Launching the Titanic!

Combined session. 21 in attendance. 

Saturday marked our first session of 2018, and we are making a start on our Titanic project. To inspire the young writers, we started off the year with a visit to the SeaCity Museum.

This term, the writers will be producing short monologues and dialogues based on the stories of the famous Titanic. They are writing these pieces to be performed by the Mayflower Youth Theatre, at a SeaCity Museum open day.

The museum started off by giving the students an insight into life in 1912. With a specific focus on Southampton, including photos of the city as it was, and lots of information on the docks, they saw how different life was! In 1912, there were no planes, people still travelled by steam engine, teabags and instant coffee had only just been invented! We hope that this helped them to get inside the minds of their characters.

Next, the museum explored the ship itself.

Including lots of artefacts and replicas from the Titanic, there were displays made up to demonstrate what the ship would have looked like. There was lots of information about both the crew and the passengers, as well as the ship layout.

There were even a couple of interactive features!

Finally, the museum showed us the impact of the ship’s sinking on the passengers, crew, as well as Southampton. This image is part of a map of the city in the museum, with each red dot representing the home of a crew member that was lost on the Titanic.

There was also recordings of survivors talking about their experiences, on a very persona level, as well as part of a wider community. The museum then ended with a fake courtroom, with reenactments of the inquiry into the ship’s sinking playing. This demonstrated another aspect of the aftermath of this tragedy.

We then returned to the Mayflower for a short planning session. As a group, we went over what we had learned, each young writer sharing 3 things that they had learned about the Titanic. We also shared some extra facts about life in 1912!

Next, the students were given photos of the ship, and short case studies of survivors from the ship. This included their name, age, background and their account of the sinking. Most of the case studies were from children who were onboard Titanic, but there was a variety of stories, including a few myths about the ship.

The writers were then given some time to talk over what they had learned, read through the case studies, and start to think about their scripts. We asked them to just brainstorm some ideas, perhaps using the case studies for inspiration.

There were a variety of ideas, from orphaned twins to ghost stories!

We had great fun this weekend, and we can’t wait for the next session!