leave him now? Where you go, I go’, she told him. As she rejected all pleas to get into a lifeboat, a friend said to Mr Strauss: ‘I’m sure nobody would object to an old gentleman like you getting in…’ He answered: ‘I will not go before other men’.

And that, wrote Walter Lord, was that. ‘Mrs Strauss tightened her grasp on his arm, patted it, smiled up at him, and then they sat together on a pair of deck chairs’.

… While the drama was unfolding, the ship’s band assembled on one of the decks and helped to keep up morale by playing ragtime tunes. ‘Many brave things were done that night’, wrote Beesley, ‘but none more brave than by those few men playing minute after minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower, and the sea rose higher and higher to where they stood, the music serving as their own immortal requiem’.