Last dinner on the titanic + second class dinner menu, On the night of April 14th, 1912 a group of well-dressed men and ladies sat down to their final meal on a cruise ship. It was a decadent meal - but then again, so was the meal they had eaten the previous night. And rightly so. Each diner had paid over what these days would amount to $125,000 to be there. Of course, they had no idea their trip would be cut short.
Today marks the 99th anniversary of the RMS Titanic's descent into the depths. At 11:40pm on the 14th, the Titanic struck an iceberg - but of course, we all know that story (especially if you happened to have been a pre-teen when the movie Titanic was released in the mid-nineties...ah, Leo). But the untold story is that of the extravagance, the enjoyment and the drool-worthy contents of the meal eaten on the night of the collision.
Menu shows the last dinner served to second-class passengers on the maiden voyage of the ill-fated RMS Titanic on 14 April 1912. By 02.20 the following morning the ship had struck an iceberg and sunk. Less than half of the second-class passengers who ate this meal survived the sinking. At the time of her sinking, the Titanic was the largest and most luxurious passenger liner in the world and the loss of life incurred made it the worst peacetime maritime disaster in history.
The menu is printed in postcard format, allowing passengers to post the menu to friends in order to boast about the luxury and variety of meals served on board the Titanic. The owners of the Titanic, the White Star Line, wanted the ship to become the only way to cross the Atlantic in style and a wide-ranging advertising campaign of postcards, brochures and pamphlets was launched to promote the ship. Following the disaster, replica menu postcards were produced and sold to raise money for the Titanic Disaster Relief Fund.
It is surprising that mementoes from the Titanic exist. Earlier in the voyage, menus and tickets were tucked into passenger’s pockets and forgotten, only to be found once the survivors had reached safety in New York. One passenger recalled finding two sugar spoons and a menu in his pocket when he removed his soaking clothing on the Carpathia. The menu pictured was saved by Mrs J. Bertha Marshall (née Watt), who later gave it to Walter Lord following correspondence between the two for his book A Night to Remember.
The menu forms part of the Walter Lord bequest at the NMM. Walter Lord published his most famous work, A Night Remember in 1955. A journalistic narrative history of the Titanic, the book became a British film in 1958 and Lord was later asked to be a consultant on James Cameron’s film Titanic (1997). Lord is credited with having revived the memory of the ship, about which not a single book was published between 1913 and 1955. His book has been a bestseller ever since and he wrote a further work entitled The Night Lives On to document the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in 1985.
Through the years, Walter Lord talked to and corresponded with scores of survivors, rescuers and others intimately connected with the disaster. He tracked down nearly sixty Titanic survivors to record their stories for A Night to Remember, and collected much commemorative memorabilia, donated over many years by his friends and admirers.