Whatever the reviewers might think, the book sold very well and made Lord’s reputation as a storyteller. It was filmed in 1958 with the highly popular British star Kenneth More in the role of Second Officer Charles Lightoller. The book helped to establish the idea of reporting a dramatic event through the accounts of ordinary people involved, which was used, for example, by Cornelius Ryan in The Longest Day. And it put the ageing story of the Titanic back in the forefront of the public consciousness.

However much one would like to say about the millions of people who built ships or sailed in them as passengers and crew, it is impossible for a maritime historian to escape from iconic characters such as Lord Nelson, and dramatic events such as the sinking of the Titanic. But it is quite likely that the Titanic would be almost forgotten now, or known only to specialists, if Walter Lord had not researched and published his most famous book at just the right moment.

By the 1950s the sinking had been overshadowed by two world wars, and it was no longer the greatest maritime disaster of all time—for Britain that distinction went to the Lancastria, sunk off Le Havre in 1940 with 2,500 people on board. In world terms the greatest loss of life was in the German Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in 1945, when an estimated 7,000 people, including many refugees, were killed. But, of course, these were wartime disasters, unlike the Titanic, which sank in the calm waters of a peaceful world.

Lord was motivated by his love of the great liners, which he had travelled in as a boy with his parents, including a trip in the Titanic’s surviving sister-ship, Olympic, in 1927.