It was Walter Lord in A Night to Remember (1955) who described the sinking of the Titanic as ‘the last night of a small town’. John Welshman’s talk builds upon and challenges Lord’s famous account. On the centenary of the sinking, it is the individual histories of 12 of the inhabitants of the small town that this talk reconstructs.
John Welshman was educated at the Universities of York and Oxford, and is Senior Lecturer in the History Department at Lancaster University. He has published widely on the social history of modern Britain. His talk is based upon his book Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012).