On this day 111 years ago, Olympic collided with the Hawke

It’s not so well known that Titanic’s nearly twin and slightly older sister also had a serious accident. It’s not so well known that actually she had such a sister – it was she who was feted as the biggest ship in the world at her launch. They were the same size and nearly indentical – it’s just that Titanic, who was built side by side in the Belfast shipyard, ended up being a little heavier.

The Royal Mail Steamer Olympic had barely left port from Southampton – her 5th commercial voyage – when a large naval cruiser, the HMS Hawke, rammed right into her. This occurred in the area known as the Solent where the river opens into the sea by the Isle of Wight. As I remarked in my book, it seems strange to me that two large ships could have such a violent and significant encounter, and during daylight, even on a hazy day. I am not convinced by the ‘Olympic made too much suction’ theory. Hawke’s behaviour was like that of one attacking an enemy ship. Olympic’s hull was sliced open and she was taken back to harbour (and ultimately her natal shipyard) for major repairs.

We might expect that a ship less than half the length of the liner and a sixth of its weight might come off badly; and indeed the Hawke’s bow was also smashed up, although there were no fatalies on either side. The inquiry was led by the military, who exonerated their own vessel, even though White Star Line suffered considerable damage. This meant not only loss of the passenger fares for that trip and several months, but great expense of mending this leading new liner. It also meant that the insurance wouldn’t pay as it was considered that the navy wasn’t to blame.

I am well aware of the theory from Robin Gardner and others (eg the 2017 documentary presented by Peter Willis “The Shocking Truth”) about what White Star Line did next to recoup this loss…the plan to use the nearly ready very similar ship instead in a staged event, which went wrong…and that the evidence culminates with the name on the wreck has ‘MP’ now showing (there are none of these letters in ‘Titanic’). As with my last Titanic post, I have to say that I’ve not been down there to be able to ascertain. This insurance scam theory is not, for me, beyond the realms of possibility.

I am also aware of other theories about what happened of wickedness of even greater magnitude. They are not, for me, beyond the realms of possibility either.

It occurs to me, in the vein of the first, that the Hawke was now considered an aged ship, launched in 1891, and who stopped service in the year of the first world war – perhaps surprisingly. Unlike the infamous event of the following spring, everyone on 20th Sept 1911 was rescued. A month into the war, the Hawke was torpedoed off the northern coast of Scotland.

I sense that there is more research to be done and I may well update or add to this post.

For now, I note two other facts: that two famous people were present on the Titanic and during this collision. One would survive for a further sinking on the other sister; one did not.

The captain for both voyages was Edward J. Smith.

A stewardess on both was Violet Jessop. She helped inspire my book, and like me, lived in Suffolk. I’m interested that her only published memoir, which should have been called Neptune’s Green Room, skips this event from her timeline from birth in Argentina to the 1930s. I note that she didn’t say much about the Titanic aftermath either. I know that the former was missing from her manuscript; I wonder about the editing regarding the latter.

You can read more about what Violet inspired and my other Titanic posts here

I’ll have more to say about the Olympic and her sister in the coming months on other anniversaries.

The Jury In My…

A novella/play on t…

By Elspeth Rushbrook

Book Preview

On this day in 1985, the wreck of the Titanic was found

This Sunday 4th at 8pm BST is the next BTS service on Rustic Rebels. Email betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk if you’d like to attend live before my lunchtime that day. There will be a recording for all available later

I query the significance of what finding the wreck is meant to prove. Yes, the ship was found in two pieces by Robert Ballard and his team, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it split at the surface. The water pressure as she fell, or – most likely – hit the bottom could have also caused the severance.

Like the wreck two miles under the ocean, most of us are in the dark. We’ve not spent two hours free falling in a tiny submersible, fiddling with remotely operated robotic vehicles to explore the remains. We see the footage of such trips and hear and read the finders’ commentaries on it, but we have to take their word – or not.

Recently, I heard a video claim that the space pictures which are so familiar to us are fabricated. I had not thought to question the beautiful colours and otherworldly shapes shown through famous giant telescopes that we see in planetariums and astronomy books. I did know that they were created in films, sometimes (as with The Fountain) by surprisingly simple effects – this one used a petri dish to show us Xibalba, a galaxy far, far away. It hadn’t occurred that scientists might employ the same. After the video, I did look at my old Superman annual whose endpapers have super artwork of a space scene and think…do such artists draw for space agencies too? Now with computerised image manipulation, isn’t it ever easier to make false images?

