Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From
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After failing to involve Cunard, the new combine was unveiled on April 19, 1902, in both New York and London. The new company (holding the majority stock in the Leyland, White Star, Atlantic Transport, and other shipping lines) was named International Mercantile Marine. Pirrie as well as Ismay joined its directorate. Morgan assembled a $50 million underwriting syndicate to support the bond issues needed to raise the initial cash requirements: $36 million was raised in New York and $14 million in London, with Harland & Wolff subscribing £615,438, which constituted a massive short-term commitment. However, the failure to include Cunard in the trust damaged the issue of IMM ordinary stock, much of which was left in the hands of the promoting syndicate. Although owned by a New Jersey company, the vessels of the English companies were kept on the British register. “The irrepressible and insatiable Morgan Syndicate” has bought White Star, the Economist reported in April 1902. The arrangement might have pleased shareholders in costly but modestly remunerative steamships, but to traders and travelers the prospect of higher freights and fares was unwelcome, “and to the patriotic Briton it is not a pleasant thought that the great transatlantic trade is in future to be ‘bossed’ by a syndicate of American capitalists.” The Economist opined that White Star submitted “too readily to the schemes of the American capitalists who, with all their bounce, were really powerless to hurt them.”18
It was soon clear that the Americans had prodigally overpaid for the English companies. Ismay remained as White Star’s chairman and accepted the presidency of IMM in 1904 when Morgan relented in his stipulation that he must move to New York. When Ismay’s appointment as president was announced, the Economist recalled the flamboyance with which IMM had been launched. “We were assured at the time that the ‘Morganization’ of the North Atlantic would shortly become an accomplished fact, that the British flag on the ocean highway between England and the United States was doomed to be overshadowed by the Stars and Stripes, and that . . . substantial benefits would accrue to the companies which threw in their lot with the great Morgan combine.” Within two years the disillusion was absolute: IMM had bond capital of £14 million, share capital exceeding £20 million, but its net profit, after interest charges, was a measly £71,059. Ismay, declared the Economist, faced “a gigantic task.”19
The British government’s subsidy of Cunard forced IMM to build competitive new ships costing huge sums that the combine was not earning. Moreover, IMM was a holding company, which permitted its constituent companies to retain their previous national registrations, house flags, and identities. It was the Humpty Dumpty of Morgan’s combines, in which the component pieces were never put together. There was neither integration of its subsidiaries nor rationalization of its operations. As a result, IMM never achieved the economies that a tight, streamlined organization would have yielded. Harland & Wolff held £250,000 worth of bonds in IMM, but after these had yielded no dividends, Pirrie undertook in 1907 to buy them personally over the course of the next five years. This left him with a large, unprofitable stake in the company. English shipowners, a financial journalist reported in 1907, “all know that the American Combine does not pay, and that it never will pay on the immense capital recklessly sunk in it.”20 IMM defaulted on its bonds, and a year after Morgan’s death in 1913, his Humpty Dumpty combine went into receivership. In 1927 Lord Kylsant, Pirrie’s successor at Harland & Wolff, paid £7 million to buy White Star back from IMM.21 The singular means by which Kylsant financed this deal resulted in his serving a year in prison for issuing a false company prospectus.
“He’s a brigand like all these great businessmen,” Roger Fry decided of Morgan. “ ‘Business is warfare’ is their acknowledged motto.”22 The Titanic was a ship that superbrigands owned and fighting Irishmen built.
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Shipbuilders
The land of scholars and saints:
Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,
Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints,
The born martyr and the gallant ninny;
The grocer drunk with the drum,
The land-owner shot in his bed, the angry voices
Piercing the broken fanlight in the slum,
The shawled woman weeping at the garish altar.
