RMS Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912, as the newest, largest, and undeniably the most luxurious, ocean liner yet built. She was entering the highly competitive trans-Atlantic market where her USP was the superb quality of first-class passenger accommodation and service, matching the standards provided by the world’s most expensive hotels. Passengers on Cunard and German rivals would have a faster crossing, but not in comparable comfort. This applied even to lesser facilities provided for second and third-class ticket holders. If first-class on Titanic resembled a floating Ritz designed to gratify American millionaires, second-class was a floating Lyons Corner House to soothe the English genteel. (Richard Davenport-Hines,Titanic Lives, p193)

Occupying one of the palatial suites was the British chairman of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay. After White Star was acquired by the billionaire American financier J. P. Morgan in 1902, Ismay became president of the International Mercantile Marine conglomerate. His younger brother, James, took the opportunity to leave White Star to pursue a burgeoning interest in agriculture and land management, buying the Iwerne Minster estate in North Dorset in 1908. Ill health prevented him from accepting an invitation to join Titanic on her maiden voyage. This was also true of Lord Pirrie, the Chairman of Belfast shipbuilders Harland & Wolff, with whom Bruce Ismay had planned the building of a trio of super-ships, Olympic, Titanic and Gigantic (later wisely named Britannic). Pirrie was recovering from prostate surgery, quite a big deal in 1912. If he had travelled on the ship and died, he would have been the most notable British fatality; and if he had survived in a lifeboat, he would have been an international scapegoat. (Titanic Lives p.43) That was to be the fate of Bruce Ismay. Also making a late and fortuitous cancellation was Pierpont Morgan, who preferred to oversee the shipment of his Paris art collection to America. (Titanic Lives, p.154)

Edward Smith had captained 17 White Star ships without any serious incident. After the Adriatic’s maiden voyage in 1907 he was reported as saying: “I never saw a wreck, and I have never been wrecked, nor have I been in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster.” (Titanic Lives p.251) Thus, there may have been a degree of complacency in his decision not to slacken speed as Titanic approached an icefield much further south than normal. On a moonless night and a flat calm sea, with no tell-tale waves breaking at the waterline of any iceberg, it was asking a lot of lookouts to spot even a berg 100 feet high. In trying to steer round this mountain of ice, while throwing Titanic’s three propeller shafts into reverse, First Officer Murdoch only succeeded in sideswiping projections on the underwater 8/9ths of the iceberg. Many passengers slept through the collision or were not alarmed by it. In first-class Ella White thought “It was just as though we went over about a thousand marbles. There was nothing terrifying about it at all.” (Titanic Lives p.273) She and her maid survived, but her husband and his manservant did not.

By about midnight on 14/15 October Captain Smith and Naval Architect /principal designer Thomas Andrews, talented nephew of, and probable successor to Pirrie, had assessed the damage. While confident that two, and possibly four, of Titanic’s sixteen watertight compartments could flood and the ship remain afloat, Andrews reckoned that at least five compartments were breached. He knew that if the ship foundered by the bow, water would eventually cascade over the tops of so-called watertight bulkheads into the next compartments, because the bulkheads only extended part-way into the ship’s superstructure. If Titanic had rammed the iceberg head-on, as the German liner SS Kronprinz Wilhelm had done in 1907 and still limped to port, the damage would probably have been confined to a crumpled bow. A glancing blow at speed was sufficient to loosen the rivets holding hull plates together and prove mortal. Titanic was double-bottomed, to guard against running aground, but there was no inner skin of watertight longitudinal bulkheads. Her builders had allowed for a worst-case scenario where, say in thick fog, a collision might compromise the integrity of one transverse bulkhead and two adjacent compartments. In theory the ship should stay afloat long enough for rescue vessels to arrive and transfer passengers and crew in the limited number of lifeboats (20) required by current regulations. None of Titanic’s competitors had significantly more.

