In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.
Or sign that they were bent
On paths coincident
Of being anon twin halves of one august event.
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.8
EPILOGUE
NEARLY ALL THE PLAYERS HAVE LEFT THE STAGE NOW. ONE BY ONE, THE PASSENGERS and crew have gone, until only a handful are left, and with their passing, along with their contemporaries, go the last living memories of an age when the future still beckoned hopefully, and the skies, while never cloudless, at least were bright.
Lawrence Beesley would publish a book in 1913 about the Titanic. It was to be an obsession of his until his death in 1967 at the age of eighty-nine.
The Bishops divorced less than a year after the disaster, in part due to a vicious rumor claiming that Mr. Bishop escaped dressed in women’s clothing. After the divorce the former Mrs. Bishop vanished, while Mr. Bishop died in relative obscurity in 1961.
Jack Thayer would go on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania and make a career in banking. Eventually he would return to the university and serve as treasurer and later as a vice president. But the events of April 14-15, 1912, left a mark on his spirit, until in 1945, still haunted by the Titanic, and deeply depressed by the death of his son in World War II, he took his own life. He was 50 years old.
Kate Buss did finally reach San Diego, where she and Samuel Willis were married on May 11, 1912. Their daughter would be named for Lilian Carter. Kate, who was widowed in 1953, would never be able to talk about the Titanic without breaking into tears. She died in 1972, at the age of ninety-six.
Billy Carter, like Dickinson Bishop, was divorced by his wife after a similar rumor started that he too had boarded the lifeboat in a woman’s clothes. The quintessential “polo player and clubman” died in Palm Beach in 1940.
Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, though exonerated by Lord Mersey of any impropriety, spent the rest of his days in the shadow of the Titanic and Boat 1. Proud and aloof as ever, he refused to respond to the continuing criticism of his actions on April 14-15, 1912, right up to his death in 1931. However unlikable he may have been, at worst Sir Cosmo was guilty of a monumental lapse into bad taste.
His wife, Lady Duff Gordon, prospered for a while longer in her dress-making business, but World War I spelled the end of the style of fashion “Lucile’s” was founded on, and the business folded. Lady Duff Gordon remained spirited right to the very end, continuing to defend her husband, who she finally followed to the grave in 1935.
Rene Harris, the widow of Henry B. Harris, would know incredible prosperity after taking over her late husband’s theatrical enterprises, only to lose everything in the Crash of 1929. But her “sunny disposition” never failed her, as Walter Lord put it, and “poor as a churchmouse but radiantly blissful, she died quietly in September, 1969, at the age of 93.” 1
Nellie Becker and her three children, Marion, Richard, and Ruth, found a home in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where they were joined the next year by Mr. Becker. The disaster wrought an emotional trauma on Mrs. Becker, who became nervous and withdrawn, and would never be able to even mention the Titanic without bursting into tears. She died in 1961.
Marion contracted tuberculosis and died of complications, just thirty-six years old, in 1944.
Richard went on to live a colorful life, first as a popular singer then as a social worker. He would be twice widowed before his own death in 1975 at the age of sixty-five.
Ruth eventually became a schoolteacher, married and divorced, and never talked about the Titanic until her children were almost grown. In March of 1990, at the age of ninety, she again went to sea, taking a cruise to Mexico, the first time she had set foot on board a ship since 1912. She died later that same year.
Helen Churchill Candee would go from strength to strength, becoming a noted author, world traveler, and lecturer—active and feisty until just months before her passing at the age of ninety at her home in York Harbor, Maine.
Mrs. Goldsmith and her son Franky finally reached Detroit, where Mrs. Goldsmith would eventually remarry, finally passing on in 1955.
Marion Wright’s marriage to Arthur Woolcott took place as planned on April 20, 1912. They lived in Cottage Grove, Oregon, where they would raise three sons. Marion would only talk about the Titanic with her family or close friends, and only on the anniversary of the disaster. She died in 1965.
