Belfast, Southampton preparing for 2012 commemorations

It is nearly 100 years since the great ship cast off her lines and steamed into history. Two cities with strong ties to the R.M.S. Titanic - Belfast, Northern Ireland and Southampton, England - are make preparations now for the 100th anniversary of the ship's ill-fated maiden voyage.

Thousands of Titanic aficianados already flock to Ocean Dock (Southampton) and the Harland & Wolff Shipyard (Belfast) each year to see, respectively, the dock from which Titanic sailed and the plot of land on which she was built.

Among the plans for 2012 are a Titanic square near Southampton dock that commemorates the ship and her times.

Omens of disaster: The Titanic sinking foretold?

Many people claimed to have predicted the Titanic sinking. Indeed, more than 50 people cancelled their bookings on the great ship before she sailed for America. Many of them had good reason (injury or pressing business in Europe), but a few later claimed they simply had a bad feeling about the ship.

Here, for your reading pleasure, are some odd occurrences related to Titanic:

- The ship's cat abandoned ship shortly before it sailed. She had a litter of kittens and took great care to remove her young one at a time. A stoker who witnessed the escape saw it as a bad omen and took it upon himself to leave the ship at Queenstown, her last port of call before heading into the Atlantic.

- Chief Officer Henry Wilde was a last-minute addition to the Titanic, having been borrowed from the crew of her sister ship, Olympic, on the day before Titanic sailed. In a letter to his sister posted in Queenstown, Wilde wrote "I still don't like this ship. I have a queer feeling about it." What did Wilde see or feel that made him dislike the company's wondrous new flagship? One wonders.

- The Titanic nearly collided with another ship while departing Southampton harbor. Ironically, the other ship was called New York.

- As Titanic was sinking, a doctor was watching over a dying girl at a home in England. The girl had been comatose for days when she suddenly opened her eyes and said, "I see a big ship sinking. Oh, mister, can't you the the people in the water and Wally with his fiddle?" The girl died later that night, and the doctor thought her statement was merely the rambling of a feverish child until he heard about the Titanic sinking the next night. He later learned that his friend, bandmaster Wallace "Wally" Hartley, was on board the ship and died in the disaster.

- Belfast had a special bond with Titanic as the ship was built there. On April 14, 1912 at about the time Titanic struck the iceberg, all the lights in Belfast suddenly failed. They came back on about 2:20 a.m., as the North Atlantic closed over the stern of the new miracle ship, Titanic.