Titanic Centenary Songs of Praise

Hello there from Belfast and a very special place,

the location where the world's most famous ship was built

and from where it set sail 100 years ago.

That ship, the Titanic, still has a hold on our imaginations

and in a month from now, Belfast will become the focus

of a worldwide commemoration as we remember the tragic loss of life

and reflect on the legacy of what was known as the unsinkable ship.

On this week's Songs Of Praise,

the woman whose father was Titanic's interior designer,

a driving force behind the city's Titanic Quarter

and one of the few people to visit the ship's graveyard.

And music from special guests, Brian Houston and the Celtic tenors.

Even before she set sail in April 1912

on that fateful maiden voyage across the Atlantic,

Titanic was making headlines.

She was the world's largest ship

and had standards of luxury, elegance and, ironically, safety,

which were unsurpassed at the time.

As we never forget the disaster

that resulted in more than 1500 people losing their lives,

there's a line in a well known hymn that comes to mind.

"Oh hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea."

Our congregation from St Thomas' Parish Church

lead us now in that seafarers' hymn.

Just a short distance from St Thomas' Church

is the home of Titanic's chief engineer and designer,

Thomas Andrews, now the home of the Irish Football Association.

In fact, the staircase here in the front hall

was said to be the inspiration for the grander one.

For all too short a time,

the wealthy passengers revelled in glorious opulence.

But the story of Titanic is more than just an account of engineering excellence,

it's a story of human endeavour, ambition and courage.

When Titanic struck that iceberg

at 11:40pm on Sunday 14th April 1912,

the order was given to start filling lifeboats.

Thomas Andrews ensured the survival of passengers,

but his own body was never recovered.

Mike McKimm is BBC Northern Ireland's Environment Correspondent.

In the course of his work, he was invited to film an expedition

to the bottom of the sea to view Titanic's final resting place.

For Mike, that became a pilgrimage.

It took about two days from the coast of Canada

to actually get to the Titanic site.

Then suddenly, one afternoon, the ship's engines stopped and we drifted.

I realised, "We're there, we're over the Titanic,"

and I wandered to the side of the ship and I looked down.

The sea was very calm, but I realised this was where it all took place

on that fateful night way back in April 1912,

where all these people died.

You struggle with that. I struggle with it very hard.

I can remember almost fighting back the tears.

Even now, the hair is standing up on my neck because it was such an emotional time.

We'd been built up for the expedition and suddenly,

here we were at the grave site, and that was very hard to cope with

and that stayed with us during the whole trip.

I saw people actually crying.

People really believed this was an important site,

a hallowed site, if you like.

This was a grave site where hundreds of people died

and died a horrible death all those years ago.

That kind of stuck with me all the way through the dive.

I realised that I had to remember why I was really there,

that I was marking the fact that this terrible tragedy had taken place.

As you go very slowly towards the bow of the ship,

it looms out of the darkness, and you've mixed emotions.

You're very excited to see the ship -

you've only ever seen it in pictures and films.

At the same time, all the way through filming the ship,

I kept on looking out and thinking,

"People died, people were in those cabins."

One of the most stunning images I have

is looking down into what used to be the grand staircase,

a big hole that runs down through various decks of the ship.

It once would have had a wooden staircase with a glass dome over it,

but all of that is gone and when you look down,

it was huge, it was deep, it was very eerie.

You saw right into the Titanic, deck after deck after deck,

and it was a stunning sight.

The reason I actually went to Titanic,

I was asked by Belfast City Council to put this memorial plaque

on the bridge of the ship with some other plaques.

It was from Harland and Wolff and the people of Belfast

in memory those who'd died on the Titanic

and there it is to this day, this plaque.

I was very touched and moved by that.

It was a great honour to be asked

and I kind of felt myself saying inside, "This is for you."

I don't know quite who I was talking to,

but I suspect it was the people the plaque referred to.

It was a wonderful time.

As well as diving to the ship,

I went on to visit the Titanic graveyard in Halifax in Nova Scotia.

It's where over 100 bodies that were found were buried.