Colonel Gracie never fully recovered from his ordeal that April night. He wrote The Truth About the Titanic in late 1912 and, his health broken, died a few months later, just as the book was going to press.
Mrs. J. J. Brown became known as the “Unsinkable Molly Brown,” her sometimes uncouth behavior suddenly becoming charming individualism. She would die in 1942, having become more and more eccentric with each passing year, still not giving a damn if she didn’t want to, as colorful and genuine an American article as ever there was.
Eva Hart, deported from the United States because she was indigent—she and her mother had lost everything they owned in the wreck—returned to Great Britain. Evas mother Esther never remarried and died of cancer in 1928. Eva grew up to become a British magistrate and was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth for her charitable work. She never forgot her father, and for a long time kept the recollections of that April night locked away in her memory, rarely to be discussed. In her later years, recalling the Titanic became easier for her, though she was bitterly outspoken in her opposition to salvaging artifacts from the wreck, calling the expeditions that did so little more than common grave robbers. She died at the age of ninety-one in a hospice in England in February 1996.
During World War I Edith Russell became one of the first female war correspondents, and over her long life, survived automobile accidents, another shipwreck, fire, floods, tornados, and war. Rather than tempt fate any further she refused to ever set foot in an airplane, and maintained to her dying day, in April 1975, that she had survived everything except a plane crash, a husband, and bubonic plague.
Winnie Troutt eventually settled in Southern California, first in Beverly Hills, where she married a baker, then in the town of Hermosa Beach, where she would ultimately outlive three husbands. Like many survivors, it was only with the passage of time that she was able to speak of her memories of the sinking. Proud that she was celebrated in Hermosa Beach more for civic activities than for being a Titanic survivor, she passed away in 1984, five months after she turned one hundred.
Bruce Ismay would never be able to live down the whispered accusations of cowardice that followed him almost from the moment the Carpathia docked in New York. His accusers had a case: the tradition of a captain being the last to leave a sinking ship had its roots in maritime salvage law, for as long as an owner’s representative remained on board, a ship was not considered derelict, the captain usually being the senior representative. While there was no legal imperative for Ismay to stay behind, there was a moral one—one Captain Smith apparently felt compelled to follow. Public sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic felt that Ismay should have as well. Ismay got what many felt were his just deserts, for less than a year after the disaster, he was forced not only to resign as chairman of the White Star Line, which he had planned on doing anyway, but also to step down from the board of IMM, his fellow directors considering him a liability. He became a virtual recluse, rarely leaving the estate he bought in western Ireland, and died there of complications caused by diabetes in 1937. Mrs. Ismay was often heard to remark, “The Titanic ruined our lives....”
Second Officer Lightoller never did receive a command of his own—nor did any of the surviving officers of the Titanic. He retired from the sea in the early 1920s, but never lost his lust for adventure. In 1940 he took his six
ty-foot yacht, the Sundowner, to Dunkirk, and despite being bombed and machine gunned by the Luftwaffe, managed to bring back 131 British soldiers. He died peacefully in 1952.
Third Officer Pitman soon decided that his eyesight had deteriorated badly enough that he could no longer be watch qualified, so he joined the Pursers’ Department, still with the White Star Line, at one point serving aboard the Olympic. He would spend another thirty-five years at sea before finally retiring to Pitcombe, England, where he died in December, 1961.
Fourth Officer Boxhall, like all the other surviving officers of the Titanic, never attained command rank. Over the years the accuracy of the final position he had worked out for the Titanic would be questioned by critics, but he defended his position of 41.40 N 50.14 W until the end of his days. His last posting was as First Officer of Cunard’s Aquitania in the 1930s. After his death in 1963, in compliance with his last wishes, his ashes were scattered over the North Atlantic, at the spot that marks the Titanic’s grave.