I once looked through a telescope at an observatory – an ambition of 40 years. I was somewhere very rural, and thus dark (so optimal for viewing), and expected that the exciting looking domes would reveal pictures something like the posters in the cafe. I was told that Jupiter (our galaxy’s largest planet) and fiery supergiant star Betelgeuse were especially visible. Jupiter looked like a dim marble with the faintest blob for the famous red spot. Betelgeuse was a vague orange thing – both the size of my fingernails. Hardly the Hubble! Was it just inferior telescopy, or was there a hint of proof of what this video was asserting?

This video – and yes, this is relevant to the Titanic wreck – pointed out how near things in the sky could appear so blurred and vague, and yet far things could be so detailed. They gave specific examples of images in the recent news, the former also using advanced technology. They raised the question: are we really able to see what we’re being shown, or is it invented? They already had their answer.

It’s not just Peggy Hall who thinks this. After all, scientists have been known to fabricate other things.

Turning the lens in the other direction – James Cameron likes to do both – from the heavens into the watery abyss, to a world many of us haven’t seen and won’t this lifetime, might we wonder the same? We have to trust those pictures and reports without being able to verify them.

Could there be a reason to falsify them?

Note that no photograph of the overall wreck of the Titanic has been made: we’re told that the sea is too dark, and the sections too far apart. What we see therefore is conjectural drawings based on readings and photography of small parts. The art style – often that of Ken Marschal, who has become a kind of official image maker – is not unlike that of those who create space scenes. It’s not dissimilar to my Superman annual. And there is a night sky as the great liner sank, its many windows blazing like the stars above (I thought that the lack of heavenly light was a factor in colliding with the iceberg). Underwater too, lovely images (if you can call a pulped rotting mass in mud lovely) have been recreated which were translated into models for the Cameron film. And we get used to seeing them and accept them, as I did when I first bought Titanic materials in 1998.

I’m not saying that the pictures of the wreck are lies, or that Ballard and his team deliberately falsified them.

I am saying that they do require our trust, and and that it’s worth asking the questions. Can we believe them and why might they not be what they proclaim they are? Why is the Titanic, like so much else, made the province of a few ‘official’ people?

And how do we feel about the money used on these wreck finding and visiting voyages? Who should be able to go?

And should anything be brought back? Is it OK to disturb a gravesite?

Is there anything useful which might be discovered about the truth of Titanic – or is that being suppressed?

Ballard’s book was the first I bought on the Titanic, and I honour him for that. I’ve now published my own – a novella/play. It will be deal of the day I hope in the next few days (digital download only) for 24 hours. You can also buy a print copy here

The Jury In My…

A novella/play on t…

By Elspeth Rushbrook

Book Preview

Ilia Delio, your God is too small

A Review of “The Emergent Christ”

I was excited about obtaining this book, sorry to have missed her UK tour last year, but swiftly found it hard work. Not that I didn’t understand it, but its matter is as dense as the early Big Bang, and that’s not in a good way.

It could easily be a paper, not a full length book. I obtained two things from Ilia’s 150 pages of main text:

“Evolution is progress towards union in love because God is ever deepening love.” (minus the irritating and unneeded hyphen between the penultimate words)

That is sufficient synopsis of the whole book. She need not write more!

The second was her summary of Hildegard of Bingen who saw sin as the exile of unrelatedness, the refusal to grow.

My major issue with Ilia is that she is another theologian trying to fit God round contemporary science, which is entirely the wrong way round. She asserts that scientists know that evolution is true, not a theory – something that my reading and understanding has always queried, on a scientific and philosophical level. (I wrote a dissertation on this subject).

She doesn’t engage with the theological issues about evolution either – a loving powerful God who uses waste and suffering, and is so slow! She suggests God could have achieved salvation in another way because God can do anything. But He can’t manage creation in any other way than Darwin’s, even though she’s the one to remind that Darwin only used evolution in the last line of his work. Nor does she justify the Big Bang, built on extrapolation and highly interpreted observations.

Instead, she uses dense stylised language with many invented and italicised words to whizz round such questions like spiral galaxies, oscillating so quickly that you’ve barely time to notice what she’s not said. Try paraphrasing her, and I realised how little real substance there is in my view. Dense, but not weighty.

It’s assumed but not truly argued or demonstrated that for God to be love – and she does have some beautiful and original phrases about that – God must evolve, and do so in a way analogous to the universe’s journey as understood by our relatively young scientific theory.

Most of her work is about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas, and quoting many Catholics and scientists along the way, I felt there was little really coming from Ilia as original thought.

That point contains another issue I have – for despite ‘catholic’ supposedly meaning universal, this is a very Catholic book. If you weren’t reared on Bonaventure or what the popes say, you can feel alienated. Ilia often asks what it is to be Catholic, not to be Christian, and not to have faith or spirituality more generally. Given her scientific stance, her hints that Christ is the telos of enlightenment rather than just the 2^nd person of the Trinity, and her writing style, this book doesn’t feel likely to have a wide audience.

