Photo: The Wireless Room, Wireless Mystery Theatre
All I want to do is talk but no-one else seems interested. That’s one of the problems of this wireless generation. And at times I’m as guilty as the rest of them of tapping away on my iPhone when there are people around I could be talking to.
Having breakfast in Belfast’s Maggie May’s I want to talk about The Wireless Room, find out what everyone thought of the Wireless Mystery Theatre’s Titanic themed radio play we saw the night before, but everyone’s disconnected in a connected kind of way.
“What did you think of the show last night then?” I blurt into the ether. But all I get is radio silence. ‘Is there anybody out there?’ I wonder, much as they must have done that cold April night.
Hannah’s playing Ice Age on her DS. Cameron’s collecting Mega Jump coins on his iPod touch. Kirstie’s checking her email while Matthew’s trying to figure out whether there’s Wi-fi in the cafe. For a change my phone is in my pocket and I know how everyone feels when they can’t reach me. Strange how the technology that connects us isolates us.
But it’s not always so. On the night the Titanic sank the Marconi wireless operators and their simple transmitter were a lifeline, the only means by which the stricken vessel could reach out for help. Using only dots and dashes.
“Why did they use that morse code thing?” asks Cameron suddenly, without looking up “Why didn’t they just ring for help?”
No wonder the kids found the play confusing. A radio play, but on a stage, about a wireless room on a sinking ship, inhabited by 2 wireless operators, the only people on the ship who had the very latest ‘wireless technology’, but could only call for help using an obscure code, and could only reach people with special receiving equipment, if they were within a few hundred or maybe a thousand miles, depending on the weather and time of day. It’s probably not a world kids today can easily understand.
“So there’s no Wi-fi then?” says Matthew joining in.
I’m not sure if he’s talking Maggie May’s or the Titanic but I’m grateful for his contribution.
“No, there was no Wi-fi, no mobile phones, no satellite comms, GPS or two way radio. The only way to send a message off that ship was with dots and dashes.”
“What like pictochat?”
Perhaps they’ll never get it. But I did. The men of the wireless room, Harold Bride and Jack Phillips, were quiet unsung heroes, not mariners but technicians, the single point of contact with the world beyond the berg struck ship, calling for help in a way no-one else on board could, in conditions of extreme stress, until the water almost reached their feet. Heroes, saviours and pioneers of a very different wireless generation.
Back at the Malone Lodge Hotel later that night we find ourselves glued to another kind of screen, watching a documentary on the Costa Concordia. But at least we’re watching together and it’s a kind of shared if unsettling experience. This time you can see and hear it all, caught on camera: videos, photos, phone-calls and radio transmissions, all recorded as it happened by passengers, crew and rescue teams. It leaves nothing to the imagination. And I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
We’ visited Liverpool and Belfast to find out more about how the two cities are connected to Titanic, joined in the Titanic Festival and tried to figure out what the story of the Titanic has to teach us one hundred years on.
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