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

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Mauritz Björnström-Steffansson was a twenty-eight-year-old chemical engineering graduate of Stockholm Institute of Technology and the son of a leader of the Swedish wood pulp industry. He was a sharp, determined young man who knew how to advance his interests in a balanced manner and had first crossed the Atlantic in 1909 intent on becoming a rich, well-placed New Yorker. In this he succeeded, for in 1917 he was to marry Mary Eno Pinchot, heiress of a New York wallpaper and timber fortune, to whom he had reportedly been introduced by Helen Candee. The marriage fixed him in a political and business nexus including Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist governor of Pennsylvania, and the English diplomat Lord Colyton. Björnström-Steffansson’s cold pursuit of money elbowed aside mellower traits or more sensual appetites. During the 1920s he amassed holdings in the Canadian paper and pulp sectors and bought real estate around Park Avenue in New York before its remunerative redevelopment with apartment buildings and hotels.

  If Björnström-Steffansson was hawklike, Hugh Woolner was vulpine. Aged forty-five, he was the son of an eminent sculptor and a cousin of Evelyn Waugh. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1888 and was elected a member of the London Stock Exchange in 1892 at the age of twenty-six. In 1893, using £7,000 inherited from his father, he founded the firm of Woolner & Company in the City and dealt chiefly in mining shares. His interests included Kalgoorlie Electric Power & Lighting Corporation, which was promoted to supply electricity to gold mines in Western Australia, and Sterkfontein Gold Estates, which found lime rather than gold in its Transvaal properties. In 1905, together with George Baker, Woolner formed Great Cobar, a mining company with copper and coal properties in New South Wales and nominal capital of £1.5 million. By way of promotion profit, Woolner’s firm received shares and debentures worth £34,110 and was lifted from insolvency to affluence.59

  In March 1907, in Woolner’s words, “one Montmorency, notorious in the City but unknown to me, known also as Nassif, placed orders with us for purchase of Great Cobar shares to the extent of over £70,000 for which he paid & gained my confidence.” A month later Montmorency telephoned from Paris with further orders: as a result Woolner bought Great Cobar shares worth £122,473 (the equivalent a hundred years later of nearly £10 million computed from the retail price index). These lavish purchases may have been a “ramp” intended to boost the value of the shares before dumping them. Woolner paid about £11 per share, but when Montmorency defaulted and never paid a sixpence, he could not settle the debts. Although Baker of Great Cobar promised to aid Woolner as the stockbroker unloaded shares in small parcels, he joined a bear market against Great Cobar shares, the price of which fell. Woolner sold at an average price of about £4½ per share sustaining a loss exceeding £70,000. In November 1907 he and his partner were hammered on the Stock Exchange, where their debts were about £5,600, with assets of around £2,000.60

  Now, whichever way he turned, Woolner saw the smirking face of trouble. Baker sued his firm and obtained a judgment for £11,702 (the equivalent of nearly £1 million in 2008 values). In 1908 Woolner became chairman of the New Gutta Percha rubber company, but had to borrow money from his mother and spinster sisters secured on shares in Gutta Percha and the Bohemia Mining Corporation—another of Baker’s companies, promoted to mine tin and wolfram, but where the mineshafts were flooded after the pumps failed. In 1908–1909 Woolner borrowed £9,600 from Elizabeth Forster, a rich old spinster living in Palace Green, Kensington. He visited Cheyenne, Wyoming, and became chairman of Casper & Powder River Oilfields, which held oil rights in the state; but he was stuck in a glutinous mass of debt. In July 1909, at the instigation of his enemy Baker, he was adjudged bankrupt, with assets of £21 and liabilities of £65,417 (the equivalent of £5 million a century later), and forced to resign from Gutta Percha and Casper & Powder. He was discharged from bankruptcy on payment of just £1,000 in 1910, and thus freed to become a company director again.