Fifth Officer Lowe served in the Royal Navy in World War I, then never went to sea again. He retired to his native Wales and died quietly in 1944.
Harold Bride never could cope with the notoriety of being the Titanic’s surviving wireless operator. In 1913 he left the Marconi Company and vanished, his whereabouts becoming a mystery for the next three quarters of a century. In 1987 an enterprising private investigator from Michigan named David Norris, who was also an amateur radio enthusiast, traced this lost “silent key.” Harold Bride had died in a Glasgow, Scotland, hospital in 1956. He had become a traveling salesman after leaving Marconi, and so successfully concealed his past that even his family did not know who he really was until after his death. No one will ever know what drove Bride to such a self imposed silence.2
Captain Stanley Lord would spend the rest of his life trying to clear his name. Condemned by both the Senate and the Board of Trade Inquiries for failing to come to the Titanic’s aid, within months after the disaster he had become enough of an embarrassment to the Leyland Line that he was asked to resign. Though he would find subsequent employment as a master in years to come, his career had effectively ended, as his commands became progressively smaller and slower. Repeated requests by him and on his behalf to the Board of Trade for an inquiry in order to exonerate him were refused. Over the years his case attracted quite a few defenders, some of them very competent and quite clever. But no manipulation of facts, figures, relative positions, curvature of the earth, mystery ships and the like, all of which Captain Lord’s supporters have utilized to attempt to exonerate him, can get past the simple fact that there was a ship firing distress rockets near the Californian in the early hours of April 15, 1912. Regardless of whether it was the Titanic or not, somebody needed help, and Captain Lord refused to go to their aid. He died in 1962, his family to this day still carrying on the fight to have his character rehabilitated.
Arthur Rostron’s career was made by his impeccable seamanship in the morning hours of April 15, 1912. In 1915 he was given the Mauretania, at the time the most prestigious command on the North Atlantic run, a position he held until 1926. In 1928 he was made Commodore of the Cunard Line, and retired with full honors in 1931. He died in 1940.
The Californian continued on for the Leyland Line until she took two torpedoes from a German U-boat in the fall of 1917.
The Carpathia would meet a similar fate on July 17, 1918.
The Gigantic never left the ways. After the disaster the White Star Line abandoned such pretentious names, so it was as the subdued but dignified Britannic that the third sister was launched in April 1914. Extensive modifications were made to her, including a double hull, bulkheads raised to forty feet above the waterline, and cantilever davits that held lifeboats stacked like the cars on a ferris wheel. World War I broke out before she was completed and she was requisitioned by the Royal Navy as a hospital ship. In September 1916, while steaming off the coast of Greece in the Aegean Sea, she struck a mine that ripped open her first six watertight compartments—a coal dust explosion almost blew her bow off—and she sank in an hour and a half. Only plenty of lifeboats and a warm sea kept the death toll down to thirtyfive. The Britannic was gone before the world ever knew she existed.
Only the Olympic was left to carry on for the White Star Line. Her career in World War I was distinguished, to the point of ramming and sinking the U-103 in May 1918. She returned to passenger service in 1919, becoming one of the best-loved ships on the North Atlantic. But in 1934 she rammed and sank the Nantucket lightship, killing all seven crewmen aboard that hapless vessel. Taken out of service, she was broken up in 1935, many of her interior fixtures and decorations finding their way into houses and pubs in Liverpool, Southampton, and London.
The Titanic herself will continue her slow decay at the bottom of the North Atlantic. Despite fanciful talk and wild speculation by salvage firms about raising the wreck, it is most likely that corrosion has so weakened the already over-stressed hull that it would never stand the strain of being raised. Ultimately, her deterioration will cause her great bulkheads to collapse and her decks to fall in, reducing the once proud hull to a mass of twisted steel. Within a century all that will remain of the “unsinkable ship” will be a pile of unrecognizable rust. The porcelain, glass, and ceramic pieces strewn about the debris field, along with the ship’s brass fittings, will remain unchanged, alternately covered and revealed by the slowly eddying currents.