—LOUIS MACNEICE, “AUTUMN JOURNAL”
Thomas Andrews was the Titanic’s designer. From boyhood to death, he was an out-and-out company man. His energy, his plans, his imagination, and his devotion were pledged to Harland & Wolff. His mother was Pirrie’s sister, and at the age of sixteen, in 1889, he went to train in his uncle’s shipyard. He toiled in turn in the joiner’s shop, the main store, and the molding loft. The cabinetmakers, shipwrights, painters, fitters, pattern makers, and smiths brought him their skills. Eighteen months in the drawing office completed his apprenticeship. “His job, first and last and always” was what drove him: “that was the man’s way.”1 Andrews was appointed in 1905, aged thirty-two, as chief of the Design Department, and in 1907 as managing director. Though his uncle never trusted him with financial confidences, he was an omnipresent force at Harland & Wolff, controlling his unruly workmen. His biographer pictured him as “big and strong, a paint-smeared bowler hat on his crown, grease on his boots and the pockets of his blue jacket stuffed with plans, now making his daily rounds of the Yards, now consulting his Chief, now conferring with a foreman, now interviewing an owner, now poring over intricate calculations in the Drawing office, now superintending the hoisting of a boiler by the 200-ton crane into some newly launched ship by a wharf.”
There were other images of him at work: running amok among a gang of workmen whom he surprised heating their tea cans before horn blow; lambasting men whom he found stealing a crafty smoke below a tunnel shaft; kicking aside a red hot rivet that had fallen fifty feet and missed his head by inches, and striding on with a laugh. Another tale had him standing by a ship’s precarious gangway down which four thousand hungry workmen were jostling homeward for their evening meal. When the gangway’s guard rope snapped, and his workers were at risk of a ninety-foot plunge, his commanding voice rang out, “Stand back, men!” and singly he held the thousands back until the rope was repaired. Andrews would often intervene in fights or sectarian violence among his workforce. “Once he found a great fellow ill-treating a small foreman who had docked his wages; whereupon Andrews took off his coat and hammered the bully. During labour and party troubles, he several times, at risk of his life, saved men from the mob.”2
The Hamburg-Amerika liner Amerika (22,225 tons), which was built under Andrews’s aegis and launched at Belfast in 1905, broke molds—and not just because it had the first electric elevator in an Atlantic liner. Until Amerika, the first-class interiors of liners were a muddled pastiche of styles: Tudor, Jacobean, Olde Englishe, Louis XIV, Italian Renaissance. This sterile fakery appeared even in innovative ships like the Mauretania, which, having copied the Amerika by having a brace of elevators, enclosed them in sham Renaissance grillwork made of aluminum. But in 1903 Albert Ballin hired Charles-Frédéric Mewès and his partner, Arthur Davis (designers of the Carlton and Ritz hotels in London), to work on the first-class interiors of the Amerika; at the same time he enlisted César Ritz to train the catering staff to Ritz-Carlton standards. Mewès and Davis produced striking designs for the Amerika and later worked on the ritzy interiors of Hamburg-Amerika’s Kaiserin Auguste Victoria and the Cunarder Aquitania. Davis was told by his employers that their passengers were mostly seasick Americans who wanted to forget that they were on a ship when they went to sea. They sent him across the Atlantic to watch passengers in midocean. Voyagers on these Atlantic leviathans were not amateur yachtsmen out to enjoy the ocean waves, he saw, but squeamish types who expected Ritz-Carlton or Waldorf-Astoria standards on land and sea.
At 10,650 tons the Inman Line’s City of Paris had been the world’s largest ship when it was launched in 1889; by 1907, within twenty years, Cunard’s Mauretania—“the monstrous nine-decked city” with “seventy thousand horses,
” as Kipling called it—was triple that size.3 The Lusitania and the Mauretania were larger than any ships yet built, and had the first steam turbine engines to be installed on a passenger line, which guaranteed a speed of 24½ knots and provided more. They immediately took the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossings. Speed not only satisfied the impatience of rich Americans but shortened their sufferings in rough weather. “By night-fall,” wrote a first-class American heading for Paris in 1907, “turbid waves were upon us, & they shook & harried & hunted us from one continent to the other. We really had a brutal crossing, but it was a very short one, luckily, as we were on a fast boat.”4
White Star commissioned the Olympic, the Titanic, and then the Britannic to compete with the Mauretania, the Lusitania, and ultimately the Aquitania. A new double slipway was erected at Pirrie’s shipyard: on December 16, 1908, work began on Keel 400, later the Olympic; and on March 31, 1909, on Keel 401, later the Titanic. By the end of 1910, the shipyard had 11,389 employees, double the number working there a year earlier and a fillip to the prosperity of all Belfast. White Star did not try to compete with the Cunarders on speed but chose to build slower, larger, more luxurious ships that were lean and elegant in design—far removed from the lumbering bulk of Hamburg-Amerika’s Imperator. Whereas the Mauretania (31,938 tons) was designed to carry 563 first-class, 464 second-class, and 1,138 third-class passengers; and the Imperator (51,969 tons), 700 first-class, 600 second-class, 1,000 third-class, and 1,800 steerage passengers; the Olympic (45,324 tons) was the first and only vessel to carry about the same number of first-class and third-class passengers (about 1,000 each) and 500 second-class passengers. It was launched in October 1910 (sales of spectators’ tickets raised £486 for the Pirries’ pet charity, the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast) and made its maiden voyage in June 1911.