  Woolner was a towering, suave man who evidently coaxed old Miss Forster into signing a new will in January 1912. Under its provisions, she bequeathed a quarter of her estate to him, £400 to his soldierly son, Christopher, and £200 each to his daughters. After her death in 1915, her estate was proved at £369,566 net. Her nieces, legatees of an earlier will, contended that because of senile decay, she was incapable of comprehending the contents of her will and had been influenced by Woolner. The case was settled in 1917 with the 1912 will upheld.61

  After inveigling Elizabeth Forster into signing her will, Woolner in February 1912 went to New York on the Baltic. The attraction in New York may have been Mary “Maisie” Dowson, widow of an American, whom he was courting and was to marry in August. She was the eldest daughter of Lucas Ionides, a London stockbroker and art connoisseur: the marriage may have improved his credit if not his reputation. His mother died on March 9, and he hurried back from New York to attend her funeral. His return to the United States was on a first-class ticket costing £35 10s. Woolner, then, when he boarded the Titanic, was the victim of his own temerity, an ex-bankrupt who had learned in hard times to dive beneath insults.

  For every Widener or Hays on the Titanic, there were half a dozen pretenders whose silky assurance was a precarious facade. Woolner had a Californian counterpart in Washington Dodge, a physician who had entered San Francisco politics in the 1890s and served four terms as assessor of the city. Dodge had been president of the Continental & Building Loan Association “when that concern stirred up Californian politics in 1905 by setting a trap which involved many members of the legislature in bribery charges.”62 When he boarded the Titanic he was on the brink of leaving politics, at the age of fifty-two, to become president of the Federal Telegraph Company and vice president of the Anglo-London & National Bank. There was as much devious business in telegraphs as in city politics. Dodge was forced to resign from his Federal Telegraph presidency in 1919 and was being sued for Stock Exchange manipulations when some months later he shot himself. In 1912 he was traveling with his young wife, Ruth, and their four-year-old son, “Bobo,” Washington Dodge Junior.

  Emily Post described a familiar type of Atlantic voyager who conned the passenger list with the avidity of a bird pecking at worms. “You have scarcely found your own state room and had your deckchair placed, when one of them swoops upon you: ‘I don’t know whether you remember me? I met you in 1902, at Contessa della Robbia’s in Florence.’ Your memory being woefully incomplete, there is nothing for you to say except, ‘How do you do!’ If a few minutes of conversation, which should be sufficient, prove her to be a lady, you talk to her now and again throughout the voyage, and may end by liking her.” If these overfriendly pests proved objectionable, well-bred Americans should engross themselves in a book, or confine their replies to monosyllables.63 Dawn Powell also described a midwestern American determined on scraping shipboard acquaintance with “the best names in the traveling universe.” In A Time to Be Born she depicted a mother and daughter who were social masochists: “it gave them a feeling of accomplishment and progress to wear down snubbing, and they felt there was something secretly the matter with someone who did not make use of his or her position to be arrogant. The merest Astor had only to step on them firmly to utterly enslave them.”64

  Some passengers did not want to pick up new acquaintances, or pay attention to others: the honeymooners and mourners, especially. Perhaps the saddest Titanic party were the Ryersons. Arthur Ryerson, of Haverford, Pennsylvania, an attorney and steelmaker aged sixty, who boarded at Cherbourg with his wife, Emily, was hurrying to Cooperstown, New York, after their eldest son, Arthur Learned Ryerson, was killed in a motoring accident at Bryn Mawr. (He was being driven by a college chum on the Chester Road when a front wheel hit a stone, so that the car swerved suddenly: both youths were thrown out and fatally injured.65) The Ryersons were accompanied by their surviving children, aged between twenty and thirteen, Suzette, Emily, and John, and by Mrs. Ryerson’s maid, Victorine Chaudanson, from Le Teil, a little port on the river Rhône specializing in
the transit of chestnuts out of Ardèche. A railway station had opened there in 1876, a year after Chaudanson’s birth, and the de luxe carriages of the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits flashed through Le Teil on their journeys between Paris and the Riviera. Now the maid was experiencing first-class luxuries herself.

