The Titanic and the City of Widows it left Behind – The Forgotten Victims of the Fatal Voyage by Julie Cook.

As featured in the Daily Mail: ‘Forgotten victims of the Titanic: Widows of crewmen lost in the 1912 disaster were left battling grief and penury… now one writer has traced her own great grandmother’s moving story of heartbreak and survival’

Also featured in the Daily Express: ‘The forgotten victims of the Titanic‘.

When Titanic foundered in April 1912, the world’s focus was on the tragedy of the passengers who lost their lives. This book instead focuses on the widows and children of the crew who perished. Author Julie Cook’s great-grandfather was a stoker who died on Titanic. Her great-grandmother had to raise five children with no breadwinner. Using original archive sources and with accounts from descendants of crew, the book asks how these women survived through abject poverty and grief – and why their voices have been silent for so long.

A guest post written by Dilip Sarkar MBE, author of Battle of Britain 1940: The Finest Hour’s Human Cost.

As I write, the world is in turmoil owing to a new disease, which nobody, at least in the western world, had heard of until only a few weeks ago. Today, we have all, surely, heard of the dreadful Coronavirus and are affected by it, at best, through the essential ‘social distancing’ measures and current ‘lockdown’, and at worst, tragically, losing a loved one to this lethal virus. Desperate times indeed, an altogether new ‘Darkest Hour’, which, apart from a selfish and irresponsible minority, the nation is facing with courage and collective resolve. At this terrible time, good news seems in short supply – and yet, amidst all this fear and uncertainty, earlier this week I watched the most heart-warming and uplifting BBC TV interview of one Hylton Murray-Philipson, a sixty-one-year old who, after twelve days in Leicester Royal Infirmary, had beaten the dreaded Coronavirus and now revelled in the sheer joy of being alive, in the process giving thanks and paying tribute to the kind, caring, professional and courageous NHS staff to whom he owed everything. Mr Murray-Philipson, in fact, likened these wonderful people, professionals and volunteers, to ‘the Spitfire pilots of 1940’ – which rather resonated with me in this, the Battle of Britain’s 80th anniversary year.

Click to read the rest of this post via the P&S blog