Ilia wants to re-translate catholic (more italics coming up) to whole-making, which is a beautiful idea. The notion of God too growing and expanding is not new to me, and it is one I already embraced. I am glad that she accepts death and suffering as part of the process of our own parallel journeys, not something to eradicate via the science she so venerates.

But again, death as an act of creation – not a phrase she uses – is something I long knew: I found it in the film The Fountain, and watching it and thinking on its deep and similar themes was a more pleasing experience that these hours with Delio.

Heaven as a place on early was proclaimed by singer Belinda Carlisle in the 1980s, and the Kingdom being within is pretty obvious in the gospels. Is Ilia hinting she thinks that there is no next world?

I found myself instead wanting to explore Ms Bingen and even to have a go at Teilhard again, whose shockingly innovative insights were more pertinent when he wrote perhaps, but I felt this rehash has little to add to these times.

Ilia goes a step further than saying evolution and Christianity are compatible; she says – evolution is theology. Radical, intriguing, but appealing or true? I sense she’s touching on something there: that if we think of growth and deeper understanding as part of life and of God, then the way we understand the world scientifically does change and become more meaningful. But I refuse to make God fit science, saying, as we’re evolving we must know better now than all that came before. There’s both arrogance and naivety in this statement (if I’ve understood correctly). I know development to be spiral, twisting back and round and revisiting, not simply forward.

My understanding of working through Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis means attaining mastery on a personal and mass level. Ilia’s work seems stuck in the second stage, exonerating new science; but for me, obtaining wholeness and mastery (which I do not claim yet to have) is only achieved when we embrace and synthesise the wisdom of ancient beliefs and see that modern science is only a small part of actual knowing.

Strange Moon Rises

The title partly comes from a distortion of the debut album by The Smoke Fairies, Sussex born makers of ethereal folky music. I recalled the phrase when reading The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong’s third memoir. Recounting the period in the 1960s where she lodged with Oxford academics Jenifer and Hebert Hart, Karen often had reason to print the words ‘Moon Rises.’ Her charge, Jacob, greeted her with the phrase each morning. He read the newspapers over breakfast and quoted the day’s headlines and mooncycles to her.

This is the second time I have read The Spiral Staircase, and both times I have felt an affinity with the writer and presenter who left a nunnery after a breakdown to ‘begin the world’ as her second memoir was almost titled. Her next essay of 2004 is a mature overview over sixty years, from novice to scholar, teacher, broadcaster and is now well known for her books on mainly the monotheistic religions. I take courage from the time it took for Karen to find her place in the world, for opportunities and careers to abort before embracing her path on a solitary spiral stair, a secular sacred assent that has recently culminated in her worthy compassion charter.

Perhaps the episodes with the Hart family stand out most for me. It was here that Karen was prepared to deal with and accept her own epilepsy, though sadly looking after Jenifer’s son Jacob did not precipitate a diagnosis for her or keep her away from useless psychiatrists who refused to take her frightful visions and black outs seriously.

Although I have a reaction to the faith she lost, denigrated and kind of returned to, my strongest response is to that era where Karen struggled with her health and believed herself to be a few steps from a mental hospital’s inpatients. Since leaving her religious order, Karen seemed to have been surrounded by so called rationalists. I say ‘so called’ as a dogged belief in only what science approves of and a derisory ridicule of anything beyond that is not rational to me. It is the reverse. And many people have entered mental institutions for disagreeing.

Hasn’t proclaiming someone mad long been the easiest way to silence and undermine? Whether you’re Christine from Changeling, questioning the authorities, or the spurned lover of Mussolini, it’s just another set of cells with actually worse treatments and control than a prison. It sweeps away dissenters and challengers; people who might embarrass – not through their behaviour but often by exposing other’s shortcomings. Last week, I posted on the television series Afterlife. The fictional medium Alison Mundy spent much of her past in mental institutions because of her gift. In the first series, she bravely returns to help a young man who claims he has an alter ego that harms him and others. What’s frightening about re-entering that hospital is not the other inmates but the staff. Any dissent and you are hauled off and then given treatments. The staff are inhumane, talking in that patronising unreal way. All of this is designed to destroy souls that the system often doesn’t believe in.

In Afterlife, Alison says that the drugs actually feed the spirits and do not make anything go away. Karen’s experience of drugs were that they were also ineffectual.

