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

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  There was no counterpart of Europe’s haute juiverie in America. Neither the Guggenheims nor the Strauses had any hope of the acceptance in society enjoyed by the Sassoons and Rothschilds, or King Edward VII’s trusty Sir Ernest Cassel (who tried to stop the sale of White Star to Pierpont Morgan to please the monarch). However intelligent, inventive, generous, and charming, Jewish Americans had no chance of assimilation except—like Henry Harris—in showbiz. A respected American sociologist had written in 1906 of the population of Jewish districts: “It is a haggling, bargaining, pushing, crowding, seething mass . . . cowed by fear, unmanned by persecution; a thing to jeer at, to ridicule, to plunder and to kill.” Many Jews, he charmingly explained, conceded their “racial faults” and accepted that their “people are greedy, greasy and pushing, or doggedly humble; as might be expected of hunted human beings, who for 2,000 years have known no peace, wherever the cross overshadowed them.”23 This was the bigotry with which Guggenheim and Straus (to say nothing of Jakob Birnbaum, George Rosenshine, and Abram Lincoln Salomon) had to contend.

  There were two family parties led by North American railway colossi on board the Titanic. John Borland Thayer, vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest American railroad as measured by traffic and revenue, was returning from a visit to a diplomat friend posted in Berlin, accompanied by his wife, Marion, “one of the handsomest women in Philadelphia”;24 their teenage son, John B. Thayer Junior, known as “Jack”; and his wife’s maid, Margaret Fleming. Thayer was also a director of the Long Island Railroad and other concerns, and an expert in managing freight traffic. The other railway titan was Charles M. Hays, president of Canada’s Grand Trunk Railroad, a stocky, heavily bearded, pomaded man whose expansive ambitions and wish to make his will inexorable had left him looking careworn.

  Born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1856, Hays began as a railway clerk with the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad in Saint Louis, Missouri. He moved to Montreal in 1896 as general manager of Canada’s heavily indebted Grand Trunk Railway and gained a reputation for invincibility after imposing reforms that coincided with the boom years of 1896–1913. As general manager (and president from 1909), he impressed, at times captivated, the Canadian prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Hays’s workweek was filled with swift, obligatory action: he believed in big decisions and unfaltering purposes. In every predicament he chose the course that demanded the greatest energy. Risk was his stimulant. He convinced Laurier that Canada needed a second transcontinental railway, running along a less populous northern route than the existing Canadian Pacific Railway, and extracted a large government subsidy toward the cost of building one.

  Construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway began in 1903. Hays determined that the Grand Trunk Pacific would be a Titanic of railways, built to the highest standards. However, his perfectionism slowed completion of the project, and by 1912 the company’s debts were immense. Hays’s solution—which smacks of blind obstinacy or unreasonable pride—was to spend more money by upgrading rolling stock, laying double tracks, and building luxurious hotels in the great cities. The first of these hotels, Château Laurier in Ottawa, had recently been completed, and Hays needed to attend its ceremonial opening later in the month. Ostensibly, he had visited Europe to study Ritzonian hotels, with a view to improving the projected Grand Trunk hotels, but his most pressing task was to reassure his London board and British investors. Some considered that Hays had deceived his London directors about the Grand Trunk Pacific project: his policies certainly lured the railway headlong toward insolvency. In 1919 GTP defaulted on its borrowing and went into receivership, which soon necessitated the nationalization of the whole network. Hays’s tactics ended in ignominious failure.

  Hays was traveling with his wife, Clara; her maid, Mary Anne “Annie” Perrault; his daughter Orian (aged twenty-seven); her stockbroker husband, Thornton Davidson; and Vivian Payne, a fatherless boy of twenty-two who, after a shining career at Montreal High School, had become Hays’s protégé and personal secretary. Thornton Davidson was the son of Sir Charles Davidson, chief justice of Quebec: the family were staunch Protestants, and the elder son, Shirley Davidson, one of Canada’s best racing yachtsmen, drowned himself in a suicide pact on the Saint Lawrence River in 1907 with his Catholic fiancée, whom the judge forbade the boy to marry. Thornton Davidson had a square face with a tenacious, emphatic, and uncompromising look. He ran his own brokerage firm in Montreal and was one of those stockbrokers whose success was compounded of force and ease: he was a sporty clubman who pressed palms, exchanged confidences, and made deals as a member of the Racquet Club, the Montreal Hunt Club, the Montreal Jockey Club, the Montreal Polo Club, the Montreal Amateur Athletics Association, and the Royal Saint Lawrence Yacht Club.

