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A BUM STEER

Some perfectly intelligent people, when put on the spot, struggle to tell their left from right. Now read on. Louise Patten has revealed the secret that her grandfather, Charles Lightoller, the Titanic's only surviving officer, took to the grave. The real reason the Titanic hit the iceberg was not because the ship turned away too late, but because they turned straight into it, the result of the sort of left/right mix-up that would make Homer Simpson say ''D'oh!'' ''My grandfather, like the other senior officers on Titanic, had started out on sailing ships,'' she explained to The Guardian. ''And on sailing ships, they steered by what is known as 'tiller orders' which means that if you want to go one way, you push the tiller the other way [so if you want to go left, you push right]. Whereas with 'rudder orders', which is what steamships used, it is like driving a car. You steer the way you want to go. Titanic was a steamship, but at that time on the north Atlantic they were still using tiller orders.'' When First Officer William Murdochgave the command in tiller orders, the steersman, Robert Hitchins, panicked and reverted to the rudder orders he had been trained in. And to think we thought it was just us who felt that steering a boat was a bit like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time. It all puts us in mind of Peter Cook, who once began a skit by looking up from a newspaper and saying, in a world-weary way: ''I see the Titanic's sunk again.''