The British Enquiry Report calculated that there were 1178 spaces on 14 lifeboats plus two emergency boats and four collapsible rafts. These were not enough for over 1300 passengers, let alone nearly 900 crew. The loading of the lifeboats was little short of chaotic. Apart from the token lowering of two lifeboats for the benefit of a Board of Trade inspector at Southampton, There had been no proper boat drill nor a muster. It was explained that great difficulty frequently exists in getting firemen [stokers] to take part in a boat drill. They regard it as no part of their work. To be fair to the firemen, they remained stoically up to their waists in water shutting down the furnaces, as red-hot boilers and icy sea water make a lethally explosive combination. Many of these heroes did not escape. The first lifeboat was lowered at about 12.45a.m. with 3 crewmen, 23 passengers (all first-class, but they were accommodated nearest the boat deck) and 39 vacancies. Smith’s order was “Put the women & children in, and lower away”. At the starboard lifeboats, Murdoch interpreted this to mean women & children first. On the port side, Second Officer Lightoller took it to mean women & children only. He rigorously excluded all males, including teenage boys. It was difficult to persuade women to leave their husbands and partners. Early reluctance to abandon the apparent safety and warmth of the allegedly unsinkable ship was compounded by the deafening, cacophonous screeching of steam necessarily being vented from three of the funnels, and the prospect of the hazardous descent over sixty feet towards the inky blackness of the Atlantic. The American Report speculated that even fewer than 711 would have been saved had the boats been swinging in high winds and smashed against the side of the ship. There were more than enough life preservers for everyone but floating in icy water would not prevent death from thermal shock or hypothermia. Most of the boats pulled away from the vicinity of Titanic, for fear of being sucked down in a vortex, or swamped by desperate swimmers. Throughout all this horror the lights of another ship were visible, but they came no closer. They presumably belonged to the Californian, whose Captain Stanley Lord had stopped in the icefield to await daylight. The Marconi wireless operator on the Californian had retired to his bunk about 5 minutes before Titanic hit the iceberg at 23.40, and 35 minutes before the heroic operators on Titanic sent their first distress message. Crew on the Californian saw regular rockets being fired and reported them to Lord, but inexplicably he took no action. He was abstemious and so unlikely to have been intoxicated, as suggested later. At about 2a.m. Bruce Ismay and another male passenger boarded one of the starboard-side collapsible lifeboats. There were, he testified later, no women nor indeed any males in sight. At 2.20 a.m. Titanic finally sank. (To be continued)

At the time of writing, April 2026, interest in the Titanic story remains immense. The BBC recently broadcast a four-part dramatisation, based verbatim on survivors’ accounts. At a Devizes auction sale of artefacts and memorabilia held on 18 April, a canvas seat cover from one of the lifeboats, emblazoned with the White Star Line burgee, was anticipated to sell for £180,000, and made £390,000. On 19 April a Titanic Exhibition organised by White Star Heritage opened at the Birmingham NEC. On 18 June 2023 the OceanGate Titan submersible imploded while diving on the wreck of Titanic 2.5 miles down on the ocean floor, adding five more fatalities to the 1490 lost in 1912.

At 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 03 March at Gold Hill Museum, Professor Karen Hunt will give an illustrated talk entitled ‘Women’s Suffrage in Dorset: forgotten stories’. She writes: Dorset is not a county usually associated with the long campaign for votes for women that culminated in partial enfranchisement in 1918. However, that does not mean that the women (and men) of the county were indifferent to women’s lack of citizenship. This talk explores where in Dorset women chose to organise, what they did and the effects it had locally. Why did suffragism blossom in some places and not others; why were there far more suffragists than suffragettes; and how did the experience of this campaigning affect Dorset women once the vote was won?

Having retired from teaching at Keele University, Karen is now Professor Emerita of Modern British History, about which she still writes and lectures. A Trustee of Bridport Museum, she worked with Holly Miller to re-create the banner of the West Dorset Women’s Suffrage Society, which has been paraded at the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Rally. This talk is free to members of the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society, while seats should be available from 2.20p.m. to the public, on payment of £5 at the door.

Mary Lowndes (1857-1929) was the daughter of Richard Lowndes, rector of St Mary’s Church, Sturminster Newton, and his wife Annie Harriet Kaye. After studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, she began to draw cartoons (designs) for stained glass artist Henry Holiday. Her first, two-light window ‘Feed My Sheep’ was installed in 1893 at St Peter’s, Hinton St Mary in Dorset; eventually her Arts & Crafts-style designs were in demand throughout England and Wales, and the 1897 Lowndes and Drury partnership expanded into the purpose-built Glass House, Fulham, in 1906. This was the leading studio-workshop for Arts & Crafts stained glass, providing facilities for independent, like-minded practitioners, including female artists for whom Mary was an inspirational trail-blazer.

In 1907 Mary Lowndes was instrumental in the formation of The Artists’ Suffrage League, which produced dramatic posters, postcards, Christmas cards and banners, like the 1909 example at the head of this blog. In 1910 she published a guide to ‘Banners and Banner-Making’, in which she asserted that you do not want to read it, you want to worship it. Choose purple and gold for ambition, red for courage, green for long-cherished hopes … It is a declaration.

A photograph in our archives from a1913 Fancy Dress Dance organised by boarders at Miss Dunn’s Grosvenor House School for Girls, Shaftesbury, indicates that Women’s Suffrage was very much an issue of the moment for the pupils in this small but highly regarded Dorset private school.