  This was an exciting era to be a Canadian stockbroker, especially if one was not restrained by obtrusive scruples. Canada’s first burst of industrialization occurred in textiles, brewing, flour milling, iron, rolling stock, and farm implements. Its second wave of industrialization, during the Laurier boom era of 1896–1913, derived from steel, precision machinery, cement, chemicals, and electric power generation. It was during this boom that the embezzling banker “Diamond Jim” Baxter amassed the fortune that allowed his widow, Hélène, to travel so royally with her children on the Titanic. After 1909, Canada was in the throes of a merger boom, with promoters floating new businesses and creating paper millionaires. There was a lot of sudden, showy, precarious opulence in the sphere of Hays and Davidson. Bernard Berenson visited Montreal in 1914: “the one thing these provincial millionaires think of,” reported his wife, “is to build ultra hideous brown-stone houses (here the stone is a gloomy slate-colour) and hang in their multifarious and over-heated rooms a vast collection of gilt-framed mediocre pictures, often spurious and almost always, even if authentic, poor. The usual acres of Barbizon output greet us here, some of your beloved Rembrandts, a few real Goyas and fake Velásquezes, endless ‘English School’ and ‘French XVIII Century’ pictures, Japanese knickknacks enough to bury you—and all dreary and horrible, and affording endless satisfaction to their owners.”25

  The collecting bug was well represented on the Titanic by the Wideners. Old Peter Widener, the Philadelphia tramway millionaire and associate of Pierpont Morgan in IMM’s takeover of White Star, amassed a collection of paintings in his Lynnewood Hall mansion. His son Joseph collected promiscuously, too, while his other son, George, cheerfully paid for his wife’s collection of silver and porcelain, and his young grandson Harry was in 1912 shaping up to become America’s finest bibliophile.

  Young Americans reared at empyrean social heights, like Harry Widener, began crossing the Atlantic on the fastest steamers of the most expensive lines when they were small children. Edith Wharton described a youth called Troy Belknap who from the age of six had embarked in New York for Europe every June. His family would alight at the New York docks from a large silent car, he would kiss his father good-bye and shake hands with the chauffeur who was his special friend, and mount the gangplank in file behind his mother’s maid. On board, one steward would carry off his mother’s bag while another led away her French bulldog. Then for “six golden days Troy . . . ranged the decks, splashed in the blue salt water brimming his huge porcelain tub, lunched and dined with the grown-ups in the Ritz restaurant, and swaggered about in front of the children who had never crossed before and didn’t know the stewards, or the purser, or the captain’s cat, or on which deck you might exercise your dog, or how to induce the officer on the watch to let you scramble up a minute to the bridge.” On the seventh morning they would reach Cherbourg, and Troy Belknap would traipse down the gangplank with his mother, her maid, and the French bulldog toward a smiling, saluting French chauffeur (to whom he was as devoted as to the New York driver). “Then—in a few minutes, so swiftly and smilingly was the way of Mrs. Belknap smoothed—the noiseless motor was off, and they were rushing eastwards through the orchards of Normandy . . . beautiful things flew past them; thatche
d villages with square-towered churches in hollows of the deep green country, or grey shining towns above rivers on which cathedrals seemed to be moored like ships.”26 Troy Belknap almost seems modeled on Harry Widener, who embarked at Cherbourg on the Titanic with his parents: they had been staying at the Ritz in Paris and were traveling with their servants Edwin Keeping and Emily Geiger.

