Original subtitles

For over a century,

we've been gripped by the story of the Titanic.

This drama, this soap opera, played out as the ship sank.

We all see ourselves there

and we wonder what would we have done?

In April 1912, the Titanic was the most spectacular vessel afloat...

The ship must have been absolutely dazzling

for some of the third-class passengers.

..but it's a story often told in black and white.

Now, we reveal the ship in its true colours.

Anyone who'd spent money on the first-class tickets

would have been very pleased coming in here.

Photographs and film footage of the Titanic

and her sister ships are colourised,

some for the very first time,

bringing to life the people who built

and sailed on the 20th century's most famous ship.

Artefacts and clothing from the Titanic

and her passengers give insights into their lives...

The reason this has been saved isn't a relic of tragedy,

it's a relic of pride.

..and relatives of those on board tell their dramatic stories.

One of the men in the group

turned to my dad and he said,

"There's nothing for it now, lad.

"It's every man for himself.

"You'd better jump for it."

These accounts take us inside the legend of

the world's most famous ship.

The Titanic is a never-ending story.

It will continue to thrill us

and enthral us for years to come.

In the summer of 1910, two giant vessels

dominated the skyline of the city of Belfast.

Commissioned by the prestigious White Star Line,

they were designed to be the largest

and most luxurious ships on the planet.

They had to build special construction sites for them

because nothing on that scale had been built before.

The two ships were the Olympic

and her sister ship, the Titanic,

and were being built at

the world-leading Harland & Wolff shipyard.

The vessels were to be almost identical,

inside and out.

These are big, they're 882-feet long,

and they're 92-foot wide, so they're going to be

the largest moving objects on the planet

and they're each going to be able to carry about 2,500 passengers.

And so you have the public and the press

watching their construction with fascination

and also quite a lot of pride.

The ships were the product of the Edwardian era,

symbolising modernity and optimism for the new century.

The Edwardian period really expresses

a time of calm between two storms.

We have the death of Queen Victoria,

the end of the Victorian age,

and then we have, in 1914,

the outbreak of the First World War,

which will change the fabric of Britain irrevocably.

Everything is just bigger and faster,

and so in 1909 you have

Winston Churchill declaring, really quite prophetically,

"We have arrived at a new time.

"A Titanic world has sprung around us."

In this brave new world,

international travel became accessible to millions.

Shipping companies built the largest vessels

the world had ever seen,

nicknamed "liners" as they sailed on fixed routes or "lines".

The ocean liner began to emerge as

a status symbol between some of the world's greatest nations,

as this symbol of national pride that is

an advertising board for the mother country

to show that, "No, we are the best.

"We are capable of achieving great things."

The steamships are getting faster,

they can accommodate more people.

So what used to be a much lengthier

and trickier journey is now sort of within

the reach of ordinary people.

In 1907,

the British company Cunard led the field

with its superliners, Lusitania and Mauretania.

Carrying over 2,000 passengers each,

these vast ships made the crossing from Southampton

to New York in just under five days.

There's very few restrictions on migration.

There's no real world of passports as we understand it now.

That comes in after the First World War.

So people are free to move, they're free to travel.

People are attracted to America

because they've heard stories of great wealth to be made.

There's the prospect of gold, of land,

of bettering themselves.

Cunard's direct competitor was the White Star Line.

They decided to retaliate

with three ships that were 50% larger,

but their size would make them, by default, slower.

White Star Line hits on an ingenious strategy,

which is to turn this potential weakness into a selling point.

They start to advertise ships that are larger than

the Mauritania and the Lusitania and a day slower.

And how they present this to the travelling public is,

we will get you there in one extra night,

but you won't be shaken across the Atlantic like a cocktail.

You'll arrive more comfortably than you would on

the Lusitania and Mauritania.

The genius behind the design of the Olympic

and the Titanic was Belfast man Thomas Andrews.

Thomas starts his apprenticeship in

the shipyard when he's just 16

and he works with the painters and the fitters

and his rise is pretty swift

and he ends up becoming manager of construction

at the pretty young age of 28.

He's really well-loved by all his workers

and he's really well-respected. Why?

Because he's not afraid to take on bullies

and he's also very willing to break up sectarian fights.

The Titanic was built against the backdrop of political unrest

in the province of Ulster.

