In second class on the Titanic there were a good number of “well-to-do men,” to use Bennett’s phrase, who had not needed to shove and squirm their way forward in life. These included Erik Collander, the young technical director of a Helsinki paper mill, and Hull Botsford, of Orange, New Jersey, a graduate of the Cornell School of Architecture, designer of railway stations and railway bridges, who had been studying European styles and construction techniques. Denzil Jarvis, originally from Breconshire in Wales, managing partner of an engineering firm, Wadkin and Company, of North Evington, employing about a hundred people, was embarking on a six weeks’ business trip to America: he lived with his wife and two adolescent sons in Stoneygate, the most expensive suburb of Leicester, in an imposing modern villa, the Crest, an airy three-story redbrick building with big bay windows, turreted balconies, and high chimneys. He was an ambitious, striving man, who had given his younger son the first name of Wellesley in honor of his great military hero, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington.9 Ernst Sjöstedt, a Swede who had worked for the great steelworks of Schneider-Creusot in France and Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania, had been a senior manager at the Lake Superior Steel Company at Sault Sainte Marie in Ontario since 1904. The inventor of the Sjöstedt sulphur roaster and the Sjöstedt electric smelting furnace, he was returning from Gothenberg, which he had visited at the request of the Canadian government’s Mining Department, to report on methods of extracting copper sulphite ore. Denzil Jarvis and Ernst Sjöstedt were just the type to feel uncomfortable dressing for dinner, impatient of gushing, overemphatic millionaires’ wives, and disgusted by their painted faces.
Lower in the social scale were the sort of men whom Somerset Maugham had encountered after he crossed the Atlantic on the Cunarder Caronia, in 1910. Maugham stayed initially in the exclusive purlieus of the St. Regis Hotel before visiting other cities and backwaters. “I often asked myself what sort of men those were whom I saw in the parlour-cars of trains or in the lounge of a hotel, in rocking-chairs, a spittoon by their side, looking out of a large plate-glass window at the street . . . In their ill-fitting, ready-made clothes, gaudy shirts and showy ties, rather too stout, clean-shaven, but wanting a shave, with a soft hat on the back of their heads, chewing a cigar, they were as strange to me as the Chinese.” This category of Titanic second-class traveler—men determined not to stay where they started economically—included Frank Maybery, a realtor at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and Thomas Myles, in a similar business in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Maugham decided, after several visits to the United States, that the common notion that the great republic was free of class distinctions was “hokum.” One day, out West, he was asked to lunch with a woman worth $20 million. “I have never seen a duke in Europe treated with such deference as she was. You might have thought that every word that issued from her opulent lips was a hundred-dollar bill that the guests would be allowed to take away with them.” The American notion that one man is as good as another was “only a pretence,” he felt. “A banker will talk in the club car of a train to a traveling salesman as though they were equal, but I am not aware that he will dream of asking him to his house. In such communities as Charleston or Santa Barbara the traveling salesman’s wife, however charming and cultivated, will never succeed in making her way into society. Social distinctions in the final analysis depend upon money.”10
The pretense that one man is as good as another led Americans to treat liner crew members with a politeness that was applauded by Violet Jessop, stewardess to second-class passengers on the New York run of the White Star’s Majestic. American passengers, although demanding, were appreciative. “Even those I learnt on better acquaintance to dub ‘holy terrors’ were somehow approachable and human. They acknowledged you as an individual, invariably gave you your name, even went to the trouble of demanding to know it at the first moment of meeting.” Americans expected her to make their trip comfortable, but recognized that her work was arduous. “Most Americans want to absorb every new fad as soon as it appears,” Jessop recalled. “As a result, they are often left in a state of hectic unrest which naturally transfers itself to those around them.” When liners reached their destination, Americans rang to bid good-bye to the steward or stewardess, tip them well, and shake hands heartily. Passengers of other nationalities, by contrast, expected stewards “to hang about like beggars outside a church, waiting for alms,” and usually proffered a niggardly tip.11
