The capacity crowd attending the Gins Fitting Out party may have sat down to a 3rd Class Titanic supper of rice and vegetable Soup, boiled brisket and vegetables, followed by rice pudding and peaches, but the standard of cooking was certainly first class. Given that the cost of a Third Class ticket on Titanic to New York in 1912 was $36.25, judging from the menu for just one meal, the passengers seem to have got value for their money.

The Titanic theme was a somewhat oblique introduction to the evening’s speaker, newly elected Honorary Member, Ron Hancock, who gave a fascinating overview of the history of the ‘modern’ Southampton Docks. That Ron has something of a passion for the Docks is not altogether surprising, given that not only has he worked for a succession of owners of the Docks for the past 39 years, rising to be Marine Administration Manager, but he is the fourth generation of his family to have done so.

Ron illustrated his talk with early photographs from when the Foundation Stone was laid in 1839, very close to where Ocean Village is today, right through a successful of peaks and troughs and successive Railway Company owners; the requisition by the UK and US governments in the First & Second World Wars respectively, to its privatisation by Maggie Thatcher in 1982 (only the second one of her new government), and its present ownership by a Goldman Sachs led consortium.

Of particular interest was the connection of Ocean Village as the earliest part of the new Docks to have been completed; the millions of men and hundreds of thousands of horses that embarked through there during WW1; the extension of the Western Docks in 1934, before which you could reach the Central railway station by water and the enormous growth in the size of visiting ships. In 1912 Titanic was the largest man made movable object in the world at 46,000 tonnes gross. Today, there regular visits by cruise ships in excess of 200,000 tonnes; bulk carriers that can take 6,000 cars and box ships that carry 9,500 containers.

But perhaps the most moving anecdote describes the visit to what is now the Ocean Village dock of the Brunel designed “Great Eastern”, which had been badly damaged in a severe gale in the Channel in 1859. Among those anxiously awaiting friends and loved ones on the ship was William Whiting, choirmaster at Winchester College. Standing at the entrance to Ocean Village and struck by the damage and loss of life that the gale had brought with it, he quickly wrote what surely must be one of the most memorable sea related hymns of all time: “Eternal Father, Strong to Save”.

So congratulations to Jackie Knight for organising such an illuminating evening, but one must hope, given the close connections of Ocean Village to the early history of the Docks, not the least that the very first operational commercial ship ever to visit was actually berthed at the spot where the RSYC clubhouse now stands, that this talk is repeated there. It could certainly stand a reprise.

Roger Townsend