The Stories of the Titanic

By my reckoning there can be no single event in recent history which exercises such a hold over the collective imagination as the sinking of RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912. Except that it wasn't a single event, of course, but a series of innumerable events as individually experienced by the 2200 people on board. Among the 1500 people lost were the following: Leslie Williams and Dai Bowen. Now there is nothing unusual about this information; both appear on the passenger manifest, and Bowen even has a short entry on Wikipedia (with the obligatory 'what if' element to the story). But what may be unusual is the reason for this blog post: I recently found two photographs of these men while searching issues of Health & Fitness magazine (a truly memorable publication, incidentally, in its own right) for a client working on a very particular aspect of the history of physical fitness. It is well known that Williams and Bowen were both talented boxers travelling to the US to take part in a series of fights, but these photographs may, just possibly, be unknown to those who are interested in the ship, her passengers and their stories. So here they are, Leslie and Dai, two friends who perished in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic - a night to remember, indeed.