  Harry Widener had been born in Philadelphia in 1885. He had a rational, ordered childhood that left him confident and untroubled. “The marvel is that Harry is so entirely unspoiled by his fortune,” a visitor to Lynnewood said. It was at Harvard in 1906 that he began buying Charles Dickens first editions, as well as folio works by Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. With the help of his mother, in 1907, he bought a first folio Shakespeare for the highest price then known for a folio of its kind. He may have relished the eager exchange of heretical ideas when he was a Harvard boy, but after college his course was conventionally disciplined. An investment manager in his grandfather’s business, he crossed to Europe several times each year and when in London scouted the rare book dealer Bernard Quaritch’s shop or took him to lunch at the Ritz. “So many of your American collectors refer to books in terms of steel rails; with Harry it is a genuine and all-absorbing passion, and he is so entirely devoid of side,” Quaritch said. “Had he lived, he would no doubt have gathered one of the most remarkable libraries in America. He was a most amiable young man & greatly liked by everyone who came into contact with him.”27 Several rare books lately bought by him had already been remitted to America on the Carpathia, but he was carrying with him a copy of the rare 1598 edition of Francis Bacon’s essays that he had bought from Quaritch two weeks earlier for £260. Its money value was infinitesimal compared with that of the pearls with which his mother was traveling, which were insured for £150,000.28

  French bulldogs, it will be noted, played a part in Troy Belknap’s Atlantic crossings—appropriately, for this muscular, compact, frisky, and bat-eared breed provided fashionable trophies for Americans returning from Paris. French bulldogs were the Titanic dogs. A French bulldog, Gamin de Pycombe, belonging to Robert Daniel of Philadelphia, was last seen swimming for its life in the ocean. Moreover, the greatest American force in the world of French bulldogs, Samuel Goldenberg, boarded at Cherbourg with his wife, Nella. In 1902 he had bought in France a dog, Nellcote Gamin, which he imported to his kennels at Riverdale-on-Hudson, where it became the progenitor of most French bulldogs in America. In 1905, having just turned forty, Goldenberg retired from his business as a New York lace importer to live in Paris, where he founded the French Bulldog Club of Paris. He was traveling to New York so that he could judge the French Bulldog Club of America’s show at the Waldorf-Astoria on April 20.

  At Cherbourg, Henry Harper, scion of the American publishing family, boarded with his Pekingese, Sun Yat-sen, and handsome Egyptian dragoman, Hammad Hassab; Margaret Hays, Elizabeth Rothschild, and Philadelphia attorney William Dulles each boarded with a Pomeranian; and Helen Bishop had a lapdog, Frou-frou, which she had bought in Florence on her honeymoon. The Astors had their Airedale, and a spinster called Ann Isham, a Chicago lawyer’s daughter who lived in Paris, may have been accompanied by a Newfoundland or Great Dane; William Carter by a King Charles spaniel, and Harry Anderson by a chow.*

  Lapdogs were objectionable to Francis Millet, a sixty-five-year-old American painter, the head of the American Academy in Rome, who was returning from attending a ceremony there honoring a benefaction to the academy by Pierpont Morgan. “Queer lot of people on the ship,” Millet wrote in a letter posted at Queenstown. “Looking over the list I only find three or four people I know but there are . . . a number of obnoxious, ostentatious American women, the scourge of any place they infest, and worse on shipboard than anywhere. Many of them carry tiny dogs, and lead husbands around like pet lambs. I tell you the American woman is a buster. She should be put in a harem and kept there.”29

  Millet was an interesting man. Born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, in 1846, he served as a drummer boy and surgical assistant with Union troops in the Civil War. After a shining career at Harvard, he worked on the Boston Courier, but lithography and sketching were his avocations, and he forsook journalism to attend the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Antwerp, where he was awarded a gold medal. He was a hardy traveler who acted as a war correspondent during the Russo-Turkish conflict of 1877–1878. Millet’s friend Henry James spoke of “his magnificent manly self . . . irradiating . . . beautiful genius and gallantry.”30 He published travel reportage, essays, short stories, and a translation of Sebastopol Sketches, Tolstoy’s fictionalized account of his Crimean War experiences. Murals at the Baltimore Customs House, Trinity Church in Boston, and other public buildings were painted by him. Photographs of Millet show a quietly handsome, distinguished man with an unwavering look and a calm, determined manner with no fierceness or bravado.

  Millet owned a property at East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, but also shared a house in an old-fashioned district of Washington, D.C., with President Taft’s military adviser Archie Butt, who was nineteen years his junior. On March 2 they had left America together for Italy on the Norddeutscher-Lloyd steamship Berlin. “If the old ship goes down, you will find my affairs in shipshape condition,” Butt told his sister-in-law on the eve of departure.31 He was the cynosure of every eye on the deck of the Berlin—fascinating a deaf-mute sponge merchant from Patras—because of his glorious apparel: bright copper-colored trousers with matching Norfolk jacket, fastened by big ball-shaped buttons of red porcelain, a lavender tie, tall bay-wing collar, derby hat with broad brim, patent leather shoes with white tops, a bunch of lilies in his buttonhole, and a cambric handkerchief tucked in his left sleeve.32 The two men returned to America together (Butt in cabin B-38, Millet in cabin E-38), although Butt boarded at Southampton and Millet some hours later at Cherbourg.

