12 DECEMBER 1952, Page 5

The death this week of one of the few survivors

of the sinking of the liner Titanic ' forty years ago brings back vividly the sensation which that alrflost unprecedented disaster caused. The liner was at that time the largest ship afloat. Her construction, her launch and her departure on her maiden voyage had aroused much the same public interest as the same events in the career of the Queen Elizabeth ' twenty-eight years later. The maiden voyage was never completed. One morning that April I saw from the top of a bus in the Strand a newspaper placard with the startling legend " Titanic sinking." -W. T. Stead was known to be a passenger. I suppose every paper in London wirelessed to him to send it a story. Certainly the paper of which I was then News Editor did. But Stead sent no story. He was one of the fifteen hundred who went down with the ship after she had driven at full speed against an iceberg.

JANUS