I heartily recommend a new book called “And the Band Played On” by Christopher Ward, a friend of mine. It’s a best-seller already in the UK. It’s about his grandfather, who was the violinist in the band that played as the Titanic sank. But it’s not about the sinking, but about what happened afterwards, and in particular the feud that broke about between the violinist’s father and his pregnant fiancee’s family. It’s an astonishing tale of fraud, hoaxes, lawsuits, imprisonment and cruelty that would make a fiction writer blush at having exaggerated.
But, for the purposes of this website, what struck this rational optimist most was the examples of how non-good were the good old days. A world in which a ship’s musician has to buy his own uniform on credit, to be deducted from his wages, is not very nice. But a world in which those wages were stopped by his employer at 2.20am on 14 April 1912 is shockingly awful. And a world in which his father then receives a letter pointing out that the wages having been stopped, there is still a sum owing for the uniform buttons, which the father should settle by return — takes the biscuit. This was also a world in which a seventeen year old girl who devised a cruel hoax to get revenge on her father and stepmother was imprisoned in a brutal jail awaiting trial for deception. Yet I suspect Scotland in 1912 was a lot kinder than it was in 1812 or 1712.
Next time the Archbishop of Canterbury or some pontificating busybody tells me the world is getting worse because people are so much more selfish these days, I will suggest they read this book.