Most of Belfast's protestant population were opposing calls for

a degree of independence for Ireland, known as Home Rule.

This was a ship that was proof of

the Ulster that they believed in,

that they identified with.

So the Titanic takes on a political significance

to these people,

but it also takes on an emotional significance.

As a shipyard worker,

you're usually assigned to one ship,

so you will be working on this leviathan for three years,

day in, day out.

You will become attached to it emotionally

and there's a huge, huge sense of pride in this ship as well.

And when you were creating something

that was being called one of the wonders of the world,

that pride was particularly understandable.

PR was a vital part of the White Star Line's strategy.

Even before their launch,

their new ships needed to be seen as exceptional.

So, in October 1910,

the Olympic was painted light grey.

It was actually an early ship-building photographer's trick.

At the time, it was very difficult

to get these ships to appear impressive

and stand out in that early kind of grey,

black and white photography,

and to get them to stand out against

the industrial backgrounds that were behind them.

So painting them light grey or

a white colour would make them appear large

and impressive against the background.

The only photographs we have of these giant vessels

are in black and white.

Colour film would not be readily available until the 1930s...

..but modern technology can transform these images.

With her hull complete, the Titanic was launched

eight months after the Olympic,

on the 31st May, 1911.

Many employees from Harland & Wolff were there.

Many onlookers, bystanders,

children, all the way to old men

who probably never imagined

they would see such a sight in their city.

There are no champagnes cracking on the bow.

Instead, just after midday,

a single firework is released up into a perfect turquoise sky.

FIREWORK EXPLODES

There is this moment where this behemoth they've been working on is

slipped into the River Lagan with all of the grease

and soap so that it would slide easily.

Titanic was nicknamed "the Olympic - perfected."

Now, you've got various modifications

that make her 2% heavier

and that gives her the title of the largest ship in the world.

The Olympic was the first of the three superliners

and was feted by the press.

The Titanic was in her shadow,

meaning there is only one piece of film footage

of the legendary ship.

It was taken nine months after her launch,

on the morning of Saturday 3rd February, 1912.

The footage reveals a ship unfinished,

dirty and not yet fully painted.

It does have the feel of something very unofficial,

very behind the scenes, very sort of "making of",

for lack of a better term

and the White Star Line was completely about appearances.

And so it does have that gritty sort of feel

of something maybe we weren't quite supposed to see.

After more than a century in the archives,

the minute-long film is damaged and grainy.

But after expert restoration, removing scratches,

sharpening the images, repairing broken frames,

and then adding colour, the Titanic comes to life.

FOGHORN HONKS

I think you only really get a sense of scale with that footage

when you look at the men on the bow of the Titanic

and you just see various indistinct blobs of black moving around

and that's the men in their overcoats.

The colour footage reveals that one vital part of

the ship has already been painted.

Towards the top of the ship at the front end,

there's the wheelhouse.

This is where the vessel would be steered from,

where a lot of the navigational equipment

was installed for the bridge, but that part is painted white,

as it would've been when she was finished.

The things around it are unpainted steel.

The reason for this is that the wheelhouse was different

to the rest of the ship. It was made out of timber

so that it wouldn't interfere with

the ship's magnetic compasses used for navigation.

So when it was installed, it was painted up

and we can see that the rest of the ship remains

to be unpainted around the wheelhouse.

Inside, the interior of the Titanic was being transformed.

The largest ship in the world was becoming a colourful,

high-tech superliner.

On 2nd April,

the Titanic passed her sea trials in Belfast Lough.

She was ready to sail for Southampton

and pick up passengers.

Jean Legg's father, Sidney Daniels,

was a steward with the White Star Line.

My dad had a bit of shore leave

and he was expecting he would be assigned to the Olympic

for the next trip.

But then he was told he had been selected

to go on Titanic. He couldn't believe it.

To be selected he thought was quite an honour.

He'd been on the Olympic,

the first of the trio of Olympic liners.

Now he's going to go on the Titanic.

Also, he had promotion.

No longer would he be a plate washer,

he now had what they called "people in his care".

So he was assigned to third-class cabins.

Before the liner came to Southampton,

he went to Belfast with other crew members to pick up

the liner to make her ready for the maiden voyage.

He was on board, thrilled to bits. He got promotion,

extra money,

and on a second liner's maiden voyage.

The White Star Line advertised their new vessel with

a promotional booklet,

but nothing compared to the real thing.