I am interested in Karen’s relief at being diagnosed with epilepsy and her willingness to take drugs for it. As mentioned, she was mostly around people who believe in science and the mind. She had rejected religion, believing Christianity to be academically insupportable. She has not returned to experiential faith and her ecstasy now is from art and study – her definition of ecstasy not being one of transported rapture but an etymological leaving oneself behind. She sometimes felt that her ability to feel had been lost and her ability to think originally was submerged for some years, first under her nun training and then in academia. All this perhaps explains why a medical response was welcomed rather than the ideas that Alison of Afterlife or anything that Louise L Hay or a famous medium might tell you.

For them, spirituality and health are connected. Karen never speaks of a higher self, a spirit world or a personal God, but for other writers these are essential philosophies. Understanding symptoms of epilepsy for them would not be about drugs to control electric jumps in the brain. What is really going on is something that can’t be measured, just as our full humanity cannot be.

I am loathe to even mention the idea of fits and demons being linked. Liberal Christians read Jesus’ exorcisms as in fact dealing with epilepsy. Looking at it that way round, it’s a relief: it takes away the terror of potential possession, relegating the fits and any visions to things that can be cured by a dosage, and which has much less fear and stigma attached (there should be none). Perhaps I will no more than hint of the reverse interpretation except to say that such diagnoses can be harmful emotionally as much as the often poorly handled attempts to release sufferers.

But could spirituality and mental and physical health be more entwined than many practitioners are willing to believe? As The Verve sang, the drugs don’t work.They are a wicked form of control, as much as padded cells and restraints. As Alison in Afterlife points out, some previous mental health candidates would have been seen as witches and burned. We are really not very good at fair treatment and empathy with those that are different, including those who manifest behaviours or powers that perhaps frighten us.

I was relieved to think that Mother Julian’s devil visitations might be explained in the same way of Karen’s ghastly visions. Karen’s doctor said she has temporal lobe epilepsy which affects the sight and smell areas of the brain, which explains her eyeless old man and the malodorous sulphur. Something similar was experienced by Julian, though those in the room with her did not. When I first read of Julian’s fiends, it frightened me that a devout woman should be allowed such visions – why didn’t God step in and rescue one of his own from this attack? Two years ago, I decided her visions were because she had explicitly asked for it, and influenced by cosmic ordering, believed God had given her simply what she had chosen. Now I am less comfortable with that.

I have said this before but it is a point worth repeating: we believe what is palatable. There are some things I don’t want to be true – whether it be the existence of a scary cryptological specimen or demonic interventions. And I will work to discredit them. However, there are some things I am happy to embrace and draw comfort from. Evangelical Christians say that those who deny God do so because if he and the miraculous side of the Bible are true, it calls them to face up to things they don’t want to that requires action. Perhaps that principle is true of rationalism in general – that if something is not denouncable, choices are called for and uncomfortable transitions must be made. I often wonder why the existence of a spiritual realm, especially God, is so unfavourable to many people and why the miraculous elements of the Bible are so hard to absorb. I have a very liberal, non mainstream faith but my attitude to all of the science worshippers’ objections has always been: why not? God, flood, miracles… resurrection… what an unimaginative, narrow world where such wondrous aberrations cannot take place.

You will soon gather that I too have a spiralling mind, a theme and title which have significance in my creative writing. So we circle round the staircase to again find our strange moon, and the family that gave this piece its title. I really warm to Jacob Hart and would like to know more of him. I think he sounds witty and interesting. I have been intrigued and impressed by what I have found out about his parents and how their unconventional lodgings were an oddly nurturing time for Karen. I love how Jenifer rescued Karen from the mental hospital and had stolen second hand sweets to comfort her with. I am shocked when Jacob’s appearance and behaviours are called hereditary – by looking at his father. I don’t claim to know what epilepsy and other illnesses are – even if ‘illness’ is the right word. But I question hereditary theories and, and especially the use of drugs and other treatments from inside hospitals. Karen lists some shocking ways of dealing with epilepsy from the past, but we have not moved on very far, especially not in the general world of mental health; and drugs are tied into pharmaceutical company profits – there is more to their prescription (both senses) than supposed greater success of control. Drugs do not even pretend to cure epilepsy. I am sure that other kinds of healers have a far more healthy and holistic way of assisting. One healer wrote of a client who wouldn’t release his epilepsy because it made him feel special. I can understand why that man hung onto it; like why some people on wheelchairs at a Charismatic healing rally say – it’s OK: I can live like this. I don’t need curing. I am whole as I am. And like Alison Mundy – it is part of me and I’d be lost without it.

This is a staircase I like to tread on and may well return to. For now, I shall watch out for moons and think of not only excellent gigs but of a wonderfully eccentric, radical household and celebrate those whose ideas give them ideas to change the world; and of misunderstood people with gifts and traits that should be celebrated and explored, not quashed and scolded, and heaven help us all: treated.