The arrival of the Olympic in New York was a major event. The ship steamed up the Hudson, as the stewardess Violet Jessop described it, “flag-bedecked and gay, fussily escorted by all manner of official and unofficial small craft, up past the huge buildings in Battery Park, the wharves and ships, all of which appeared to shimmer with the moving, cheering mass of people. Not a window, however small, but had a little flag or handkerchief waving from it, as we slowly passed to the accompaniment of shrill tootings from everything afloat that had a whistle to blow.” Thousands of inquisitive sightseers crowded on board during the next forty-eight hours with strident and sometimes inane questions. On the second night, White Star invited its six hundred agents, drawn from across the United States, to inspect the liner and enjoy a boozy dinner. “As the hours wore on, both they and their steward escorts—by now more or less on a brotherly footing—began to show signs of wear,” Jessop recalled. “At 3 A.M., there was a lull in the convivial din, after which men were found sprawling asleep in the most out-of-the-way places: inside baths and half under beds, where they had seemingly dropped in their tracks . . . Others wandered aimlessly about, apparently lost and muttering for some guiding soul to rescue them. It took many hours to reunite coats, hats and shoes with their rightful owners but everyone voted the Olympic and its crew ‘swell.’ The surprise was that she was not burnt to the water’s edge, seeing the masses of cigarette and cigar ends swept up next day, and the burnt patches that could not be swept up.”5
The Olympic replicated the amenities that the rich expected of their luxury hotels in New York or the European capitals and watering places. Lord Winterton, who crossed from New York on her in 1912, recorded his pleasure in his diary. “She really is a fine ship. Exceeds one’s imagination. Racquet Court, Gymnasium, Swimming Bath, Restaurant, & Public Rooms are splendid. Decorations all over in real and not (as generally at sea) in tawdry taste. Food in Restaurant quite excellent. No ‘shippy’ smell.” His cabin was larger than the bedroom of his bachelor chambers in Mayfair, and his first day on board delighted him: “one really feels as if one was in a Sea-Side Hotel.” The other first-class passengers included the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, their daughter Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower, Lord Alistair Kerr, and several American youths going up to Oxford or Cambridge. Life on land seemed drab to Winterton after the Olympic. “A glorious blue sky & warm sun in the Solent, and we were able to sit out on deck and listen to the band. Got to Southampton at 2 P.M. & found a dirty old train, with no Sunday papers on sale, labelled as the ‘White Star’ Express. This was our welcome to England!! Before reaching London, we ran into dense grey sooty fog.”6
Ismay and Andrews traveled on the Olympic’s maiden voyage and made close observations that resulted in changes to the plans for the Titanic. The second ship, which was three inches longer, thus came nearer to White Star’s ideal of perfection. Ismay decided that some of the deck space on the Olympic was superfluous and should be allotted for passenger cabins on the Titanic, which was able to accommodate 163 more passengers than its sister ship—mostly in first class. On both the top deck, known as the boat deck, and the upper promenade deck, known as A deck, more cabins were added. Moreover, on the promenade deck, known as B, two specially spacious first-class suites were installed comprising a sitting room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and servants’ quarters—for which £870 a trip would be charged at the height of the season. Each of these suites had a private promenade deck, protected from the sea winds by steel screens pierced by large windows and ornamented by mock-Elizabethan half-timbered walls and bogus oak beams on the ceiling. One of these princely suites was allocated for Pierpont Morgan’s use whenever he crossed the Atlantic. Ismay also fussed about the potato peeler in the crew’s galley, wanted cigar holders to be fitted in first-class lavatories, found the beds too springy, and stipulated that sliding glass windows should be installed on the A deck promenade to protect strollers from sea winds and spray. These windows, which were fitted on the Titanic, became known as the Ismay screens.