There was plenty for the new crew

to discover on its ten massive decks,

including four large dining rooms

and over 800 cabins.

You have the ship's second officer saying that it takes him two weeks

from when he joins the Titanic

to find his way around the ship.

What's left of Titanic's lavish interiors

now lie rotting at the bottom of the North Atlantic...

..but in a hotel in the small town of Alnwick

in the North of England,

it's possible to see and feel

what it must have been like to be on board.

This incredible space is the first-class lounge

from the ship Olympic,

the sister ship of Titanic.

It was brought here by Algernon Smart,

who was the hotelier in the 1930s.

When Olympic was decommissioned,

she was taken out of service and stripped of her parts

and those parts were auctioned.

Smart managed to purchase several of them,

and also this entire room.

I think it gives you a real sense

of what it would've felt like to be

a first-class passenger aboard both the Olympic

and the Titanic.

Anyone who'd spent money on the first-class tickets

would have been very pleased coming in here.

The lounge was a place where passengers could relax

and socialise during the voyage.

They could have conversation, they could play cards,

they could write to their loved ones.

There were writing desks in the bay window here.

You could also have afternoon tea.

There were bells around the room that you could ring

to order from one of the stewards.

It was a space in which you could spot celebrities,

you could see and be seen here,

it was a performative space.

Everything is a feast for the senses.

The Titanic was not only sumptuous,

it was technologically advanced.

In an era when most streets and homes were lit by gas,

the vast number of electric lights installed across

the Titanic would have been a marvel.

There were generators aboard the ship that powered everything

from the deck cranes to the potato peelers in the kitchen,

and there was actually 200 miles

of cabling that was cleverly hidden in the design.

Despite being state of the art,

the ship looked reassuringly old-fashioned.

The first-class lounge copied interiors from

the Palace of Versailles, but carved in English oak.

For the Edwardians, it was very trendy

to have rooms that were decorated in different styles -

from as far afield as the Tudor age,

and other parts of the ship were in the Louis XVI style,

and other parts were Georgian,

and so they were borrowing from all these different time periods

because passengers of the Titanic in the first class

would be familiar with those spaces.

They had inhabited them before.

But it was also a bit of fun

to be staying in these themed rooms that were all each different

and almost no two of them were the same.

Harland & Wolff were proud of

the craftsmanship employed on their ships,

as this publicity photograph reveals.

We see a sculptor who is finishing

a plaster-sculpted head of Neptune, God of the Ocean.

These notes, there are numbers,

there are serial numbers all intended

to really make sense of the puzzle

that was this complex, huge ship.

Because it's a staged image, I think what it's doing here,

it's promoting not only the finished product

that passengers can buy into by buying a ticket

to come aboard the Olympic,

but it also says something about the value that

the White Star Line places in artisanal craftsmanship

and the quality and making process itself.

Like the first-class lounge,

something else from the ship survives.

At the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London,

is a genuine piece of undamaged Titanic carpet,

taken by a Harland & Wolff employee

as a treasured souvenir before the ship sailed.

It gives us a glimpse into the colourful experience

of life aboard the ship.

This square of carpet might seem small,

but the story it tells is mighty.

It tells us so much about what

the Titanic would've looked and felt,

and even smelt like on board.

We can only see

such a small part of what we imagine to be

a much bigger pattern.

There's nothing necessarily decadent about this carpet.

What we do see is something well-made,

well-constructed and probably built to last as well.

The objects and the images

that tell the story of the Titanic

so often might feel far away from us in that they are now part of

the wreck or that they were brought onto

the ship by passengers.

They were never native to the ship.

This carpet is different.

This was part of the fixtures and the fittings.

This carpet draws us back to the roots of the Titanic,

to everything that went into them,

thousands of people who would've worked

to make this liner

one of the most fabulous constructions in the world.

And it's remarkable, really,

that a worker decided to save a piece of that,

to have a souvenir without

the foresight that it would become

the most famous ship that ever sailed.

So, the reason this has been saved isn't

a relic of tragedy, it's a relic of pride.

The Titanic cost £1.5 million to build,

about £170 million today.

White Star Line were so confident in their new ship's construction,

they could devote more time to its luxury than its safety.

