The Tragic Sinking Of The ‘Titanic Of The 1950s’
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article from The Telegraph.
This is the sub-heading.
The wrecking of Italian liner SS Andrea Doria, 70 years ago on Sunday, bore eerie similarities to the most infamous maritime disaster ever
These two initial paragraphs add more details.
The sinking of the Titanic has entered folklore to such an extent that practically every other maritime disaster is measured against it. Equally, the dreadful loss of life on that bleak April night in 1912 – and the sequence of unfortunate events that precipitated it – was so awful that, on the face of it, nothing could ever really bear legitimate comparison.
And yet, Sunday marks the 70th anniversary of what has been referred to as “the Titanic of the 1950s” – a description that is far from inaccurate. True, the events of July 26 1956 did not come at a cost of 1,496 people. Nor have they been the subject of a major Hollywood movie. But in other ways – a luxury liner heading for New York; a sudden but avoidable collision; damage that, from the first moment, could only have one result; a manic race to save those in peril; a wreck site in the North Atlantic – there were significant similarities.
I remember the disaster well and I suspect, that was because, I was only a few days short of my ninth birthday and it was extensively covered on our new black-and-white television.
But because a transatlantic liner was involved, it may have been more relevant to my family, as my mother’s Aunt Beattie was a regular user of the great ocean liners of the era. She also flew the Atlantic in a BOAC Stratocruiser.
The article on The Telegraph is well worth a read.
The Anonymous Widower 