But farther to the north, in the Labrador Sea, the icebergs still break off from the Greenland glacier and drift down into the North Atlantic, a force of nature, waiting....
APPENDIX I
THE TITANIC: FACTS AND FIGURES
Dimensions
Length: 882 ft 6 in
Beam: 92 ft 6 in
Moulded Depth: 59 ft 6 in
Height (from keel to top of funnels): 175 ft
Tonnage (Designed): 45,000
Tonnage (Actual): 46,329
Powerplant
Boilers (Double-ended): 25
Boilers (Single-ended): 4
Furnaces (three to each boiler end): 162
Engines:Two four-cylinder, triple-expansion, direct-acting, inverted-type engines, balanced by the Yarrow, Schlick and Tweedy system, each producing approximately 15,000 shaft horsepower (s.h.p.), driving the wing screws.
One low-pressure turbine, driven by the exhaust steam from the reciprocating engines, producing approximately 16,000 s.h.p., driving the center screw. This turbine could not be reversed.
Performance
Designed Speed: 23-24 kts.
Highest Attained Speed (on April 14, 1912): 22 ½ kts.
Coal Consumption: 650 tons daily
Crew
Engineer Department 289
Boiler and Engine Rooms (inc. Firemen, Trimmers, Stokers, and Greasers)
Electrical and Refrigeration Engineers 8
Engineers (inc. Engineer Officers) 28
Deck Department
Master and qualified Watch Officers 7
Pursers and Clerks (inc. 1 Purser, 2 Ass’t. Pursers) 7
Carpenters 7
Surgeons 2
Bosun, Bosun’s Mates, and Quartermasters 8
Able-Bodied Seamen 39
Masters-at-Arms 2
Window Cleaners 2
Messroom Stewards 2
Steward Department
Stewards and Service Staff (inc. Galley Staff) 471
Stewardesses 20
Matron (Nurse) 1
Telegraphists (Wireless Operators) 2
Total Crew 892
(When she sailed, the Titanic left behind five stokers who had gone ashore to visit a nearby pub and failed to return to the ship on time. After the disaster, some reports of the total number of lives lost erroneously included these five men. Additionally, the seven engineers from Harland and Wolff who accompanied Thomas Andrews were actually registered as Second Class passengers. Some sources have included them among the crew when recording the number of lives los
t, not realizing they were carried on the passenger lists, in effect accounting for them twice.)
Accommodations
Carried on
Designed Maiden Voyage
First Class 735 337
Second Class 674 271
Third Class 1,026 712
Total Accommodated 2,435 Carried 1,320
Passengers and Crew Lost
Men Women Children
First Class 118 4 1
Second Class 154 15 0
Third Class 381 89 53
Crew 674 3 _
Totals 1,327 111 54
Total Passengers and Crew Lost 1,502
Passengers and Crew Saved
Men Women Children
First Class 57 139 5
Second Class 14 79 23
Third Class 75 76 26
Crew 189 18 _
Totals 335 314 54
Total Passengers and Crew Saved 705
(Some sources quote different figures for the number of passengers aboard the Titanic the night she sank, along with correspondingly different numbers of persons lost: these are based on the Board of Trade Report, which still seems to be the most accurate accounting. The number of people saved—705—has never been seriously disputed. Over the years several errors have crept into the figures, the simplest explanation being that the erroneous numbers were based on the published passenger list, which contained the names of several people who cancelled their passage but were never deleted from the list. In addition, there were a number of passengers who were traveling under assumed names for various reasons, who later were added to the passenger lists by their correct names while at the same time their aliases were never removed. Also, as noted above, the seven engineers from Harland and Wolff who accompanied Thomas Andrews were listed as Second Class passengers, but on some lists their names are duplicated in the crew roster, erroneously adding to the total.)
Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic Page 35