  Three American sisters, originally named Lamson, boarded at Southampton, having attended the funeral on April 9, at nearby Fawley, of their eldest sister, Elizabeth: she had died a fortnight earlier at her home, 60 Avenue Victor Hugo, in Paris, and was the widow of Sir Victor Drummond, a diplomat attached to the Courts of the Kings of Bavaria and Wurttemberg at Munich and Stuttgart. The sisters—Caroline Brown, Malvina Cornell, and Charlotte Appleton—were in their fifties and accompanied by a considerate spinster in her thirties, Edith Evans. Colonel Gracie put all four women under his ocean-bound protection.

  Lady Duff Gordon took her evening meal in the first-class dining saloon on Sunday night. “We had a big vase of beautiful daffodils on the table which were as fresh as if they had just been picked. Everyone was very gay, and at the neighbouring tables people were making bets on the probable time of this record-breaking run.”66 The repast, indeed, was enough to make any diner sanguine:

  Hors d’Oeuvres Variés • Oysters

  Consommé Olga • Cream of Barley

  Salmon, Mousseline Sauce, Cucumber

  Filets Mignon • Sauté of Chicken Lyonnaise

  Vegetable Marrow Farcie

  Lamb with Mint Sauce

  Roast Duckling with Apple Sauce

  Sirloin of Beef with Chateau Potatoes

  Green Peas • Creamed Carrots • Boiled Rice

  Parmentier & New Potatoes

  Punch Romaine

  Roast Squab & Cress

  Cold Asparagus Vinaigrette

  Paté de Foie Gras

  Celery

  Waldorf Pudding

  Peaches in Chartreuse Jelly

  Chocolate & Vanilla Éclairs

  French Ice Cream

  The à la carte restaurant was favored by those old-money Americans who viewed with barely dissimulated repugnance the upstart Americans who populated the dining saloon. George and Eleanor Widener’s last dinner party was served there by discreetly flitting waiters; Captain Edward Smith, Harry Widener, Archie Butt, William and Lucile Carter, and John and Marion Thayer were their guests. People like the Wideners and Thayers recognized each other’s passwords: the men spoke the same language, drew on the same stock of ideas about business, politics, and recreations, used the same weights and measures to value men and events. They were America’s self-renewing ruling class.

  In dress, too, the Wideners and Thayers respected strict conventions. They thought of how they would look to other people rather than of their own selfish comfort. “On the de luxe steamers,” Emily Post wrote, “nearly every one dresses for dinner; some actually in ball dresses, which is in the worst possible taste, and, like all overdressing in public places, indicates that they have no other place to show their finery. People of position never put on formal evening-dress on a steamer, not even in the à la carte restaurant, which is a feature of the de luxe steamer of size. In the dining saloon they wear afternoon house dresses—without hats—for dinner. In the restaurant they wear semi-dinner dresses. Some smart men on the ordinary steamers put on a dark suit for dinner after wearing country clothes all day, but in the de luxe restaurant they wear Tuxedo coats.”67 It is easy to bridle or scoff at these dress codes, but they were part of the curbs and conventions that America’s East Coast social leaders upheld as part of their discipline, cohesive identity, and self-respect.

  Thayer junior was seventeen years old, a slim boy with good skin who expected to have a smooth, seamless life. He spent part of Sunday on deck with his parents enjoying the Atlantic billows. They stopped to talk to Bruce Ismay and Charles Hays. In the evening, too, while his parents dined with the Wideners, he took a few turns on deck. “I have never seen the stars shine brighter; they appeared to stand right out of the sky, sparkling like cut diamonds. A very light haze, hardly noticeable, hung low over the water. I have spent much time on the ocean, yet I have never seen the sea smoother than it was that night; it was like a mill-pond, and just as innocent-looking, as the ship rippled through it. I went onto the boat deck—it was deserted and lonely. The wind whistled through the stays, and blackish smoke poured out of the three forward funnels . . . It was the kind of a night that made one feel glad to be alive.”68

  7

  Second Class

  In the course of history those who have not had their heads cut off and those who have not caused others’ heads to fall leave no trace behind. You have a choice of being a victim, a tyrant or a nobody.