Harland & Wolff identified three hazards that might make a liner sink. It might run aground; it might collide with another ship or obstacle; or another ship might run into it. To meet the first danger, they provided the Titanic with a double bottom, though not a double hull, as Cunard had specified for the Lusitania and Mauretania. Seven feet above the lower steel plates they inserted a second set of steel plates so that if the keel were holed by the seabed, the ship would not be flooded by water. To meet the second and third dangers, the Titanic was fitted with fifteen bulkheads that divided the hull into sixteen watertight compartments. The bulkheads required apertures so that crew and passengers could move about the ship, but these were fitted with watertight doors that could be shut with the flick of a switch by the ship’s officers. Each bulkhead door automatically shut if the compartment became flooded with more than six inches of water. If the Titanic’s bow were smashed by a collision, it would stay afloat even if the first four of these compartments were flooded. If another ship stove in its side, the Titanic could float with any two of its central compartments flooded. This seemed impressive, even indefeasible, for most ships had only one or two bulkheads in the bow as a defense against collision—not sixteen watertight compartments. However, the bulkheads added to the ship’s cost, and Harland & Wolff’s designers concluded that it was unnecessary for them to reach higher than D deck fore and aft and E deck amidships. In places, therefore, the bulkheads were no more than fifteen feet above the waterline. Although the Titanic would not sink if the first four compartments were holed in a head-on collision, or if two compartments were breached by another ship hitting broadside, it was a different matter if the front six compartments were somehow damaged. Then the bow would sink so low that water would flood over the top of the bulkhead separating the sixth from the seventh compartment, and from the seventh to the eighth—a process that would continue until the ship sank. This seemed unthinkable.
Alexander Carlisle, Harland & Wolff’s general manager, who was in charge of the equipment and decoration of the Olympic and Titanic, anticipated that the Board of Trade, the government department regulating British-registered ships, would
introduce regulations requiring a greater provision of lifeboats on superliners. His brother-in-law Pirrie told him to make plans on that assumption, and he brought proposals for forty-eight or even sixty-four lifeboats to conferences with White Star. At these conferences Pirrie and Ismay did all the talking: Carlisle recalled that he and Ismay’s deputy, Harold Sanderson, “were more or less dummies.”7 At one day-long meeting, they talked for a total of five or ten minutes about lifeboat provision; and despite Carlisle’s misgivings, which he dared not express before Pirrie, the provision of lifeboats was cut from forty-eight to twenty once it became clear that the Board of Trade was not going to alter its regulations. This reduced clutter on the deck as well as costs, but meant that the liner would have lifeboat capacity for a maximum of one-third of its passengers and crew. The risk seemed minimal when the consensus held that the liner was invulnerable.
It is notorious that the Titanic was certified to carry 3,547 passengers and crew but had lifeboat capacity for only 1,178 souls. Indeed, the ship was certified to carry 1,134 steerage passengers and would have required nineteen lifeboats if each of them were to have a place. Instead it carried fourteen wooden lifeboats (thirty feet long) with an official capacity of 65; four Engelhardt boats with collapsible canvas sides, which could take 47 passengers apiece; and two cutters for rescuing people who had fallen overboard, which were both capable of taking 40 people (a total deficiency of 2,369 places). This was not markedly worse than the figures for other liners of all nationalities and sizes. The French vessel La Provence was best, in providing for 82 percent of passengers and crew; but the Cunarder Carmania could only account for 29 percent. Cunard’s Mauretania and Lusitania both had capacity for 2,350 passengers and 900 crew but with twenty lifeboats had a deficiency of 2,150. Hamburg-Amerika’s two liners Kaiserin Auguste Victoria and Amerika could each carry 2,770 passengers with 550 crew and had twenty-four boats, leaving a deficiency of 2,000 people. Norddeutscher-Lloyd’s George Washington could carry 3,262 passengers and 590 crew and had twenty lifeboats, making a deficiency of 2,752. The figures for the Holland-Amerika line’s Rotterdam were 3,585 passengers, 475 crew, and eighteen lifeboats, leaving a deficiency of 3,070.