THE sinking of ill-fated liner Titanic is one of the 20th century's most enduring tragedies.

As if to prove it, Southampton's community history officer Sheila Jemima has been hit with an avalanche of inquiries from around the world as the 90th anniversary of the sinking approaches.

Sheila was one of the team behind the record of local people's memories of the disaster, called Titanic Voices, which has gone on to sell more than 100,000 copies world- wide. The success of the book has meant the city council staff behind it have been deluged by thousands of questions and queries from fascinated readers.

Sheila said: "We have been inundated with so many inquiries that we couldn't cope. We had to get extra admin staff to deal with it. We were getting letters just addressed to Titanic Voices, Southampton and they were asking about everything.

"A lot of people wrote and asked about relatives and whether they were on the ship, or if they are related to passengers. Other people want to know about documents and whether ones they have are genuine."

Teacher Sui Bang Ping, of Jimo Middle School in China, wrote to ask for help in teaching his class about the ill-fated liner.

He wrote: "Perhaps you do not expect to hear from a Chinese young man. I was greatly shocked by the terrible tragedy of Titanic. I wrote poems to express my deep sorrow and anger to the greedy Atlantic. So I make up my mind to rewrite the story and introduce it to my people."

He was not alone. Staff at the city council's cultural resources department have fielded questions from as far afield as Australia, New Zealand and South America and have often been able to provide them with the answers they need from their impressive store of information.

Sheila said: "A curator of a German Titanic museum wanted to know what kind of flowers there were on the Titanic and what the locations were. We were able to help him because we had interviewed the grandson of the man who owned the nursery which supplied them. We were able to tell him all the plants."

Titanic Voices has even gone down well with Walter Lord, author of the authoritative record of the disaster A Night to Remember, which was turned into a major film in the 1950s. Mr Lord wrote: "I am so entranced by the pleasure I have had reading Titanic Voices. Every time I have picked up the book I have learnt something new."

Ninety-year-old Titanic survivor Millvina Dean, who was nine months old at the time and lost her father in the tragedy, is to re-open Southampton Maritime Museum's Titanic exhibition on April 14. The show contains updated exhibits and a new audio-visual feature about the doomed ship.

- Originally published April 2002.