  —PAUL VALÉRY, ANALECTS

  If first class on the Titanic resembled a floating Ritz designed to gratify American millionaires, second class was a floating Lyons Corner House designed to soothe the English genteel. The first Lyons Corner House—the brainchild of Montague Gluckstein—had opened in 1909 just east of Piccadilly Circus, near his famed Trocadero Restaurant. Gluckstein aimed to provide restaurants offering a wide range of comforting food at low prices in agreeable surroundings. Theodore Dreiser, venturing into the first Lyons Corner House in 1912, was “struck with the size and importance of it even though it was intensely middle class. It was a great chamber, decorated after the fashion of a palace ballroom, with immense chandeliers of prismed glass hanging from the ceiling, and a balcony furnished in cream and gold where other tables were set, and where a large stringed orchestra played continuously during lunch and dinner. An enormous crowd of very commonplace people were there—clerks, minor officials, clergymen, small shop-keepers—and the bill of fare was composed of many homely dishes such as beef-and-kidney pie, suet pudding, and the like—combined with others bearing high-sounding French names.” In the early years the waitresses in starched uniforms were all called Gladys and moved with stately dignity so that Dreiser found the service slow by American standards; it was only in the 1920s that a friskier generation of Corner House waitresses became known as “nippies” because they darted about so sharply. He enjoyed listening to the music, watching the customers being led to their tables—the English curate under his shovel hat and the tightly buttoned clerk—and analyzing the social spheres that Lyons Corner Houses represented.1

  Second-class passengers on the Titanic were like a sample of Dreiser’s fellow diners: clergymen, teachers, hoteliers, engineers, shopkeepers, shop assistants, clerks. In second class there were chauffeurs whose employers were traveling first class—one of them was an instigator of pillow fights on F deck. There were workmen, such as a glassblower from the lower-middle-class London suburb of Forest Gate, heading for New York, and a young bricklayer from Catford heading for Detroit. Harry Rogers, aged nineteen, formerly a waiter at the Bedford Hotel, Tavistock, and the Angel Hotel, Helston, “was sailing for Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he has several uncles and aunts, and intended to turn his hand to anything that came along. He was a smart and steady young fellow. He had intended to travel by another liner, but the sailing was canceled on account of the coal strike.”2 Second-class passengers in White Star’s oceanic Lyons Corner House were seldom hectoring or braggart people. Some of them stood at the furthermost brink of gentility: the parties of Cornish migrants, for example, could easily topple into the abyss of poverty.

  “The second cabin,” Robert Louis Stevenson had reported after his Atlantic crossing in 1879, “is a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages. Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement.”3 The improvements in transatlantic conditions that were achieved in the next quarter century owed much to White Star, which unlike Cunard and the Germans gave priority to shipboard amenities rather than speed. Their second-class acco
mmodation was situated atop rather than amid the steerage and was gentrified to the Lyons Corner House standard. Arnold Bennett, who crossed the Atlantic as a first-class passenger in 1911, found the second-class accommodation impressively spacious. Propellers and engines were audible, but otherwise second-class resembled a reduced first class, with “many obviously well-to-do men” in the smoking room.4 A guide to Atlantic liners published in 1913 noted that the demarcation between first-class and second-class passengers was less sharp than that between second class and third class. Second-class saloon comforts tempted travelers who might have traveled first to economize on their fares: moreover, in second, “certain established conventions, such as dressing for dinner, are not observed.”5

  Bennett’s descent into second class was exceptional. “It is a gross breach of the etiquette of the sea life, and a shocking exhibition of bad manners and low inquisitiveness, for passengers to visit unasked the quarters of an inferior class,” the 1913 guide insisted.6 There were indeed signs on the Titanic, at the doors connecting the second- and third-class decks, prohibiting people from moving between their classes.7 The condescension of passengers on slumming expeditions had been resented by Stevenson when he traveled steerage. “There came three cabin passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air,” he wrote. “We were in truth very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of their squire. Not a word was said; only when they had gone . . . we had been made to feel ourselves a sort of comical lower animal.”8