Of course there's people from the north of Ireland there,

there's people from all round the world, including children.

That was particularly poignant

but somehow, going there helped me close that circle

and helped me pay my respects.

Being able to do that in many ways gave me a little bit of settlement

and comfort that finally, I'd completed a task that I'd set out to do

and then I didn't feel so bad

about having gone down to the ship and been in their space.

These are the Titanic's drawing offices

in Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyard.

Visionaries of another era worked here,

innovators, men of ideas and this is where the dream began.

From brain to paper, from drawings to reality.

The Titanic interior boasted a level of design and luxury

never before seen on an ocean liner.

Ambrose Willis was one of the men responsible.

He worked here and his daughter, Eleanor Thompson, takes up his story.

My father worked on the Titanic.

He was chief design draughtsman.

There were a lot of designers and a lot of draughtsmen

and they all worked in the drawing office that is there to this day.

Just the same way as you would have a designer in your home,

my father did that on the ships.

The work he did talk about was that beautiful staircase.

I mean, that was all the designers, it was everybody's work

and all these things were made.

There were workshops -

there was a paint shop and a carpentry shop

and there was an awful lot of furniture for the boats.

They were made in Harland's

and that would have been part of my father's job.

He loved his job and he was away a lot.

He started out with his team to go on the Titanic trip

and he went as far as Southampton.

And he was told when they got here that he was needed in Belfast

and he left the ship and went back.

And of course, all his friends, the people that he worked with,

all so many people that was lost on the Titanic.

It must have been awful going back

and all the seats, just people weren't there.

He was heartbroken. He lost all his friends.

And I think he did have a feeling of,

"I was saved, why?

"And all my friends were lost."

He probably avoided a lot of things

that reminded him of the sad times,

but he certainly didn't like to refer to people

or to times of being on the Titanic, never.

It was never talked about in my home at all.

But that's the way he treated it,

by putting it completely out of his mind.

But it must have been heartbreaking for him.

There were people that would say,

why did God allow a thing like that to happen?

But you never heard my father or mother

saying anything like that at all.

There is a Belfast singer-songwriter called Brian Houston

and as a young man, Brian served his time as a carpenter

here at the Harland and Wolff shipyard, so, we've brought him back

to perform, especially for Songs Of Praise.

# Precious Lord

# Take my hand

# Lead me on

# Help me stand

# I am tired

# I am weak

# And I am worn

# Through the storm

# Through the night

# Lead me on

# To the light

# Take my hand

# Precious Lord

# Lead me home

# When the dark disappears

# And the night

# Draws near

# And the day

# Is past and gone

# At the river I stand

# Guide my feet

# Hold my hand

# Take my hand

# Precious Lord

# Lead me home. #

100 years on, this is another part of the Titanic story.

This new building - a towering presence -

shaped like and in proportion to the real ship,

it will house the largest Titanic exhibition in the world.

But building of another kind continues.

The Reverend Chris Bennett is chaplain to the Titanic Quarter.

There's a little sense of pride around the city today as we start to

own the Titanic story again.

Over the last 100 years, they say Belfast never talked about Titanic

because the men who built her, when the news came back

about the iceberg and the sinking,

they walked the city streets, tears openly pouring down their faces.

They just never mentioned it again.

Even though the ship sank, there's a lot to be proud about,

a lot to celebrate in the fact that we built the largest man-made moving object in the world,

that 15,000 men put together something absolutely incredible -

this beautiful ship.

When I became chaplain, one of my first roles was

as a tour guide for Titanic walking tours.

As part of that, you get access to this fabulous old building -

you bring the tours around the drawing office.

When you walk in the door of this place,

you just breathe in the history - you can put yourself back 100 years,

feel a sense of the men walking into work,

designing these mighty ships.

So I have wholeheartedly become a Titanic nut.

From my point of view, the really interesting thing is to find out

that there was quite an active faith around the old shipyards as well.

There are fantastic stories of how the men would gather round the furnace

at lunch and would bring their peace - their sandwich - with them

toast their peace at the furnace and as they stood round,

there were different clubs.

