THE ICEBERG WAS ONLY THE TIP OF A TRAGIC LIFE

Titanic Captain Edward Smith, who went down with his ship, bore the lion's share of the responsibility for the sinking of the luxury liner and 1,517 lost lives. But the maritime disaster was only the start of his family's calamitous legacy

- By Karen Rockett

A FORMER MI5 spy is found dead from a shotgun wound by a terrified maid who screams when she sees him lying in a pool of blood at his luxury London flat. A partially blind widow is struck down by a taxi cab outside her Kensington home. She was holding an umbrella at the time and only a couple of months shy of her 70th birthday. A young RAF pilot is shot down and dies crashing into the sea, his body is never recovered. Three years later his twin sister dies, from polio, just two years after getting married.

It's hard to imagine a family so beset with drama and tragedy but this is the story of Helen Melville Smith, known as Mel.

And her family's tragic legacy would begin with the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in history.

Helen lost her mother, husband, and both twins in the space of a few years, before she was 49, but not before she had lost her beloved father as a child. At the age of just 14 she witnessed her first family tragedy of an unimaginable scale.

Like hundreds of others she stood on the dock in Southampton desperate for news after the Titanic, the world's biggest oceangoing liner, had hit an iceberg and sunk on her maiden voyage.

As the ship's captain, Mel's father was ultimately responsible for the 1,517 souls who were lost at sea.

Captain Edward Smith became famous or rather infamous - for his role at the helm of the ill-fated Titanic, the disastrous finale to his previously successful career at sea.

The British luxury passenger liner sank on April 15, 1912, en route to New York City from Southampton, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of passengers and crew, including Smith who is thought to have either shot himself or gone down with the ship.

Only 706 people survived. Since then countless books and films have been made about the tragedy, seeking to unpick its many myths and mysteries.