William MacQuitty (15 May 1905 – 4 February 2004) was an Irish film producer and also a writer and photographer. He is most noted for his production of the 1958 Rank Organisation / Pinewood Studios film, A Night to Remember, which recreates the story of the sinking of RMS Titanic, based on the book of the same name by Walter Lord. MacQuitty had seen Titanic being launched, when he was a child.
Early life
MacQuitty was born as William Baird McQuitty at 5 St John's Avenue in Rosetta, Belfast, the son of James McQuitty, the managing director of the Belfast Telegraph, and Henrietta Little. He was educated at Rockport School and at Campbell College. MacQuitty had seen Titanic being launched on 31 May 1911 and still remembered the occasion vividly. He also watched the maiden voyage departure the following year. MacQuitty attained employment with the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China (known today as the Standard Chartered), at the age of 18, where he remained until 1939.
In 1926, he was posted to the Far East, joining the Auxiliary Punjab Light Horse at Amritsar, who were a handful of volunteer soldiers whose job was to defend the memsahibs and the children in a city that was widely regarded as one of the most seditious in India.
In 1928 he became a founder member of the Lahore Flying Club. Further postings in the Far East included Ceylon, Siam, Malaya and China before he resigned and returned to Ireland in 1939.
Intending to take up psychoanalysis as a career, MacQuitty started a seven-year medical course in London but his amateur film Simple Silage, made for the benefit of Ulster farming neighbours, came to the attention of the Ministry of Information, launching him on a new and unexpected career.
Films
After an informal apprenticeship working with the established film producer Sydney Box, MacQuitty's film contributions to the war effort included Out of Chaos, a portrait of the war artists Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, among others, and The Way We Live (1946), which chronicled the rebuilding of the heavily bombed city of Plymouth. He also filmed T. S. Eliot reading Little Gidding, and Stanley Spencer and his crucifix painting in Cookham churchyard.
In 1951 he co-founded London Independent Producers with Sydney Box. Big feature films then followed, including The Happy Family (1952), Street Corner (1953), The Beachcomber (1954), and Above Us the Waves (1954) which starred John Mills – an account of the disabling of the German Battleship Tirpitz by British Midget submarines. It premiered in Malta, attended by Prince Philip, in 1954. The British premiere took place the following year with a celebrity guest list headed by the Queen and Lord Mountbatten of Burma. It became Winston Churchill's favourite film.
His most famous and brilliant film creation came in 1958, with A Night to Remember, starring Kenneth More, recalling the sinking of RMS Titanic. As a six-year-old, MacQuitty had witnessed the ship being launched from the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast in May 1911, and watched the maiden voyage departure the following year. For the making of the film, he enlisted several Titanic survivors including Joseph Boxhall – Fourth Officer on Titanic – who was MacQuitty's personal advisor. Many scholars and film critics still regard this film as the best of all the Titanic films (of which there are at least twelve). He was amused and flattered in 1997 when James Cameron, who had just completed his own epic on Titanic, took the trouble to thank him personally for his vision in creating A Night to Remember and causing a "ripple effect through modern culture" which he said had partly inspired his own film.
In 1959, MacQuitty helped to found Ulster Television, becoming its first managing director and running the station, creating a link with Queen's University, Belfast, and showing Britain's first adult education program, Midnight Oil, foreshadowing the Open University. His last major film was The Informers (1964).