Under the Antiquities Law devised by Iraq’s newly appointed Honorary Director of Antiquities, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), archaeological finds were to be divided equally between the finders and the kingdom of Iraq. Thus 25% of Woolley’s finds from Ur went to Philadelphia, 25% to the British Museum, and 50% remained in Iraq, where sadly many have been looted or damaged in recent conflicts. The final choice rested with the Director of Antiquities, though Ms Bell was enough of a realist to recognise that western museums must be able to retain some treasures by way of an incentive, and were often better equipped to restore artefacts and translate inscriptions. In some instances allocations were decided by the toss of a coin. But as a passionate Arabist, she was determined to preserve vital elements of Iraq’s cultural heritage for a new national museum, opened shortly before her premature death in 1926.

After the first session of haggling in 1923, Gertrude Bell wrote: It took us the whole day to do the division but it was extremely interesting and Mr Woolley was an angel. We had to claim the best things for ourselves but we did our best to make it up to him … The best object is a hideous Sumerian statue of a King of Lagash, about three feet high but headless.

When Agatha Christie returned to Ur in the spring of 1930, again via the Orient Express, the duty of escorting her on a tour of other archaeological sites in Iraq fell to the junior member of the team, Max Mallowan. Quietly spoken, he was 14 years younger and a lot shorter than Agatha, but very considerate. In September 1930, after much agonising by the bride-to-be, they were married in Edinburgh.

From 1932 the Mallowans formed a team of their own, in part self-financed, at other digs in the Near East. Agatha spent part of each day at her typewriter, drawing on recent experiences to produce best-sellers like Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Murder in Mesopotamia (1936). The latter is Dedicated to My Many Archaeological Friends in Iraq and Syria and begins: Louise Leidner, the wife of a prominent archaeologist, joins her husband at a dig in Iraq – and behaves as if she is in fear for her life! When those fears prove to be well-founded, the great Hercule Poirot is called in to investigate a seemingly impossible crime. The Leidner character was based, somewhat transparently, on the volatile Katharine Woolley. Fortunately, she did not recognise herself, or if she did, took no offence.

After 12 seasons, beginning in 1922, excavations at Ur were concluded. Katharine acted as Site Director in the final season. Years of work remained to be done on thousands of artefacts and cuneiform inscriptions, mostly on clay tablets. Woolley continued to write about Ur for 20 years or more, while undertaking other archaeo-logical projects assisted by his wife. In 1935 he was knighted for services to archaeology. During World War Two he advised Churchill as a recruiter of the art experts and museum personnel known as the Monuments Men (and women), whose task was to protect cultural property in war zones, and recover art treasures stolen by the Nazis. As Monuments, Fine Art and Archives Officer Lt. Col. Sir Leonard Woolley, he observed that: Prior to this war, no army had thought of protecting the monuments of the country in which and with which it was at war, and there were no precedents to follow…. All this was changed by a general order issued by Supreme Commander-in-Chief [General Eisenhower] just before he left Algiers, an order accompanied by a personal letter to all Commanders…the good name of the Army depended in great measure on the respect which it showed to the art heritage of the modern world.

After Katharine’s death from multiple sclerosis in 1945, Woolley was free to make his own decisions about where to live, and with whom. An ill-advised liaison with a clergyman’s wife led to involvement in a costly divorce case and did serious damage to his finances. His decision to rent Sedgehill Manor from 1948 to 1957 (by the end of which time he was seriously worried that his money would run out) provided the newly-founded Shaftesbury & District Historical Society with access to a famous lecturer and President. Sir Leonard Woolley and I knew each other for longer than he knew anyone outside his own family – off and on wrote Noel Teulon Porter in his Introduction to As I Seem to Remember, a collection of Woolley anecdotes, reminiscences and extracts from two BBC radio broadcasts. Their association apparently went back to a dig, Woolley’s first, at Roman Corbridge near Hadrian’s Wall in 1906. He was a man of slight stature and no commanding appearance – but presence, yes! … Sir Leonard took a keen and constant interest in the Society and Museum. He appears in a photograph with NTP and three others taken when the Museum first moved to premises on Gold Hill in 1954 – not the current ones. With the support of NTP, Shaftesbury Grammar School teacher Frank Hopton and at least one student, he began a small-scale dig at Sedgehill. One of the students, the late Dave Roberts, recalled this episode in 2021. Illustrious visitors to Sedgehill might have to walk about a mile from Semley station. Woolley himself seemed able, like the Prince of Wales in 1899, to have fast trains stop at Semley to suit his personal convenience. Biographer HVF Winstone describes how the sage of archaeology was known to arrive home from Semley in the cab of the local coal merchant’s lorry. The Mallowans might call when driving between their main residence near Wallingford and their summer retreat at Greenway in Devon, bought in 1938. As I Seem to Remember was published by the S&DHS in 1962, when the final (9th) volume of the Ur Excavations report also appeared. Both were posthumous, as Woolley had died in 1960.

