Memory is a curious thing. What we choose to remember and seek to forget could easily be described as a form of random compression and omission. You can also say with near certainty that how we remember 2025 will not be how we lived it, but how we made sense of it.
This is ever truer in the obsessively “wrapped” era of the 21st century, where lived experience is broken down into data points and repackaged into a story that claims it provides an accurate representation of the individual’s life. No wonder, perhaps, that so many people bristled at their supposed listening age when their Spotify Wrapped found its way onto their accounts. No wonder, too, that this data-dump storytelling style has prompted so many imitators, given the talking points it provides.
Which begs the question, how will you truly make sense of the year that just passed and the era we live in?
Perhaps the most unusual happenings or headlines will guide the way, although that might end up amounting to a few fragments that may include something as seemingly fleeting as a couple caught on camera at a Coldplay concert causing consternation in the summer or the scandalous theft of precious jewels by criminals in Paris. Neither event seems to provide a true sense of the year. Perhaps it might be by the search for ceasefires and a viable post-conflict future in this region and Europe, although the rolling nature of these wars means a single moment rarely defines them. Aside from that, a year in review can become a nightmarish vision of flood, famine, political declarations and those who left us. The natural and searchable memory vault that journalism provides, fills up with near overwhelming frequency, too. The next big headline is always only moments away.
Historical record is not always helpful in that regard either, even when dealing with the most consequential moments.
Take the events of 1915, for instance, now by dint of the new year, around 111 years in the distance. Far enough away to make sense of the world, perhaps, but also so far away that many memories have been flushed away.
If you ask an AI assistant to summarise the events of that year – and maybe last year will be remembered as the year that artificial intelligence became truly mainstream – it will report that it was the first full year of the First World War, that fighting on the ground in northern Europe reached a bloody standstill and chemical weapons were used on the Western Front for the first time.
The year was also notable for the sinking of the Lusitania liner by a German U-boat, resulting in the death of nearly 1,200 people. The sinking of the ship in May 1915 is now regarded as being responsible for turning the tide of US opinion towards joining the war and for reshaping maritime rules during conflict. In the shorthand version of history, it is one of the war’s most critical junctures.
There is more to the year than that, though. As ever, history rarely lays out in a neat line to be followed. The twin brothers that are compression and omission do their best to obscure that path.
In truth, the US did not declare war until almost two years later and the rules of the sea would not be changed until after the sinking of the SS Arabic liner off Ireland in August 1915, by yet another submarine strike on a civilian ship. That deadly act gave rise to the so-called “Arabic pledge” between the US and Germany in September, which affirmed that liners would not be struck by submarines without warning.
Still, later that same year, SS Persia, another passenger liner, was torpedoed without warning while on its way from England to India via Egypt’s Suez Canal, Aden and Karachi. The Persia would get no further than the Med on its fateful journey. It was attacked off the coast of Crete, which violated the Arabic pledge, resulting in the loss of 343 lives. A cargo of precious jewels went down with them, some of which have since been recovered.
This week (Tuesday) marked the 110th anniversary of this often-forgotten tragedy, although the curious can find this story if you know where to look.
SS Persia’s story is told in detail at the Buckler’s Hard Maritime Museum, which can be found in a particularly bucolic part of coastal Southern England. The connective tissue for the museum and the sunken ship’s story might be found in the original name for Buckler’s Hard, once known as Montagu Town.
On board the Persia were John, 2nd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, who survived after more than 30 hours in the water before being rescued, and his secretary, Eleanor Thornton, who didn’t. Thornton will be unwittingly familiar to many as the model and inspiration for the Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament that adorns Rolls-Royce motor cars, past and present.
Why do some stories persist and others don’t? It might be that we like the past to be invoked rather than understood or it may be that living in the present is all-consuming. Sometimes memory is a silent ship alone in deep water.
