Martin has built up a Titanic collection

Almost 30 years on and his fingers still suffer. When he was 12 years old, Martin Thompson wrote out by hand the entire passenger list from the maiden voyage of the ill-fated ship Titanic.

"It took me a while. It's 2,200 names. I was doing a couple of hundred a day," remembers Martin, now aged 40.

His commitment to the legend of the White Star Line vessel, the "unsinkable" ship which tragically went down 100 years ago, is beyond doubt.

Stepping inside his Telford apartment is a bit like boarding the Titanic itself.

Hundreds of artefacts, posters, books, DVDs, plates and postcards adorn pretty much every inch of wall space.

There's a White Star Line bedspread and framed copies of ship manuals, a piece of coal from the actual vessel and many replica oddments including a ship's whistle and replica china tea sets from the liner.

"I don't know anybody else who has got a collection like this," says Martin, who works at the Odeon cinema in Telford, and has watched the 1997 film "hundreds of times". He even has it downloaded to his mobile phone.

Martin's fascination for RMS Titanic began he was set a social science project at school.

"We were asked to write an essay about anything we wanted to relating to social science," Martin explains.

This was all in the days before the internet, remember, when the world wide web was called a district library.

"I found a disasters book and I read about the ship and wanted to know more. Then I read Walter Lord's novel A Night to Remember from the early 1950s. At the time there was nothing else out there to do with the Titanic really."

It was while researching his school project that he saw a film by the same name, which cemented what he'd already learnt.

Book by book, film by film, Martin consumed all there was to know about the ship and its voyage.

Subsequently, as part of his insatiable appetite for memorabilia, the Titanic has led Martin halfway around the world on his own personal voyage of discovery "trying to follow my Titanic dream".

Meeting survivors along the way and even acquiring priceless artefacts relating to the ship they said could never sink – it was full steam ahead.

Titanic dates stick in his mind. He recalls watching the News At Ten in September 1985 when it was announced that the Titanic had been finally located.

"I was like a kid in a candy shop," says Martin.

"There I was, 14 years old, watching the telly two inches from the screen.

"I remember the following year they sent divers down there and there were all these amazing images coming back. It was on the news for weeks."

However, when he hit hard times in the late 1980s he sold his books, many of them first editions and worth a bob or two, "and got nothing for them really. But I had to survive."

It's almost ironic, then, that flotsam from a sinking ship kept Martin afloat.

His next voyage took Martin to the first exhibition of Titanic artefacts at Greenwich in 1993 where he was able to see items and personal belongings recovered from the wreck – jewellery, hairbrushes, hats and pieces of shipwrecked furniture that were like little jigsaw puzzle pieces from the tragedy.

Here he met survivors, in particular Millvena Dean who was only six months old when the ship sank. Martin already knew her story but meeting her brought it to life.

"I told her it was a pleasure to meet her and she told me that all she knew about it was what her mother told her later. Nothing was recorded or talked about back then, like it is now.

"But she was on the last lifeboat. Her family was in third class and her father had gone to find out what was happening. They had locked the gates at third class by then but her mother begged the steward to open the gate and they got in the last lifeboat. Incredible."

Martin's journey took him to Belfast docks where the ship was built, and tales of the Titanic sailed closer to home when a family friend revealed his father went for a job as a bellhop on the ship, but didn't get the job.

However, at the interview he had been given a copy of the ship's safety manual, entitled Lifeboat Efficiency, which among those who would later sail on her would come to have great significance.

Martin now has one of the only remaining original copies thought to be in existence.

He later found out that the brother of the would-be bellhop had been an assistant cook on Titanic and had died in the disaster.

Martin has also attended Titanic exhibitions in Orlando, Florida and has visited the graves of the deceased at Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Says Martin: "It was very poignant because all these people from different walks of life are all united by the tragedy."

While at Titanic conventions he has attended Martin has met stars of some of the spin-off films, including Jonathan Hyde who played J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, and David Warner who played Spicer Lovejoy, in the 1997 movie Titanic.

But Martin is not a member of any Titanic societies.

"Titanic is very personal, I don't like to be in the crowd," he says.

"With me, as well as the stories of those on board, it is the ship itself, and how it hits ice in the North Atlantic Ocean and what happened next."

Like most people, Martin Thompson has charted life's choppy waters; but in times of trouble the one thing that has never faltered is his Titanic.