In the final report Woolley stuck with his conclusion of nearly thirty years earlier that he had found evidence of probably the world’s oldest museum. On the intact floor of a chamber of the Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna were half a dozen diverse objects found lying on an unbroken brick pavement of the sixth century B.C., yet the newest of them was seven hundred years older than the pavement and the earliest perhaps two thousand: the evidence was altogether against their having got there by accident. (Woolley, “Ur of the Chaldees”, 1950 edition, p.135) One of the objects, a small clay cylinder inscribed with cuneiform of the time of the building of the palace / nunnery, described another object that was itself now nowhere to be found: a brick dated to around 2100 BCE (about 1500 years before the construction of the palace) (Moudhy Al-Rashid 2025) This cylindrical clay tablet, Woolley decided, must have been an exhibition label from a deliberately curated collection of local antiquities. (ibid.)

Moudhy, our lecturer on a new date to be confirmed, has taken each of the objects, plus the drum / label and the person of Ennigaldi-Nanna, as the themes of chapters in a superb new book Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History. (Hodder, 2025) One reviewer declares it an ingenious, passionate “history of histories” … we vividly witness how lives across the millennia are revealed and connected.

“Harrison”, the salmon-pink 1934 Rolls-Royce 20/25 Barker Sports Saloon belonging to former Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Stuttard, can often be seen at local village fetes and charity events. The unusual colour reflects that of the Financial Times, to which Sir John sent regular reports of his 10,000 mile marathon drive from Peking to Paris in 1997. After negotiating some of the world’s highest and roughest roads in Tibet, Nepal and Pakistan, Harrison was in need of bodywork repairs and a respray, but Sir John decided to keep the novel colour scheme. Harrison has attended multiple Rolls-Royce rallies at home and abroad, and Sir John has written about many of them. He brings his expert knowledge of the early years of Rolls-Royce to the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society meeting at Gold Hill Museum at 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 06 January. His illustrated talk is entitled Rolls-Royce and Russia, Czarist and Bolshevik. Seats should be available for non-members from 2.20 p.m. on payment of £5 at the door.

The partnership of the Northern motor engineer, Henry Royce, and the Old Etonian financier and car salesman, Sir Charles Rolls, was formed when they were introduced at the new Midland Hotel, Manchester in 1904. Rolls was so impressed by Royce’s prototype 10 hp car that he undertook to sell as many as Royce could build. Previously he had been selling Peugeots imported from France and Minervas from Belgium. In their early years Rolls-Royce provided the chassis, engine, gearbox and transmission, while customers could choose from a variety of independent coachbuilders such as Barker. By 1907 Rolls-Royce Ltd was winning awards for the quality and reliability of its cars. Rolls was also a pioneer aviator and his personal involvement in RR Ltd was ended at the age of 32 by a fatal crash at a precursor of the Bournemouth Air Show.

Royce was devastated by Rolls’s death. A workaholic who frequently forgot to eat, he suffered from serious intestinal problems from 1911. He moved from the works in Derby and divided his year between Sussex and Le Canadel in the south of France, accompanied by key members of his design team. During World War One he focused on the development of aero engines – the motley collection of aircraft which left for France in 1914 was seriously under-powered. By 1930 he had been knighted for his contribution to aviation, and had laid the foundations for production of the Merlin engine which first ran in October 1933. Royce died aged 70 in April of that year. The Merlin was subsequently fitted to a whole range of famous World War Two aircraft including the Spitfire, Hurricane, Mosquito and Lancaster.

Rolls-Royce and Russia, Czarist and Bolshevik (This synopsis & Russian images kindly provided by the speaker)

Czarist Russia was known for its architecture, fine art, literature and music. With this appreciation of quality and the wealth of the nobility and business, it was not long before Rolls-Royce found a niche market in the years before the First World War. After being introduced to the marque in 1913, the Czar became a loyal customer. In total, 42 Rolls-Royce motor cars were delivered before the 1917 Revolutions which ended the Romanov dynasty. But the Revolutions did not end Russia’s appreciation of Rolls-Royce. Trotsky and Lenin commandeered the Czarist cars and at least a further 46 Rolls-Royce motor cars were ordered by the Soviet Government until diplomatic relations soured and Stalin put a stop to further imports.

Sir John Stuttard will relate the story of the owners of Rolls-Royce motor cars in Russia, set among the treasures, the turmoil of the Revolutions, the Civil War and the excesses of the Bolshevik era. It is based on the book he wrote and published in 2021, working with a senior executive, Maxim Kartashev, of the State Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, and his co-author.