On the Titanic’s maiden voyage, two cranky American women, claiming to be mother and daughter, chided and vexed the stewards. Perhaps they were plaintive eccentrics rather than troublemakers trying to extort compensation, but their protests on the first day of their voyage were discordant and relentless. The elder woman had been born Lucinda (“Lutie”) Temple in 1852 in Lexington, the “Horse Capital of the World,” in Kentucky’s Bluegrass Country. In 1870 she had married Samuel Parrish of Lexington. They lived there and in the nearby horse-breeding center of Versailles for many years. In her fifties, she became an inveterate globe-trotter, often accompanied by Imanita Shelley, aged twenty-five in 1912, who was described as her daughter, although her maiden name was Hall. Mrs. Shelley hailed from Deer Lodge, Montana, a junction of the Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Paul, and Pacific Railroad system, where life was dominated by long trains lumbering through and by the overcrowded, squalid state prison. An older woman from a milieu of stables and racetracks traveling with a younger woman from the drabbest of convict settlements should arouse mistrust. One imagines Lutie Parrish with a rasping voice and skin like dirty leather, and Imanita Shelley with a sharp pixie face and lashing tongue. There were surely paltry scams lurking in their history. Lutie Parrish, the older woman, died in Hawaii in 1930, but Imanita Shelley continued to shift around the country, living successively in Montana, Kentucky, Missouri, Oregon, California, Washington, and Hawaii.
The two women boarded together at Southampton on a ticket costing £26. Unlike other passengers, they did not find the Titanic all shipshape. Instead, they were contentious and disobliging. This is clear from an affidavit that Imanita Shelley later tendered to the Senate investigation of the sinking, in which she recounted her grievances against White Star. She and Lutie Parrish had embarked on April 10, “having purchased the best second-class accommodation”; but instead of being assigned commodious berths, “were taken to a small cabin many decks down in the ship, which was so small that it could only be called a cell. It was impossible to open a regulation steamer trunk in said cabin. It was impossible for a third person to enter said cabin unless both occupants first of all crawled into their bunks.” The two women sent their stewardess to the purser entreating transfer to the accommodation for which they had paid. He responded that nothing could be done until the ship had left Queenstown with its full load of passengers. After Queenstown, Lutie Parrish made eleven trips to the purser demanding transfer: he must have been in turn solicitous, numbed, and exasperated by her importunities. At nine that evening, no one having taken them to better quarters, Imanita Shelley sent a note to the purser declaring that “she was very ill and, owing to that freezing cold of the cabin, was in great danger” and if neither the purser nor Captain Smith would help, “she would have to wait until reaching America for redress, but most assuredly would claim damages if she lived to reach her native land.” Four stewards, fervent with apologies, then appeared to carry her to a better cabin.
John Simpson, the physician responsible for second- and third-class passengers, who had become a ship’s doctor because the strain of his Belfast practice had injured his health, was supposedly fearful that Imanita Shelley’s tonsillitis would turn to diphtheria, and confined her to her cabin. This cabin, though roomy, was, she claimed, inferior to Cunard cabins, seemed half-finished, and was intolerably cold. When she and Lutie Parrish complained about the chill, the steward replied that the second-class heating system was broken, except in three cabins where the heat was so intense that the purser had ordered the heat to be shut off: “consequently the rooms were li
ke ice-houses all of the voyage, and Mrs. L. D. Parrish, when not waiting on her sick daughter, was obliged to go to bed to keep warm.” This was not the end of the women’s voluble remonstrance. They claimed that fixtures in the women’s lavatories were still in crates, that their stewardess could not get a tray to serve Mrs. Shelley’s meals in her cabin, and brought the plates and dishes by hand one at a time, “making the service very slow and annoying. The food, though good and plentiful, was ruined by this trouble in serving.” Although both steward and stewardess repeatedly appealed for a tray, none was obtained: “there seemed,” said Imanita Shelley, “to be no organization at all.”12
These complaints were not typical. “It is lovely on the water, & except for the smell of new paint, everything is very comfortable,” wrote Marion Wright (a farmer’s daughter from Yeovil going to marry a fruit farmer in the Willamette Valley, Cottage Grove, Oregon), during the journey from Cherbourg to Queenstown. “The food is splendid . . . the vessel doesn’t seem a bit crowded, and there are dozens of tables empty in the dining saloon.”13 Most voyagers appreciated that the second-class cabins had been designed to have as much natural light as possible. Their brightness was enhanced by the white enamel walls. Mahogany furniture was covered with hard-wearing, fire-resistant woolen upholstery, and linoleum covered the floor.
