Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  The blood it did flow in crimson streams

  Through many a winter’s night

  They knew the Lord was on their side

  To help them in the fight.

  This was an age when violence was considered by many to be virtuous.

  “The world’s splendor has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed,” declared Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, published three years before the Titanic was launched. Speed was hailed as the chief weapon that modern civilization had added to the armory of human pleasures. “We will sing of the fervid night-time vibrations of armaments factories, and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; gluttonous railway stations devouring smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung from the clouds by their crooked trailing smoke; bridges that leap rivers like giant gymnasts, and blind the watcher with reflective flashes of harsh sunlight; bold steamers sniffing the horizon; broad-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of vast steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of aircraft whose propellers turn like banners in the wind.”6 In the seven days after the Titanic left Southampton, the American Harriet Quimby became the first woman to pilot an aircraft across the English Channel, Prince Scipione Borghese, who had already raced across Mongolia in a fast car, gave a press interview on his projected Peking to Paris air flight, and two aeronauts who flew out of Hendon in a race to Dublin both crashed and died.7

  Moneyed men and women expected that their conveniences would be fast. The rich confirmed or canceled their Titanic cabin reservations in the final days before the voyage if not at the last minute. Headlong changes of travel plans were signs of wealth; they proved one’s power to have sudden impulses as suddenly fulfilled. Instantaneous satisfaction of needs or whims became a measure of value, if not the hallmark of quality. There was an impatience that had been unknown twenty years earlier. Immediacy was a keynote of the Edwardian mood. Undoubtedly the helter-skelter of the times was accentuated by the telephone. There were telephones in all the first-class cabins on the Titanic. Several liners had arrangements whereby as soon as they docked, the onboard telephones were connected to the land system so that millionaires could begin ringing their brokers, lawyers, and butlers.

  It was apt that American millionaires loved speed: the word had once been a synonym for success and good fortune. Henry Clay Frick, Pittsburgh’s Coke King, who canceled his reservations on the Titanic’s maiden voyage, was eulogized in terms that stand for his class: “His real hobby was speed, terrific speed, which came as a reaction from years of patient drudgery and as the revival of the impatience of an inherently eager disposition. Motoring he found delightfully exhilarating unless hampered by road regulation, to which ultimately, after securing the most expertly daring chauffeur to be found in France, he paid little heed. Nevertheless, with the multiplication of cars, came more and more ‘jams’ and hateful ‘crawling along’ until finally automobiling, as a pastime, was perforce abandoned.”8 In 1910 Frick sent his chauffeur for aviation lessons and ordered him to buy a good flying machine, as he was “sick” of motoring between New York City and the Myopia Hunt Club at South Hamilton, Massachusetts.9 This was the sort of speeding millionaire for whom the Titanic was built.

  John Jacob Astor IV was one of the first Americans to buy a motorcar, had eighteen vehicles in his garage, and, like Frick, felt more real and alive when bucketing along the roads with dauntless celerity. Once, bedecked in train driver’s overalls, he drove a steam engine at full tilt drawing a coach filled with millionaires. He was avid to hear the latest exploits of dashing young William K. Vanderbilt II, nephew of a man initially booked on the Titanic, who in quick succession, with the wild hurry of the aimless, was thrown from his Renault when it crashed at sixty miles per hour; scattered a hundred hapless spectators perched on wooden crates with one nonchalant twist of his steering wheel at the start of the Madrid to Paris motor race; fired his revolver at Provençal paysans who tried to lash him with whips when he almost smashed their cart by reckless speeding; and drove one mile in thirty-nine seconds at Ormond Beach, Florida. Several Titanic passengers were car mad or speed crazed. Algernon Barkworth, heir to a Hull shipping fortune, was proclaiming the need for better English roads at the moment when the Titanic met its iceberg. Another passenger who boarded the Titanic at Southampton was Washington Roebling II, heir to a New Jersey engineering fortune. The designer of the Roebling-Planché racing car, in which he finished second in the Vanderbilt Cup Race in 1910, he had just completed a motoring tour of Europe, no doubt at breakneck speed, in his new Fiat. The Michigan industrialist Dickinson Bishop, who boarded at Cherbourg with his nineteen-year-old bride, was to be met in New York by his newly bought Lozier, the most expensive line of cars then made in the United States, with new models priced at $7,750. In 1914, speeding after a dance at the Bishops’ country club, his car slammed into a tree, catapulting Helen Dickinson onto a sidewalk, fracturing her skull, and inducing epilepsy, which killed her two years later.