We know from the managing director of Harland & Wolff,

Alexander Carlisle,

that in the early conversations with

the White Star Line about what the ships would look like,

they actually spent two hours, he says,

on the carpets for the first-class cabins

and only 15 minutes on the lifeboats.

On the morning of Tuesday the 2nd April, 1912,

the Titanic left Belfast for Southampton.

The massive liner dwarfed her escort tugs.

She was newly painted,

ready to impress her first passengers.

There's almost like a formula

for painting ocean liners at the time.

These are all coal-fired ships.

They use tonnes and tonnes of coal.

The issue with this is that coal is extremely dirty.

So the sides of the hull were painted mostly black.

This was the area that the ship would be

receiving coal through the chutes

that she would be refuelled with

and so it hid the dust.

The red underside got the colour actually from Venetian red.

It's a pigment that was used in the...what is called anti-foul.

It's the coating that would be applied on

the underside of the ship to prevent

the build-up of things like molluscs

and marine growth that would actually slow the ship down.

But it was also mixed in with things like arsenic

to prevent this kind of growth from building up.

There was a tradition by that point to paint

the superstructure of ocean liners white,

but it also provided reflection from the sun

and would keep some of these upper passenger spaces

a little bit more cool.

On the evening of the 2nd April,

the Titanic began its 570-mile journey to Southampton,

where it would pick up its precious cargo of passengers,

and her maiden voyage could begin.

On the 4th April,

the Titanic sailed into Southampton docks.

The port was intended to be the starting-off point

for her transatlantic voyages for many years to come.

In six days' time, Titanic would start taking on passengers,

but first, supplies and coal had to be loaded,

and the rest of the crew signed on.

Titanic, like all White Star ships, didn't have a dedicated crew.

Instead, men were recruited voyage by voyage.

For her maiden trip,

more than three quarters of the crew came from Southampton.

Henry Pugh's grandfather, Samuel,

was one of over 700 local seamen taken on.

He went on board

and saw the youngest brother, Alfred, up on deck.

And he was a bit nonplussed at this,

because two brothers on a ship is unlucky

and Alfred told him that the middle brother, Percy,

was down below as a leading fireman.

My grandfather didn't think too much of that.

Two brothers on a ship was unlucky,

three is really tempting fate.

I think he might've been right there.

So put his kit bag on his shoulder and walked off.

Samuel remained in Southampton,

while his brothers stayed onboard.

It would be almost two weeks before he would discover

what happened to them.

The Titanic's designer, Thomas Andrews,

sailed with the ship from Belfast.

What he's doing is supervising all those last-minute preparations,

you know, even flowers,

really fresh flowers to cover up the smell of new paint

and even organising the furniture for the Parisian cafe.

And Andrews is pretty confident

because he writes to his wife that the Titanic is complete

and we'll do Harland & Wolff credit tomorrow when we sail.

The first of Titanic's 2,240 passengers started

to arrive on the morning of the 10th April.

Over 900 would come on board at Southampton,

some more at Cherbourg in France,

and the final few at Queenstown in Ireland.

Often the glamorous and glitzy side

of the Titanic has taken precedence

and we've forgotten that it had this other purpose,

which was really just to move people across the Atlantic

who weren't planning on coming back,

who were seeing it as a one-way journey.

Coming on board the ship,

there must have been so many people.

We know there were Scandinavians, Irish,

Italians, Eastern Europeans, Lebanese,

Chinese.

People coming from all around the world

who wouldn't have otherwise ever met each other.

Among the first to arrive at the second-class gangway

were Dorothy Kendle's mother Edith, then 15,

and Edith's parents, Thomas and Elizabeth Brown,

who had travelled from South Africa.

They were going to go and emigrate to America,

to Seattle.

My grandfather was going to open a hotel there.

My grandmother had a sister there

and she wrote to them and she said,

"Why don't you come over to America?

"It's booming here."

So that's what he did.

He sold everything and he took all his money with him.

When they saw the size of the Titanic,

it was so long,

my mother said you couldn't see the end of it.

And she said all the lettering was all in gold.

And as they went up the gangway, his face went white

and my grandmother turned around and said, "Are you ill?"

He said, "No, but something's going to happen."

Before the Titanic sailed,

second-class passengers were allowed to get

a taste of first-class life.

As they walked along, my mother said

they came across the grand staircase.

She said that was magnificent. It was so beautiful.

The dining area of the first class,

that was already laid

with Irish tablecloths,

real silver cutlery.