Marion Wright saw so many empty tables because the Titanic carried only 271 second-class passengers, representing 40 percent of capacity: another sign that the competition between Cunard, the German shipping lines, and Pierpont Morgan’s trust was creating unprofitable duplication. These 271 included hardened travelers who were accustomed to heavy traffic about the world. Hans Givard, aged thirty, son of a Danish crofter, worked in both the United States and Argentina but returned annually to his native Kølsen. Ralph Giles, aged twenty-five, had been a wholesale draper in Exeter, where his father was a bookseller and his mother kept a lodging house, before becoming junior partner in a company importing French millinery to New York: he regularly traveled to and from Paris. A Jewish Russian in his fifties, Samuel Greenberg, who had lived in the Bronx for three years, traveled regularly from New York to South Africa on behalf of his employers. Second-class passengers came from all corners of the globe. A middle-aged civil servant, Masabumi Hosono, was the solitary Japanese. Arthur McCrae, the illegitimate descendant of Scottish dukes, was an Australian mining engineer whose recent postings had been to equatorial Africa and a freezing district of Siberia. James McCrie was a petroleum engineer hastening from Persia (where the first Middle Eastern oil wells had begun pumping crude oil in 1908) to Sarnia, a Canadian port on Lake Huron, where one of his children had grave tuberculosis.
Joseph Laroche was the only black man on the Titanic. He had been born in Haiti in 1886, had left in his youth for France, hoping to qualify as an engineer, but had been prevented by racial prejudice from obtaining decent work. In 1908 he had married a Frenchwoman, Juliette Lafargue: they had two daughters, and she had just begun a third pregnancy. The distinct appearance of the children was already attracting objectionable comments and gestures in France. Laroche could no longer face the struggling, screwing, stinting life, so was retreating with his family to Haiti, where he hoped to forget the bigotry and secure remunerative work. The Laroches would not have received exemplary treatment on the Titanic. Bertram Hayes recalled an Atlantic voyage on the Britannic when the passengers included a black man who was a prizefighter: “he was a decent, self-respecting man . . . and if it had not been for his colour would have been even more popular on board than he was.”14
Among the many married women, there was little racking of the brains for something to say at table or in the saloons: their talk was not confined to the exchange of recipes and sewing patterns or anecdotes of children’s illnesses and church outings; they could share their delight in being at sea on an Olympic-class liner and their plans and apprehensions about their new life in the New World. Aloofness or mistrust seems to have been rare among young women at sea. Alice Philips, for example, was a girl of twenty traveling with her father. They came from the Devon coastal resort of Ilfracombe: Robert Philips had been a barman in the Royal Clarence Tap and then a fishmonger there. After his wife’s recent death, he had resolved on a fresh start with a brother in New York. On the first day of the voyage, the Philipses shared a table in the dining saloon with a family called Herman from Castle Cary in Somerset. Sam Herman had been a butcher and proprietor of the Britannia Hotel, and was emigrating to Bernardsville, New Jersey, with his wife, twin daughters of twenty-four, and a fourteen-year-old boy who lived with them. The three young women struck up an immediate shipboard friendship full of prattle and laughter.