  Contempt, too, was basic to this world—not just the contempt of a Vanderbilt for peasants on their cart or gawpers on upturned boxes. Everywhere, it seemed, people were loftily insistent on their superiority while disdaining others’ inferiority. Few people bothered to notice the true value of others and behave accordingly. In Belfast a touchy group of bank clerks moved out of their boardinghouse when another lodger wearing workman’s clothes used the front door. They valued their dignity so highly because they paid so little for their rooms: they had little else to value except appearances. The lowly mechanic whom they despised eventually took control of the shipyard that built the Titanic: he became Viscount Pirrie, Knight of St. Patrick, Privy Counsellor, but remained so gnawed by false appearances that he lost a fortune living in a showy style that he could not afford. Several dozen Cornish miners traveling second class on the Titanic were heading for the Houghton County copper belt in Michigan. At sea or on land, aboveground or hundreds of feet below, they would never think of talking or eating with the trammers—lowly Finns and Swedes who, once the miners had broken the rock face, loaded the minerals onto mining cars, hauled them to the shaft, and lugged back timber and rails for new levels. Insecurity, scorn, and subordination were the psychological mainsprings of the Titanic era. People flinched from one another as upstarts, pretenders, and failures. Andrew Carnegie, the Steel King, derided Pierpont Morgan, whose company owned the Titanic, because he left only $68.3 million when he died: “to think he was not a rich man.”10

  “A wonderfully quick trip,” wrote Edith Wharton after crossing first class on a liner from New York to Cherbourg with over a thousand other souls: “Literally not a human being on board with whom to exchange a word.”11 An American patrician, drawing her money from inherited landholdings, Wharton deplored “the innumerable army of American businessmen—the sallow, undersized, lack-lustre drudges who have never lifted their heads from the ledger.”12 This fight for rank was humanity’s version of the farmyard pecking order: the merchant despised the penny-pinching shopkeeper, who frowned on the sordid publican, who looked down on the crafty farmer, who exploited the laborer tied to his toil. Most of them, in their way, were mad about the main chance but could not afford to recognize what they shared.

  The Titanic, after it sank, was the cynosure of envious eyes: its doom aroused malicious satisfaction as well as horror. It was packed with millionaires who provoked envy and awe, and migrants who aroused envy and contempt. The Atlantic people traffic was one long story of human denigration. In the turn-of-the-century prairie town of Galesburg, Illinois, a Jewish immigrant was called a “sheeny,” a Swede a “snorky,” a Yankee a “skinflint,” Italians were “dagos,” Germans were “Dutch,” Irish were “micks,” and blacks were “niggers” or “smokes.” “When you hated or wanted to be mean you said, ‘goddam mick’ or ‘goddam nigger,’” recalled the writer Carl Sandburg, “but if they called us ‘goddam snorkies’ . . . then we would look for bricks to heave.”13 A university professor wrote in 1914
that “Steerage passengers from a Naples boat show a distressing frequency of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins, poor features, skew faces, small or knobby crania, and backless heads.”14 He dismissed “the lower class” of east European Jewish migrants as “moral cripples” who “smirk and cringe and trick” once they reach America: “they rapidly push up into a position of prosperous parasitism, leaving scorn and curses in their wake.”15

