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My day on the ‘Deutschland’


How a day on Brunel’s SS Great Britain in dry dock in Bristol helped me set the scene for my novel about Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Wreck of the Deutschland.

YOU CAN’T begin to describe a scene convincingly in a piece of fiction unless you can see it in your own mind. That’s fine if you’re writing from your imagination, but if you’re dramatising real events it’s more of a challenge – you have to get it right, not least because you will completely lose the trust of any better informed reader if you make any howlers.

I found my imagination letting me down badly when I was trying to write the strand of my novel The Hopkins Conundrum which is set aboard a transatlantic passenger ship in 1875. Not long earlier, for reasons that seemed good at the time, I had spent a week on what was then the world’s largest cruise ship (they build a new one every year and they make each one a few centimetres longer than the last, so it isn’t any more) called the Freedom of the Seas.

Of course I knew that European emigrants in the late 19th century didn’t have a choice of pleasure pools, a climbing wall and a flume ride to entertain them, and they didn’t ride between the 2nd floor nightclub and the 13-floor cocktail bar in an express lift.

Nevertheless, every time I tried to picture the nuns of my novel walking down their ship’s corridor or taking refuge in their cabin, I saw the plush carpeted walkways and the nicely appointed stateroom of the luxury modern pleasure palace I’d just been on.

I needed to dislodge all that from my mind and get a proper picture of the Deutschland. I

knew what she looked like from the etchings we have of her. But what was it like to be aboard? What facilities did each cabin contain? How many people did you have to share with? Obviously there would be a massive difference between the levels of comfort in first class and steerage – but what precisely did those first-class comforts consist of?

Sometimes people keep records of those kinds of things – descendants of emigrants value detail like that, so you can often find it online – but in this case the record is limited because the Deutschland sank only a decade after she was launched. What we do know, however, are her dimensions, what she was made of, how many passengers she could carry, and so on. So if I could identify a comparable vessel from the same era whose details were better documented, maybe I would crack it.