  Their affection for each other was undying, as was recognized when the memorial fountain erected, by Joint Resolution of Congress, on Executive Avenue in Washington, D.C., was named the Butt-Millet Fountain. “Millet, my artist friend who lives with me” was Butt’s designation of his companion: their only recorded discord was over Millet’s choice of wallpaper for their shared home. “Both my bedroom and dressing-room are walled with red and pink roses, from buds to full-blown flowers, and even when I shut my eyes I seem to see them tumbling over each other,” Butt had lately complained. It put him in mind of Elagabulus, the Roman emperor who outraged the Praetorian Guard by treating a blond slave charioteer, Hierocles, as his husband. “That artistic if somewhat decadent gentleman,” Butt recalled, “when he wanted to rid himself of certain enemies both male and female, invited them to a feast and, after he had withdrawn, let down a shower of roses from the ceiling. They played with them at first and pelted each other with them, but they continued to fall until they were smothered to death by them.”33

  The Butt-Millet household was staffed by Filipino boys. In 1911 “a very delightful person” named Archie Clark-Kerr came to live there, “a sensible youth [who] only wanted to be let alone, not to be discussed every time he batted an eye.”34 Kerr (born in Australia, where his father owned a sheep station, but histrionic about his Scottish ancestry) was a high-spirited, playful attaché at the British embassy who opened Butt’s eyes: “did you know that the kilt is worn without any drawers? I never knew it before Archie Kerr came to live with me.”35 (Thirty-five years later Kerr returned to Washington as British ambassador: he had been created Lord Inverchapel, taking as his heraldic supporters two full-frontally naked Greek athletes, suggestively juxtaposed with a Latin motto that could be rendered “Though shaken, I rise.” As ambassador, Inverchapel alarmed the prudes of the American security services by going to stay in Eagle Grove, Iowa, with a strapping farm boy whom he had met in Washington.) Butt, too, enjoyed masculine vigor: John Tener, the major league baseball player who became governor of Pennsylvania in 1911, he described appreciatively as “a big, stalwart man, handsome as a Greek athlete.”36r />
  Butt had been born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1865, a few months after the surrender of the Confederates in the Civil War, and remained an unrepentant Southerner. He graduated from university in Tennessee and, like Millet, started as a journalist—acting as Washington correspondent for southern newspapers. On the outbreak of the Spanish-American War he joined the army, and later served in the Philippines, where he impressed President Theodore Roosevelt and the secretary of war, William Taft. Butt was recruited to the White House as presidential aide-de-camp, and remained as military aide when Taft succeeded Roosevelt as president in 1909. A strongly built man who looked impressive in his spurs, plumed hat, and elaborate uniform (“dressed in raiment which puts out the eye of Rembrandt,” as Taft said),37 Butt acted as the president’s chief of protocol, secret keeper, and buffer.

  Butt was loyal, disinterested, affectionate, and sympathetic. He liked to be useful, popular, and amusing: though a modest man, he had a swelling sense of accomplishment when his arrangements, introductions, and discreet advice went off perfectly, as they usually did. Butt misplayed shots in order to revive the golf-mad president when he was disheartened, sat up late playing bridge with him, laughed at his dull legal jokes, mitigated his boredom during official lunches for Sunday School teachers, ate the horrible meals that the obese president liked (broiled chicken, hominy, and melon for breakfast; fish chowder, mustard pickles, baked beans, and brown bread for lunch), salved the dignity of visiting politicos who did not know how to eat artichokes or cucumbers, mollified the president when saucy brats yelled “Hello, Fatty” at him. Butt’s hospitality was delightful. “People come early to my house and always stay late and seem merry while they are here,” he wrote. At his New Year’s Eve party—attended by Taft, cabinet members, ambassadors, generals, Supreme Court judges, and “the young fashionable crowd”—he served nothing more elaborate than eleven gallons of eggnog, whipped by his Filipino boys, with hot buttered biscuits and ham served by his black washerwoman.38