>I forgot to mention before, thank you for your kind words on the book...etc...
Kent, the pleasure is all mine! I can't express how pleased I was when I first read your manuscript and DIDN'T find myself moving my lips "in time" to overused quotes, or skipping ahead over too-familiar passages. We once, semi-jokingly, used the phrase "100% Frohman Free, Substantially Less Vanderbilt Content Than Our Nearest Competitor" to describe our own ongoing project, and our aversion to endlessly recyled material, and it was GREAT so meet someone who took the same approach but applied it to the ship's entire career.
Martin:
>The policy you describe seems most unhelpful to anyone wanting to write history or biography.
Well, you can USE the letters as reference material, paraphrase to your heart's content, footnote, and still come up with a fine, and historically accurate work. You could easily say "The last person known to have seen Richard Prichard alive was Alice Middleton. He encountered her on the Promenade Deck, calmed her from her state of near-hysteria, and helped her up a staircase to A Deck in the final minutes before the ship sank" and capture, entirely, what Miss Middleton wrote to Mrs Prichard without violating the usage agreement that the Imperial War Museum sends in response to enquiries.
I'm not well versed at all regarding this aspect of English Law, however, back in the 1980s when Mick Jagger's ex-girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton attempted to sell his ca. 1964 letters to her, he got an injunction and blocked the sale ~ and, at that time, there was ENDLESS column space devoted to explaining how one may, or may not, legally use personal letters in the U.K. A Google search using their names could well turn up a simplified explanation of this particular restriction of use.