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John Welshman is the author of Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain. He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town (forthcoming, 2012). Below he talks about Walter Lord, who wrote the acclaimed book A Night to Remember about the Titantic. You can read his previous OUPblog posts here.

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’. Lord had been born on 8 October 1917, in Baltimore, the only son of a prominent lawyer. As a boy, he had enjoyed a transatlantic cruise on the Olympic, during which he had fantasised about what it must have been like to have been aboard the Titanic. He attended private schools in Baltimore, and then read History at Princeton, graduating in 1939. Lord was at the Yale Law School at the outbreak of the Second World War. He then went to work for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, first as a code clerk in Washington, and later as an intelligence analyst in London. In 1945, he returned to Yale and completed his law degree. However he decided that he did not want to practise, and instead wrote business newsletters and books.

Shortly after going to work for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York, Lord published The Freemantle Diary. It was reasonably successful on its publication in 1954. But it was A Night to Remember for which Lord was best known. Published in November 1955, the book had sold 60,000 copies by January 1956, and it stayed on the best seller list for six months. Condensed versions appeared in the Ladies Home Journal and Reader’s Digest, and it was the first of Lord’s several ‘Book of the Month Club’ selections, in June 1956. A successful television adaptation directed by George Roy Hill and narrated by Claude Rains was broadcast on 28 March 1956; it attracted 28m viewers. The British-made film of the same name, directed by Roy Baker, and starring Kenneth More and David McCallum, came out in 1958. The book has never been out of print.

On its publication, the New York Times said that the book was ‘stunning … one of the most exciting books of this or any other year’, while the Atlantic Monthly declared ‘a magnificent job of re-creative chronicling, enthralling from the first word to the last’. The magazine USA Today said that the book was ‘the most riveting narrative of the disaster’, and Entertainment Weekly declared it ‘seamless and skilful … it’s clear why this is many a researcher’s Titanic bible’. In the New York Herald Tribune, reviewer Stanley Walker drew attention to Lord’s technique as being ‘a kind of literary pointillism, the arrangement of contrasting bits of fact and emotion in such a fashion that a vividly real impression of an event is conveyed to the reader’.

No books on the Titanic had been published between 1913 and 1955. Cultural historian Steven Biel has noted that the book was well marketed, but also explains its resonance through the highly visual and aural nature of the narrative. Lord blurred history into news and drama, collapsing ‘historical duration into intense moments of lived experience’. The book

John Welshman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University. His book, Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain, tells the moving real-life stories of British schoolchildren evacuated out of major cities during the Second World War. In the below post, he gives us a bird’s-eye view from the fringes of the first day of the new UK coalition government while in London for a radio interview. You can read his previous OUPblog posts here.

It’s the morning of Wednesday 12 May, and I’m in London to be interviewed by Laurie Taylor on the Radio 4 programme ‘Thinking Allowed’.  Selina Todd, from Manchester University, has been asked to contribute her assessment of my book, and so will also be on the show.  I know of her work, but haven’t met her previously.  The researchers have assured me that Selina likes the book, but she has a formidable reputation, and I worry what she might say.

I’m not due at Broadcasting House until 4pm, so head for WH Smith, and after a quick glance through Time Out, decide to go to the Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain.  The exhibition has been critically received, but Moore’s work is interesting, especially the early wood and stone carvings of the 1920s and 1930s, and the wartime underground shelter drawings.  He made a point of using native materials, such as elm and Hornton stone; elm has a very big and broad grain which makes it suitable for large sculptures.  But the later work is less interesting, reclining forms being repeated endlessly, familiar from every New Town park or university campus.

By 1pm, I have had enough, and walk up Millbank towards the London Eye.  Maybe the media will still be camped outside the Labour Party headquarters?  There is a van with a satellite dish on top, but not a single journalist.  Better luck as I round the corner into Parliament Square.  Simon Hughes is high up on a gantry being interviewed, and next minute Malcolm Rifkind is walking straight towards me.  The mood is infectious; perhaps if I hang around long enough someone will interview me?  But perhaps what I could offer is not quite what they’re looking for.  I double back and spot a large crowd, so large that I can’t see who’s being interviewed.  Soon the reason for the crowd is clear: it’s Ken Clarke.  They seem to have a special aura around them, these people familiar from television.

Further up Whitehall there is a large crowd outside Downing Street, spilling over the pavements on to the road itself – policemen, tourists, protesters, schoolchildren, bystanders.  Most people’s attention is focused on the main gates, which the police open from time to time to let cars through.  But most have no passengers, or the windows are blacked out.  The pedestrian entrance to the left seems more promising, and I am rewarded – a constant stream of politicians, photographers, politicians, advisors.  If you are quick enough, you can spot them as they go in.  BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson arrives, and jokes with a crowd of schoolchildren.  ‘Who am I?’  ‘You’re Nick’.  Then, ‘are you Nick Clegg’?

I spot the MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood, Eric Ollerenshaw – what can he be doing here?  He’s newly elected, so perhaps he’s simply enjoying