Titanic: The Musical

We have signed up for a cruise in the New Year, which includes an Atlantic crossing, so for preparation and to get us in the right mood for our holiday we elected to go and watch “Titanic the Musical,” only a few weeks before our departure, also from Southampton.

It really was a first-class show, and I promise you one thing, there won’t be a need to look out for spoiler alerts, I shall try and keep mum on what happens at the end.

We joined the King’s Lynn hub of Vision Norfolk for this special audio described production, put on at the Alive Corn Exchange in Tuesday Market. The group contained fourteen visually impaired members and their essential companions.

We mustered in the theatre’s foyer an hour before the start of the show for a touch-tour, to meet the cast, feel the scenery, fiddle with the props and, even, get inside the jacket of one of the actors. What a fabulous experience this was.

We were met by a member of a group known as VocalEyes. He described what was before us on the stage, the two-tier effect representing various decks on the doomed ship. Whoops, when I say doomed, and thinking of my earlier promise, I am not suggesting for one minute that the biggest liner in the world at the time will hit an iceberg and sink, that is all conjecture on your part, it might have been a viral infection, a terrorist attack or an onboard fire, I’m not telling.

I have been lucky enough to see some of the leading musicals to grace the West End, Broadway and, even, Sydney Opera House. Think of “Les Miserables,” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Whistle Down The Wind,” and “Billy Elliott,” among many others.

Speaking of “Billy Elliott,” as I was, the AD commentator of the performance, calling it as it happened, was a namesake, Willie Elliott. Not sure if he could dance or not, but that wasn’t important, he could certainly talk.

From start to finish, he went through it without hesitation, deviation, repetition and, most importantly of all, interruption, at no stage did he talk over the dialogue of the actors, just somehow managing to keep his input in the background, without being drowned out by the singing, music or onstage dialogue.

He made listening to his description of the action a wonderful joy. He was acutely aware that he was not the star of the show yet still managed to describe what was happening in front of our broken eyes. That is what he was for the evening, our replacement eyes. To us, he was probably the most important person in the room, well, he was to me at any rate.

Thanks to this introduction I will definitely be attending another one of these extra special events. Just a word on KLP’s next show, they have recently started rehearsing “The History Boys.” No, me neither, I am going to have to look that one up.

A big thank you must go to members of the cast, who all rocked up early, to meet us before getting on with the show. They all described what they were wearing, and it was quite the thing to feel the outfit as worn by Anthony Maley who played Isidor Straus, the co-owner of Macy’s department stores, I mean Isidor not Anthony.

He did confess that wearing so many layers, it was meant to be pretty cold in the middle of the Atlantic in April, the sea temperature was -2°C, made him rather warm under the lights of the Corn Exchange. I can’t vouch for how the get-ups looked, of course, but they felt genuine to the touch. I believe one concession was made to authenticity to reflect our more enlightened times, in that the fur around Isidor’s neck was fake, and damned right too.

Dressing up, we all like a bit of that from time to time, including the shy ones such as me, so we were handed a life preserver, something we would loosely call a life jacket these days. It felt like it had the buoyancy constituents of a brick. Talk about lightweight, I am not convinced I would be confident jumping into a paddling pool and surviving the experience with an early 20th century version, let alone the middle of an ocean.

One of the more important offices on the ship was the telegraph station, where we got the chance to feel our way around the Marconi equipment that would tap out the final call for help, SOS, Save Our Souls, (…---…), on RMS Titanic.

Harold Bride, one of the ship’s radio operators, first tried tapping out CQD, Come Quickly Danger, the predecessor of SOS, which replaced it in 1905, before trying the new-fangled code. There were two ships in the vicinity that night, although Cunard’s Carpathia was considered too far away to be effective, but the other one, SS Californian, a British cargo ship, was close enough to see the Titanic’s distress rockets, but the radio operator had retired for the night, so it never detected the call for help.

In this day and age, we cannot conceive that ocean going craft would allow their radio receivers to be unmanned. Different times with new technology where human procedure had not caught up with progress. I have to ask of the lookout on Californian that night, “What the bloody hell did you think the rockets were? An extravagant firework display in the middle of an ocean!” Duh” Hope you got the sack.

RMS, by the way. Royal Mail Ship, Titanic was, officially, nothing more than a glorified postman’s van, carrying important communications to and from the colonies, I mean the US, I forget 1776 sometimes.

The King’s Lynn Players had turned out in droves for this wonderful performance, 52 people on stage during the evening, including some younkers, see how I managed to get a seafaring term in there, one of whom, Max Hawkins, playing Jack Thayer, spent the night carrying a toy boat around with him, see accompanying picture of me with Max.

I noted that some of the characters described themselves as real-life people, so I asked if some of the others were fictional. I like clarity in an answer, so this one was yes and no. Some of the supporting roles, such as waiting staff or stokers, were amalgams of many of the true-life versions who set sail on that ill-fated voyage. Whoops! There I go again, pay no notice to me, don’t even think that the ship might hit an iceberg and sink.

Whilst all of the cast portrayed their characters with panache, I would like to save a special word for Tom Slater-Watson who took the part of Joseph Bruce Ismay, the Chairman of The White Star Line, widely known as “The Coward of The Titanic.”

From the moment he opened his mouth to speak his first words you just knew you were going to end up hating him. All through the show he was seen to be urging the ship’s captain, Edward Smith, to go faster, which must have been backed up by contemporary witnesses yet, when he stood before a Senate Select Committee, he had the audacity to deny he had ever encouraged Captain Smith to put his foot down.

