"Only 14% of second-class male passengers escaped, so he certainly managed to beat the odds, and if he hadn't done so I wouldn't be here now," Nicholas Wade said of his grandfather, Lawrence Beesley, who survived 100 years ago today as the great ship sank. Bessley wrote a book about the tragedy. Wade reads excerpts for The Economist and writes in the New York Times about his own questions, one century later, about his ancestor's actions.
April 14, 2012