Very much at home in first class was

a highly successful American fashion journalist named

Edith Rosenbaum.

Returning to the United States

after an assignment in Paris,

she lived and breathed fashion.

Edith took her clothes so seriously

that she booked two cabins on the Titanic,

one for her to sleep in,

and a completely separate one in which she would store that season's

pieces that she had picked up in Paris.

Some of Edith's collection still survives

and are held in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich,

including the shoes she wore as she escaped the Titanic in a lifeboat.

It is really remarkable to see these shoes,

not just because of the vibrancy and the beauty of the design

and the pattern and the colour, they're so opulent.

Who wouldn't want to wear

a pair of shoes like this today?

The fact that we can still see these shoes

over a hundred years on,

this is really special.

The colours have been preserved so beautifully,

and it gives us a sense

of just how colourful the Edwardian world was.

Quite often we look at history in black and white,

and these slippers show us that it was far from that.

The slippers really represent everything about upper class,

aristocratic life at the time,

particularly upper-class life on board the Titanic.

These slippers would've been worn by Edith

to the evening meal, the dinner,

the last dinner aboard the Titanic.

We know from the label,

the very faded label that we can see inside the shoes,

these would've been made in Paris.

They would've been made in

the most fashionable quarters of Paris,

probably made and designed for Edith herself,

probably one of a kind.

I can't see Edith sharing her designs with anybody else.

They're silk, and you can see the gentle sort of ruffle

around the rim here.

They've got these beautiful rosettes.

These are not hardworking shoes.

Edith didn't only pack clothes for the voyage,

the museum has something else she took in the lifeboat.

In 1911, a year before her Titanic voyage,

Edith had been involved in a fatal car accident.

This toy pig was to protect Edith from further harm.

Her mother, Sophia, had sent over a pig in

the aftermath of the car crash,

hearing that it was a traditional good luck symbol in France.

Edith had promised her mother, Sophia, that she would keep it

with her no matter what.

Few passengers on the Titanic

took as many possessions as Edith.

Second-class traveller Elizabeth Mellenger,

photographed here in the 1930s,

packed only essentials for a new life in America,

fleeing an unhappy marriage.

She wore this cape in a lifeboat as protection against

the cold of the North Atlantic.

She lived a fairly well-off, quite comfortable life.

That all changed when she had to leave her husband.

So now as a single woman with a family,

she was travelling over to Vermont to take up

the position of a housekeeper.

She would've had to be quite pragmatic

about what she brought with her.

Because she was entering into domestic work,

there was a certain level of morality

and uniformity and standards that you had to upheld.

And this coat, to me, really speaks to

the sort of role that she was going over to America to take up.

She clearly wore this coat quite a lot.

We can tell that from the replacement buttons

and the missing button here.

It has those little features that we ourselves have

of our own clothes when they're well-worn and well-loved.

And if you were to give this a first glance,

you'd probably think, "That's what you'd

"want to be wearing in that cold night air."

The majority of the passengers on the Titanic

were American or European like Elizabeth and Edith,

from countries like Britain, Ireland and Sweden,

but others came from China, the Middle East and the Caribbean.

On board in second class was a 25-year-old engineer from Haiti

named Joseph Laroche,

travelling with his pregnant French wife, Juliette,

and their two young girls.

Joseph was part of a growing trend.

Colonial elites, Indian independence leaders,

leaders in Algeria and Southeast Asia and Haiti,

they are converging on Paris and London.

They are often joined together in anti-colonial movements

in the European cities and meeting each other there

and discussing politics.

So I think it wouldn't be at all surprising to me

if Joseph Laroche belonged to those circles.

Often it's by coming to Europe and to places like the Titanic

that people who are black and Asian

at this time become really aware of race and racism.

Joseph had had enough of the discrimination he faced in Paris

and his uncle, the president of Haiti,

had made an attractive proposition.

He took his uncle's offer up to actually go

to Haiti and work as a mathematician.

He'd be well-paid there

and he'd probably have a home at the presidential palace.

So this was a good deal for him and his family.

For Joseph and Juliette,

their daughters, Louise and Simone, were a priority.

They opted for the Titanic

because of the White Star's child-friendly policy.

Joseph's mother sent them first-class tickets.

The actual line that they were booked on

did not permit children to dine with their parents.