After the sinking which, by the way, claimed the lives of its captain and designer, who opted to go down with the ship, Ismay lived for another 25 years. It is alleged that he never recovered from the sinking and was very depressed for the remainder of his life.

At least he had some life left to live, what about the over 1,500 souls who perished, trapped in their own tomb as she went down? Sorry, pal, that doesn’t cut it with me, you chose to sup with the devil so deserved everything you got, not sure that I can offer a sympathetic ear, are you. He died in 1937 at the ripe old age of 75.

Some of the statistics surrounding the disaster are mind blowing. First of all, I would like to point out her position when she might or might not have hit the iceberg.

She was approximately 41.8° North which, putting that in perspective, is roughly 566 miles further south than the most southerly point of the UK mainland at 50°. Funchal in Madeira, our first port of call, is positioned at 32.6° North, which means we have to pass through the potential range of icefields, I just hope that the lookout on Cunard’s Queen Victoria is on his or her game.

A troubling omen, for those of you who believe in this sort of thing, as White Star Line struggled to recover from the adverse publicity that surrounded the sinking of her flagship, it merged with Cunard to become Cunard White Star. I am glad to say that the White Star epithet was finally dropped in 1968. Not before time, if you ask me.

I think the point of collision gives food for thought, it is well over halfway from the North Pole to the Equator, can you imagine ice mountains coming down the North Sea or up the English Channel, both well within the reach of the breakaway polar ice.

How big was Titanic? Big, she was the largest ship afloat at the time. She was 259.8 metres (852 feet and 6 inches) long and was 29.2 metres (92 feet and 6 inches) wide. The modern-day Cunard line has four ships in its fleet, Queen Anne, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary II and Queen Victoria, all of which are longer than Titanic.

The biggest ocean-going passenger ship today is Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, with a beam of 48.5 metres and a length of one metre for every day of the year, 365 metres, there are villages smaller than this! If I walked bow to stern the distance would nearly take me to our village pub. Now wouldn’t that be grand, going to the pub on a rainy evening and not get wet!

How many sister ships did the Titanic have? She had two within the Olympic class, RMS Olympic and HMHS (His Majesty’s Hospital Ship) Britannic. The former seems to have been retired and, therefore, scrapped, after 24 years of service whilst Britannic was sunk by a mine during the First World War.

Now, how about this as a left of field idea, why not repurpose retired cruise ships as hospital ships, after all our hospitals are woefully short of bedspace, and I’m sure that hammocks will be cheaper, won’t they?

A thought for Violet Jessop if you will. Whilst there were a few who survived both the Titanic and Britannic sinkings, Violet was the only one to survive both and also survive a collision involving the Olympic. I think it will be worth checking the crew and passenger rosters before boarding Queen Victoria in January don’t you, and if the name Violet Jessop crops up, we shall turn tail and head back to Norfolk.

Titanic carried a total of 2,224 people, 1,316 passengers and 908 crew. There was room for 65 lifeboats in all, although the design team had only sought the provision of 48. In the end, she sailed with only 20, 14 standard lifeboats with 65 people, four collapsibles each with room for 47, and two ship’s cutters with a capacity of40, which added together meant 1,178 men, women and children could have got off safely on that icy night.

Why then, did only 706 make it into the boats? Not sure we will ever know. Why, also, were two boats left unused? One intriguing fact is 337 bodies were later recovered from the waters around the site.

I think that one of the first things I shall do after boarding Queen Victoria is go and check that the first-class walking deck is over-cluttered with those pesky lifeboats. I think it is worth asking why White Star got away with providing only 20 lifeboats?

Well, in those days, even though sailing the seas in ocean liners was quite the thing, governments were still to catch up with technological progress. You can’t believe they would get away with that sort of thing now, being asleep on post, about as much use as lookouts on some ships, can you? Can you imagine, for example, the big tech companies stealing a march on wine-swilling politicians?

Back in the day, the regulations demanded that the number of lifeboats required was related to the tonnage of the ship not the number of people on board. Sometimes, maths is not my strong point, but even I can work out that there weren’t enough lifeboats to save every tonne of the ship!

Before I go on to mention what we will be covering over the next few weeks, I would like to mention that due to the numbers involved in this edition I have spent far too much of my time putting it together.

I can tell you that without the amazing website given over to facts about the maiden voyage of RMS Titanic I would have been lost. On the other hand, I could have spent much more quality time with my wife. Until Saturday 15th November 2025 I had never been much interested in this subject but believe I am now hooked. It really was the devil’s own job to work out which facts and trivia should be included.

You don’t have to store this away at the back of your mind, I would urge you to pop along to the same website, details below, to while away valued time you probably haven’t got. I was captivated from the moment I stumbled across it. A massive thank you to its curator for putting this together and allowing us access to the work and pictures for posterity.

Now what shall we do in the next few weeks? I know, we returned to East Asia at the beginning of this year, and although I have featured a parkrun in Singapore so far, which I shall repeat, I haven’t yet covered the new things we did in Singapore, Langkawi, Bangkok and Chiang Mai. See you next time.

Find Out More
Vision Norfolk: www.visionnorfolk.org.uk
King’s Lynn Players: www.kingslynnplayers.com
VocalEyes: www.vocaleyes.co.uk
Alive Corn Exchange: www.kingslynncornexchange.co.uk
Titanic Facts: www.titanicfacts.net

White Cane Ratings
Corn Exchange: good – 🦯 🦯 🦯 (3)
VocalEyes: excellent - 🦯 🦯 🦯 🦯 🦯 (5)