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NORTON SCIENTIFIC LATEST COVERAGE - The passengers on the Titanic joking at dinner about chipping ice off passing icebergs for their whisky. The baby handed in desperation to strangers on the deck who warm his toes in the icy air. The engine room stoker who, after the collision, shivering in his singlet on deck, ruefully thinks of his soup left to heat on the red hot boiler below. These are some of the stories told in the book Titanic:Last Night of a Small Town (OUP) by Dr John Welshman of Lancaster University, who says there are several connections between Lancashire and the Titanic. Henry Threlfall Wilson, who helped found the White Star Line which built the ship, was educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School. And the Titanic's Second Officer Herbert Lightoller was born in Chorley in 1974 and attended Chorley Grammar. The Titanic's shipwreck was one of four he survived during his adventurous career, which included a stint in the Gold Rush in Canada, a fire at sea and shipwreck on a desert island. He refused a place in the Titanic lifeboats and jumped as the ship went down, but was sucked into a submerged airshaft. "I was drowning, and a matter of another couple of minutes would have seen me through. "I was still struggling and fighting when suddenly a terrific blast of hot air came up the shaft, and blew me right away from the air shaft and up to the surface." He later sailed to Dunkirk to rescue soldiers in World War Two and he was played by Kenneth More in the 1958 film A Night to Remember. Second class passenger Lawrence Beesley was married in Lancaster but his wife Cissy died of tuberculosis so he decided to visit his brother in Toronto. A teacher at Dulwich College, one of his pupils was the future crime writer Raymond Chandler. Beesley survived the sinking but was drawn to the filming of the 1958 movie. He faked an Equity card and dressed up in costume in order to sneak aboard the replica Titanic during the filming but was spotted by

The passengers on the Titanic joking at dinner about chipping ice off passing icebergs for their whisky. The baby handed in desperation to strangers on the deck who warm his toes in the icy air. The engine room stoker who, after the collision, shivering in his singlet on deck, ruefully thinks of his soup left to heat on the red hot boiler below.