Arts & Culture
Kelly Yu examining a shoe and brush retrieved from the sunken wreck.
Photo by Chung Chow
A titanic exhibit at Lipont Place
Lost to all but memory, the Titanic sank
April 15, 1912.
The crew on largest ship in the world at the
time, on its maiden voyage, still didn’t have the hang of the new technology of
ship-to-shore radio. It turned the radio over to transmissions from wealthy
passengers, as a perk. Had they been listening instead of sending, the ship’s
captain may have learned of the ice field they were fast approaching.
On that moonless night, suddenly an iceberg
loomed ahead. The ship tried to turn to get around it but an underwater ridge
of ice ripped and buckled the underwater side of the ship, breaching numerous
cavities, leading to Titanic’s eventual sinking with the loss of 1,503 lives
including passengers and crew. Only 705 people survived.
The western world’s imagination was further
intrigued by the fact that, for this maiden voyage, many of the first class
passengers were the elite of Europe, Britain and the newly-emerging economic
power, the US. The numbers travelling on the ship were further swollen by the
ongoing coal strike that meant many other ships’ sailings had been delayed or
cancelled.
This all adds up to a mystery and, thanks to
the James Cameron movie, a romance.
Since the discovery of Titanic’s final
resting place, deep under the North Atlantic, numerous artifacts have been
retrieved. Richmond now plays host to these artifacts that offer windows into
the lives of all the passengers of every class of this doomed ship. The items
include a working class man’s shirt, a posh fellow’s tie, a recreation of a
first class cabin that cost the equivalent today of tens of thousands of
dollars for a one-way trip, perfume bottles still full, and a variety of dishes
used in each of the different class dining rooms.
Lipont Place, 4211 No. 3 Rd. hosts this major
exhibition through Jan. 11, 2019. For more information on this show spread over
2,000 square metres (21,000 sq. ft.), Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, call 604-285-9975.
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