So, the type of family they are, they wanted to be together

and also Louise was quite sickly,

so they didn't want to leave her in a nursery.

So that prompted them to switch tickets

to the RMS Titanic.

Just after midday on the 10th April,

the Titanic pulled away from her berth in Southampton.

Dad said there were people at the quayside.

There were photographers, there were reporters,

crowds of people. So she had a good send-off.

Amongst those watching was one

of White Star Line's bosses, Benjamin Steele.

He looks confident at her going out into the world.

And, of course, he's seen this scene a thousand times.

This is nothing new for him

and there's absolute confidence that Titanic will do well.

She's described as practically unsinkable.

There is, from Steele's point of view,

nothing to worry about.

Then things start to go wrong.

As the Titanic rounded the end of the jetty,

she passed a smaller liner, the New York.

Titanic's sheer size sucked in the smaller ship,

and the New York actually breaks free,

and they were so close that one newspaper said,

"You could have thrown a hat from one ship to another."

Now, disaster is only averted by

the really swift intervention of two tugs.

To be frank,

it's not a great start to her maiden voyage.

The close shave with the New York

put the Titanic almost an hour behind schedule.

Some of those on board

believed the incident was an ill omen.

Having called at Cherbourg,

by mid-morning on the 11th April,

the Titanic was well on her way to Queenstown

to pick up the remaining passengers.

There is no footage of the Titanic out at sea,

but in 1921,

you have the White Star Line making a promotional film

to encourage first-class passengers to sail on the Olympic.

There are only very few differences between the two ships,

so this footage allows us to see what

the Titanic would've looked like as she sailed.

Below deck, the 280 men of the ship's engine department

toiled to keep the Titanic sailing.

The toughest men were the stokers, tasked with getting

850 tonnes of coal a day into the 29 boilers.

Julie Cook's great-grandfather,

William Bessant, was a Titanic stoker.

He lived in a house with his wife, Emily,

and five children. They weren't well-off.

She wouldn't have worked in 1912.

Many women obviously didn't.

So she would've been preoccupied with caring for the children.

They had to survive with just William's earnings.

And, of course, if ships weren't sailing, they had none.

So when an opportunity like the Titanic came along,

he would've taken it with both hands.

The 160 stokers worked in gruelling conditions.

You would've been able to spot the stokers a mile away.

They were often described as walking skeletons

by the time they walked off the ship.

They were bedraggled. They'd lost weight.

They would be literally staggering along the street.

And they were known as the "Black Gang",

because they were covered in soot and coal.

As the stokers fed the furnaces,

above them, second-class passengers Thomas

and Elizabeth Brown

and their 15-year-old daughter, Edith, were up early and on deck.

They always took a swift walk before breakfast

and Captain Smith stopped and talked to them.

He was telling them about the weather

and everything that was going on.

Then he turned around to my mother and he said,

"How do you like my ship, young lady?"

And my mother said, "It's very nice, sir."

Also travelling in second-class were the Laroche family,

25-year-old Joseph,

his French wife, Juliette, and their two young daughters.

I think a mixed-race family would've been treated

with some form of curiosity...

..because it wasn't the norm to see a black man

and a white lady together in open society.

They found another couple who spoke French,

and I think they had children as well.

So they were able to kind of take advantage of that.

I think any parent who has two children under the age of five

is quite grateful that they have other children

to play with on the ship.

So that would've been quite nice.

Juliette Laroche wrote a letter to her father,

to be posted at Queenstown.

"I'm writing to you from the reading room

"and an orchestra is playing next to me.

"One violin, two cellos and one piano.

"If only you could see how big the ship is.

"One can hardly find his or her cabin

"in the succession of hallways.

"People are very nice on board.

"Yesterday, the girls were both running after

"a gentleman who had given them chocolates."

During their first full day at sea,

passengers explored the vast ship.

One first-class traveller came armed with a camera...

..Jesuit theological student Frank Browne,

photographed here in the 1940s.

In 1897,

Frank has been given a camera by his Uncle Robert,

and Frank takes it everywhere he goes.

And then, in 1912,

he gets another gift from dear old Uncle Robert,

and that is a first-class ticket for a two-day voyage

between Southampton and Queenstown

on the brand-new Titanic.

Now, Frank's photographs are going to become

the best record we've got of life on board.