  At one thirty the Titanic cast off from its Queenstown moorings and steamed out into the Atlantic carrying 1,320 passengers, a total of 2,235 souls including crew; 3,435 bags of mail, 6,000 tons of coal, 900 tons of baggage and freight. “In our wake soared and screamed hundreds of gulls, which had quarrelled and fought over the remnants of lunch pouring out of the waste pipes as we lay-to in the harbor entrance; and now they followed us in the expectation of further spoil,” Lawrence Beesley noted. “The gulls were still behind us when night fell, and still they screamed and dipped down into the broad wake of foam which we left behind.”16 Fishermen were out in small boats that afternoon, and fish slithered in the nets, floundering and entangled, as the great ship sailed past. Later, some of the Irish emigrants gathered at the stern for their final glimpse before Ireland disappeared beneath the horizon. Eugene Daly, a twenty-nine-year-old farm laborer from Athlone, played “Erin’s Lament” on his uilleann pipes. The most terrible wreck in the history of shipping was four days off. Thousands of miles to the west a shape of ice drifted southward from Greenland’s icy mountains.

  3

  Shipowners

  Middle-class people these, bankers very likely, not wholly

  Pure of the taint of the shop; will at table d’hôte and restaurant

  Have their shilling’s worth, their penny’s pennyworth even:

  Neither man’s aristocracy this, nor God’s, God knoweth!

  —ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, “AMOURS DE VOYAGE”

  There is no mistake about it, the ocean is simply disgusting,” a first-class passenger wrote to his wife as he crossed the Atlantic on the White Star liner Teutonic in 1905. “We are nearing New York, in a fierce snowstorm which makes the ship roll atrociously . . . We have had what is considered a good winter passage, but oh, Lord, it’s been abject misery almost all the while for me. I’ve not been actually sick, but I have never been actually without the feeling that I might be . . . It seems seven weeks, seven months, seven years since I left you—one never sleeps properly. It’s like a feverish nightmare the whole way. Then if it approaches a calm there’s sure to be a fog, and then you have the hooter blown every two minutes and everyone gets as jumpy as fish.”1

  This was the sort of experience that a new generation of superliners was meant to stop. Cunard enlisted a government subsidy to build its famous trio of ships—variously described as leviathans and ocean greyhounds—the Lusitania, Mauretania, and Aquitania: the first two of these had their maiden voyages in the autumn of 1907. It was in a preemptive move to mitigate the challenge posed by these new ships that White Star transferred its Atlantic traffic from Liverpool to Southampton in June 1907, shortly before the Cunarders entered service. Soon afterward Bruce Ismay, chairman of White Star, proposed building three liners surpassing all others in size and luxury, in order that his company might supplant Cunard as the dominant power on the North Atlantic run. Three ships were a logistic necessity for a company intending to provide a high-speed transatlantic service departing on set days of the week: that was why Cunard built the Lusitania, Mauretania, and Aquitania in 1907–1914 and Hamburg-Amerika their formidable triumvir, the Imperator, Vaterland, and Bismarck, in 1912–1914.

  Ismay’s proposal was the origin of the so-called Olympic class, comprising liners named the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic (the Britannic was sunk by a German mine in 1916). He mooted his idea at a dinner with Lord Pirrie, head of the Belfast shipyard of Harland & Wolff. He envisaged the Titanic, so he later said, as “the latest thing in the art of shipbuilding; absolutely no money was spared in her construction.”2 Pirrie enjoyed a reputation for infallibility, and was as much a mover of the big idea as Ismay. Both men knew from the outset that there was not a berth, dry dock, or pier in the world that could handle ships of the size they envisaged. The challenges ahead incited them.

  Long before the Titanic put to sea, men were at work on land creating the greatest ship on earth. Lord Pirrie, whose shipyard built it; Bruce Ismay, whose company operated it; and Pierpont Morgan, who owned it, were chief among these men. Pirrie, Ismay, and Morgan, with their political influence and monetary power, stood at the apex; beneath them lay the brute force of the shipyards and vaunting pride of the shipping lines.

