R.M.S. Olympic arrives in New York [Bain News Service, 1911]; Olympic at speed, 1934
In my Downton Abbey season 2 anticipation, I’ve been browsing Edwardian era artifacts. Screenwriter Julian Fellowes’s use of the Titanic sinking as season 1’s inciting incident might be commended in screenwriting workshops*—up the ante, tidily identify time and place—but also seemed to me to flirt with Forrest Gumpish-ness: characters need less interest and individuation if they only animate a background we already have associations for.
Titanic has been so mythologized that it’s a shock seeing its nearly identical elder sister Olympic (“Old Reliable”) not fixed in 1911-12 amber but in 1935 after years of successful service—and also with a record of ramming things, including a U-Boat, the only recorded such sinking in World War One.
I find these photos entirely eerie: the first, the kind of New York arrival Titanic never got, the second, twenty three years later, taken from the Nantucket lightship Olympic would ram and sink less than a year later.
*the “Passover question” (why this night of all nights?), while a convenient memonic for writers to check whether they’re recounting something worth people’s time, can also lead to over-stuffing: Dad doesn’t just die in a plane crash, he dies in a 9/11 plane crash...