There'd be the chess club, the football club, the debating club and one of them was the Bible club.

Some of the men would stand round, someone would read from Scripture and

they'd stand there, chatting away - what it meant to them, their faith,

as they ate their lunch. I love that sense of faith being active,

but a little bit disorganised, out in the open air, mingled with

everyday life, even 100 years ago, when the ships were being built.

I think there's a great hope that the Titanic Quarter will recapture

all that was best about that old picture of Belfast -

the idea of community, the idea of a big mix, a big melting pot

of people from all sorts of different backgrounds working together.

What you see in the quarter already today - people making movies,

students, people living, working here,

the Science Park, the tourist attractions -

it's such an incredible mix that I think it has the potential to be

the kind of community

that Belfast has never seen before. It's really exciting for me

that faith could be at the centre of building that community.

We're here when it's still a little bit of a building site.

We're opening a pop-up cafe in a shop unit

at the base of the apartments and we hope that will be

the first community hub of the Titanic Quarter and for

the church to be at the centre of that, that's just so exciting to me.

The ultimate vision of the dock project is to buy a beautiful old ship.

It won't just be open for services on a Sunday.

It'll be a chaplaincy centre, open every day, kettle always on,

sofa always comfy, somebody always waiting to have a chat

about any topic - God or any other topic that comes up.

That idea of being mixed and mingled with everyday life,

I think that would mean that conversations about faith would bubble to the surface

in a very natural way,

just as they did around the furnace in the old shipyards.

I love the sense that

we're building on that legacy and walking in those footsteps

as we start this new journey in 2012 as well.

Whenever I look at old images

or contemporary connections to Titanic,

I suppose I know I'm looking at a really important part

of history and you ask, "Would I have survived?"

"What if?"

I come to reflect and most of all, I come to remember.

# The moonlight dances

# Among the trees

# The campfire glows

# In the autumn breeze

# And I am lost

# In my thoughts of you

# Remember me

# Recuerda me

# A comrade strums on a sad guitar

# My mind is drifting

# To where you are

# I'm holding you

# As I used to do

# Remember me

# Recuerda me

# Mi amor

# So long ago

# So far away

# Each night I pray

# Volvera Los Dias Pasados

# I promise you

# That come what may

# Those days will stay

# Ever in my memory

ALL: # In all this world

# I could never find

# The love that I had

# To leave behind

# But duty calls

# So whatever befalls

# Remember me

# Recuerda me

# Mi amor

# God only knows

# What tomorrow brings

# You're in my heart

# So my spirit sings

# And I'll be strong

# Just as long as you

# Remember me

# Recuerda me

# Mi amor. #

May God, in His love,

enable us to record the achievements of the past,

in His compassion,

may He lead us from pride to humility.

In His deep care for us,

may He help us to triumph over all adversity...

..and the blessing of God Almighty,

the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit

rest upon you and upon your families

and your friends

and remain with you now and always.

ALL: Amen.

There are many reports of unselfish deeds recorded

on that terrible night of April 1912

and devotion to duty during the sinking.

Bandleader Wallace Hartley assembled his orchestra

close to the grand staircase.

What went through their minds can only be guessed, their final thoughts - we'll never know.

But we do know that all eight bandsman lost their lives.

The survivors recounted that the final tune the band played

was the hymn, Nearer, My God, To Thee.

We can never know for sure, but the fact that they did play

in those terrible circumstances,

when faced with certain death is enough.

Although we've been looking back at those dreadful events

of that spring night in 1912,

there is a sense of hope in this story.

There's a pride in the engineering prowess of our forefathers -

a new feeling of optimism here in Belfast and a sense of faith

finding its place again at the heart of Titanic's new story.

Until next time, on Songs Of Praise, bye-bye.

Next week, it's Mothering Sunday

and Aled meets some truly inspirational mothers,

including the foster mum who's cared for 93 children.

Britain's Got Talent finalist Jean Martyn

gives thanks for her mother and tinkles the ivories too

and there are wonderful hymns from across the country.

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