  Lord Pirrie was a small, masterful man with intrepid nerves and unshakable self-confidence: he thought nothing of removing grit from one of his shipyard worker’s eyes with the blade of a knife. He measured situations swiftly, made up his mind in minutes, pounced on the weak points of other people’s arguments, rejected advice, and was “so independent he never agrees with anybody or in anything.”3 He was steely in enforcing compliance with his wishes: “Correct me if I am wrong, but did not I tell you to . . . ,” he would ask an underling—sometimes as a prelude to sacking him. Pirrie seldom read anything but business papers, technical journals, and newspapers. Occasionally, with pensive care, he studied books about masterful leaders who bent other men to their will and impressed their characters on their age. Pirrie worked long hours, but his vitality was never slaked: he took ten-minute power naps, and woke invigorated. He was a master salesman, who made a point of being seen smiling and spoke with an unabashed Belfast accent, which convinced other businessmen that he was sincere and trustworthy. It was said of him while the Titanic was being built, “Lord Pirrie has a sort of magic by which he charms orders for ships out of customers.”4

  Pirrie’s father had died in New York in 1849 when his only son was two. The fatherless boy was intensely close to his mother, who instilled in him the precepts that made him industrious, persevering, and forceful. When he turned fifteen, in 1862, she paid for him to be apprenticed to a young Belfast shipbuilder, Edward Harland. Harland’s shipyard covered part of a man-made island created by the soil and rubble when a new channel was cut to straighten the river Lagan as it meandered through Belfast, and was only a few miles from the Irish Sea. Harland was an innovative shipbuilder who installed iron instead of wooden upper decks in his steamers, thus strengthening hulls by creating a box of metal girders, and he increased the capacity of his ships by having flat bottoms and square bilges. He dispensed with bowsprits and figureheads, though his steamships still carried masts and sails until the late nineteenth century. Belfast technical expertise was melded with Hamburg Jewish financial skills when in 1862 Harland took Gustav Wolff as his business partner.

  Pirrie achieved a partnership in Harland & Wolff at the age of twenty-seven, traveled abroad seeking orders from foreign shipowners, studied the amenities in top European hotels, and adapted them for the public saloons of Belfast-built liners. He became chairman of the shipyards following Harland’s death in 1895, and after 1906, when he bought Wolff’s shareholding, turned them into his personal fiefdom. He kept control by hugging all crucial information jealously to himself. His fellow directors were marginalized: when he was away from Belfast, meetings were chaired by his wife. Copies of all letters sent from the shipyards were submitted to his scrutiny. His managers were never privy to the shipyard’s finances or contractual details with shipowners. A ship’s architect who discussed finance with a shipowner was fired by Pirrie, who ordered that the man’s locked desk be broken open to find what further indiscretions had been committed. He was so secretive that when he died, no one else in the company knew the state of negotiations with its potential customers, which threw the business into crisis.

  Ships were built to Harland & Wolff designs: Pirrie consulted shipowners only as to general specifications, sketching rough designs for every vessel personally in consultation with the owners, and charging building costs plu
s 4 percent profit.* Under Pirrie’s propulsion Harland & Wolff was by 1900 the biggest shipbuilder in the world (employing nine thousand workers and producing one hundred thousand tons of shipping a year). The English newspaper editor W. T. Stead, who perished in the Titanic disaster, profiled Pirrie shortly before the liner’s maiden voyage: “He is the greatest shipbuilder the world has ever seen. He has built more ships and bigger ships than any man since the days of Noah. Not only he builds them; but he owns them; directs them; controls them on all the seas of the world.”5

  Pirrie’s control of the seas was enforced by his involvement with Pierpont Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine Company, incorporated in New Jersey, which in 1902 bought the White Star Line. As a result of this deal, IMM contracted that all orders for new vessels, and for repairs undertaken in Britain, were to be placed with the Belfast shipyard if its prices were competitive with those of U.S. shipyards. Harland & Wolff was thus practically constituted as IMM’s shipbuilders and secured most of the repair work for IMM’s great fleet: repairs were reckoned to be more profitable than building, and kept the yards busy when new orders were scarce. An American associate wrote of Pirrie: “Born to command, he had larger ideas than others and a greater insight into men.” The American likened him to the railway man Jay Gould, the oilman Rockefeller, the steel man Carnegie: “like these Pirrie stands out conspicuously—giants all of them among dwarfs.” He seemed “easily the biggest man in Ireland.”6