He visited the gym

and took pictures of the state-of-the-art equipment

and the so-called Physical Educator, Thomas McCawley.

The Edwardians that we see on the Titanic

are a different generation from the Victorians

that we'd seen barely two decades before.

They are modern,

they are a bit more forward-thinking.

They have more of an outlook on life

to be lived leisurely

and that is something about moving away

from something slightly austere

into something modern and I don't want to say frivolous,

but I think it's that thing of just wanting to enjoy life.

Between one and three in the afternoon,

children had the run of the equipment.

The film footage from 1921 shows

the very child-friendly policy of the White Star Line,

which so appealed to Joseph and Juliette Laroche.

For the rest of the day,

children played where they could.

Frank Browne captured one of those moments.

Six-year-old New Yorker Douglas Spedden, playing in first class.

In the photo, Douglas is spinning a top on the deck.

His father is in the scene

and it is just this lovely moment

of a first-class family settling in to life on board.

It's just a slice of life.

In the background is a steamer chair,

and, contrary to the popular saying,

the Titanic did not have deck chairs to rearrange,

it had these wooden steamer chairs that you could hire

for the whole voyage for four shillings.

Frank Browne's brief time on the Titanic gives us

a valuable insight into life onboard.

He even took photos of his first-class cabin or stateroom.

He thought it "large and prettily furnished."

What this film from 1921 shows is

a typical first-class stateroom on the Olympic,

which looked just like the ones that are on the Titanic.

Now, they were designed to be a home-from-home.

They're really big. I mean,

you can entertain all your friends in them

and they're also equipped even with telephones,

which you could use to book a shave or a Turkish bath,

you name it.

First-class accommodation was magnificent on the Titanic,

but second and third-class cabins

were also much better than on other shipping lines.

For decades, really, the steerage class,

the immigrants in third class had been expected

to essentially be crammed in wherever they could

in horrendous conditions,

typically down towards where the ship was steered from,

right down the very back,

which is ostensibly where they got the name steerage.

By the time of Titanic's day, though,

standards had increased immensely.

Companies began to realise that these people too

deserve their own bumps in standards of quality and comfort.

The ship must've been absolutely dazzling for some of

the third-class passengers.

You've got flushing toilets, food.

The whole environment must have been

absolutely overwhelming, I think,

for people who'd come from some of the rural

and poorer backgrounds.

At 11.30 in the morning,

the Titanic dropped anchor off Queenstown.

High up on the bridge,

Captain Smith watched the boat carrying

the passengers come alongside.

Seven passengers disembarked,

including photographer Frank Browne...

..albeit reluctantly.

Frank apparently befriended

an American couple who offered to pay his fare to New York.

He's really tempted.

And so he sent a wireless message

to his Jesuit boss asking permission,

but, thankfully for Frank,

the reply he gets back ordered him right off the ship.

At the quayside,

a doctor examined third-class passengers

for signs of disease or disability.

The ship could be right there in the bay.

They might have saved up

or borrowed money at high interest rates.

They finally got this ticket,

but there's still the very serious risk

that they'll be turned away.

One of the last photographs of the Titanic

shows third-class passengers at the stern

looking back towards Ireland.

The ship was full

of people who needed to make a change,

wanted to make a change,

were at these precipice moments in their life.

For first-class passengers, not really the case,

but for third class, that's the story.

So, there will have been all of the emotions

that we associate with the emigration experience

in the Edwardian period.

There is hopefulness.

There is, I assume, excitement for the life ahead of them,

but there also was a great deal of sadness.

PIPE MUSIC PLAYS

One of those third-class passengers went back up on deck

and played on his pipes a song called Erin's Lament,

a farewell to Ireland as Ireland faded into

the horizon in front of him

and the Titanic started

the 3,000-mile journey towards New York.

Below deck, the chefs prepared a meal of oysters, duck,

and French ice cream for the first-class passengers.

The weather forecast for the next few days was excellent...

..but it was a geological event years earlier that would change the lives

of Titanic's passengers and crew forever.

In about 1909, a massive iceberg,

probably two miles across,

broke off a glacier in Greenland

and started to drift slowly south.

By April of 1912,

although it would've been a fraction of its original size,

it was still about 400-feet across and 100-feet high

and in the path of Titanic.

The largest, most luxurious and colourful ship in the world

would prove to be no match for this vast ice monster.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media