One can imagine the docile, inquisitive sympathy between young women sharing a cabin. Nora Keane, Susan Webber, and Edwina Troutt shared a cabin on E deck. Nora Keane ran a shop in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with her brother, but had spent four months visiting her mother in County Limerick. Susie Webber, a Cornish farmer’s daughter, was emigrating to join her nephew in Hartford, Connecticut, as his housekeeper. Edwina “Winnie” Troutt, aged twenty-seven, came from Bath. After working in her brother-in-law’s tobacconist shop, she had gone to America in 1907, working as a waitress and servant, and was returning to Auburndale, Massachusetts, from a holiday in Bath to help her sister who was heavily pregnant. She had been transferred from the Oceanic as a result of the coal strike, and boarded with a ticket costing 10 guineas.
Wage-earning husbands were the unassailable leaders of the family groups on the Titanic. Their wives were treated more as their human appendages than as autonomous voyagers. At sea, as on land, patriarchy was the model for families like the Collyers. Harvey Collyer, a grocer at Bishopstoke in Hampshire, was emigrating with his wife and daughter. Several years earlier some friends had gone to Payette, Idaho, where they prospered from the orchards they bought there. In enthusiastic letters to the old country, they urged the Collyers to join them. When Charlotte Collyer evinced symptoms of tuberculosis, she and her husband decided to buy a farm in the same gentle valley as their friends. Payette, with a population of about two thousand, was also known as Boomerang because it was the location of the turntables of the Oregon Short Line Railroad: it was salubrious because it was the end of the line. The leave-takings from Bishopstoke were gratifying for Harvey Collyer but distressing for Charlotte. He had been verger, bell ringer, and sometime parish clerk of the local church; she had been in service in the vicar’s household. On the afternoon before departing for Southampton, their Bishopstoke neighbors turned out to bid them Godspeed. Some of the congregation sat Collyer under an old tree in the churchyard, climbed into the belfry, and rang St. Mary’s church bells with gusto for an hour. He was delighted by the tribute, though his wife felt the poignancy keenly.
Collyer carried all their savings, including the proceeds of his shop, in banknotes secreted in the inside pocket of his jacket. From Queenstown he sent a letter, dated April 11, to his parents, which shows his proud excitement at their coming adventure. If his wife still wore a closed, stricken face, he said nothing of it:
My dear Mum and Dad,
It don’t seem possible we are out on the briny writing to you. Well dears so far we are having a delightful trip the weather is beautiful and the ship magnificent. We can’t describe the tables it’s like a floating town. I can tell you we do swank we shall miss it on the trains as we go third on them. You would not imagine you were on a ship. There is hardly any motion she is so large we have not felt sick yet we expect to get to Queenstown today so thought I would drop this with the mails. We had a fine send-off from Southampton. . .
Lots of love, don’t worry about us. Ever your loving children Harvey, Lot & Madge.15
By the time that he wrote this letter, Collyer had savored the second-class breakfast served on April 11. It had the range of a Lyons Corner House slap-up.
Fruit
Rolled Oats • Boiled Hominy
Fresh Fish
Yarmouth Bloaters
American Dry Hash Au Gratin
Grilled Sausage, Mashed Potatoes
Grilled Ham, Fried Eggs
Fried Potatoes
Vienna & Graham Rolls
Soda Scones
Buckwheat Cakes, Maple Syrup
Conserve • Marmalade
Tea • Coffee
Watercress
There was no one on the second-class decks sulking and railing at life’s hardships, especially after such a breakfast. The lower echelons of second-class passengers, when they were working in their hometowns, often endured aching, jostled journeys on public transport, but here on the Titanic there was none of the buffeted, shabby side of life. These were people with clothes that were neatly mended and brushed. Commuters faced every day, in cramped proximity, insulting evidence of their limitations, but the Titanic opened to them a world of expansive possibilities. There were people in second class, beneath the status of Hull Botsford or Denzil Jarvis, for whom life had brought disappointments and those quiet little successes that no one else noticed. They were covered with an enamel of good humor and equipped with different appearances for different times. Second-class saloons on Atlantic liners had a magnanimous temper. They were not places for mean-minded types who stayed in their old districts, peering over fences with envious eyes, relishing their neighbors’ misfortunes as visitations intended to keep uppity people in their place, and resolving to show their superiority in the pettiest ways.
Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From Page 12
