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

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Frank Andrew, aged thirty, lived with his wife and small child in a hamlet near Redruth, where he was respected in the Wesleyan church. The lodes were depleted in the centuries-old tin mine where he worked, and he, too, was bound for the Houghton copper district.38 Other clusters of Cornishmen came from farther north. Shadrach Gale, born in 1878 at Rising Sun, a hamlet of Harrowbarrow near Callington, had settled at Idaho Springs, Colorado, as a miner, came to Cornwall on a family visit, and was returning to Idaho Springs accompanied by a new emigrant, his elder brother Henry. The Gale brothers were in a party with two youngsters from Gunnislake, the next village to Harrowbarrow, who were both heading for Butte.

  After dinner on Sunday evening, there was impromptu music in the dining room. Douglas Norman again played the piano. Alfred Pain, a young Canadian physician returning from a study trip to King’s College Hospital in London, played his flute. Mathilde Weisz, the Belgian wife of the stonemason with gold bullion hidden in his coat, sang Thomas Moore’s melody “The Last Rose of Summer,” with its haunting question “Oh who would inhabit this bleak world alone?” James Witter, steward in the second-class smoking room, recalled that last evening: “It was a beautiful, clear but very cold evening, the sea was like a sheet of glass, while I, duty smoke room steward, was clearing up the 2nd class smoke room (11:40) ready for closing at midnight. All was very quiet.” About forty people sat in the room, most just talking, but for the maiden voyage the chief steward had suspended White Star’s rule that there should be no card playing on Sundays, and there were three tables of men intent on their cards. Usually the smoking room closed at eleven on Sunday evenings, but on this maiden voyage it was to be kept open until midnight. “Suddenly,” Witter said, “there was a jar, the ship shuddered slightly and then everything seemed normal.”39 Everything seemed normal, yet within four hours, all of the Cornishmen had gone to their deaths, and only 8 percent of the men from second class were still alive.

  8

  Third Class

  An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: “There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.” This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.

  —WILLIAM JAMES, “THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS”

  Third-class accommodation on the Titanic was dispersed over four decks. White Star’s preference for amenities rather than speed had immeasurably benefited its poorest voyagers. Cabins were mostly intended for two or four passengers—the provision of two-berth rooms in third-class accommodation was a fine innovation—but in some cabins six, eight, or ten passengers could be accommodated together. Cabins were small, spartan but not squalid, ventilated, lit by electricity, and equipped with washbasins. There were red and white coverlets on the beds. Single women and families were berthed aft, so that children with their mess and screech were not in annoying proximity to the married couples and single men berthed near the bow of the ship. Additionally, there were open berths for 164 people on G deck. In the previous generation, before there were three classes on Atlantic liners, washing by steerage passengers below deck had been forbidden, while ablutions on deck in a sea wind were unbearable. On the Titanic, however, no one needed to stew in their own dirt, for there were showers and baths. Steerage had been a massacre of privacies; in third class it was possible to preserve self-respect. One room no longer had to serve as ladies’ room, dining room, children’s playroom, and smoking room. The Titanic’s third-class general room was paneled in whitewashed pine and furnished in teak with fixed sofas and movable chairs. There were also a smoking room and bar. The third-class dining saloon, lying amidships, consisted of two interconnecting saloons, extending from one side of the ship to the other, with an airy, capacious look and comfortable, sturdy furniture.

  Some third-class passengers found the throbbing of the engines and the pulse of the ship were soothing, but others—Neshan Krikorian from Armenia, for example—felt confined and restive beneath decks. Lillian Asplund remembered disliking the smell of fresh paint. Overall, though, the Titanic represented the highest third-class standards reached before 1914. The Aquitania carried twice as many third-class passengers in a more confined space.

  Altogether, 497 third-class passengers embarked at Southampton, 102 at Cherbourg, and 113 at Queenstown. These 712 passengers amounted to 70 percent of capacity. Reliable estimates are that there were 118 British third-class passengers, 113 Irish, 104 Swedes, 79 Lebanese, 55 Finns, 44 Austro-Hungarians (including about 20 Croatians), 43 Americans, 33 Bulgarians, 25 Norwegians, 22 Belgians, 18 Russians (including people from Poland and the Baltic states but excluding Finns, who were also subject to Czarist autocracy), 12 Armenians, 8 Chinese, 7 Danes, 5 Frenchmen, 4 Italians, 4 Greeks, 4 Germans, 4 Swiss, and 3 Portuguese. At Cherbourg the embarking third-class passengers were mainly Christians from Armenia and Lebanon seeking to escape Turkish Muslim persecution and privation. The Turkish authorities created many obstacles for voyaging Armenians, who had the choice of leaving by the Black Sea ports of Trebizond and Batoum. Trebizond was nearer to Armenia but under Turkish control; Batoum was over the Russian border, but it was easier to evade controls there. Either way, baksheesh had to be paid. Armenians then crossed to Bulgaria and made their way via Marseille to Cherbourg and thence to New York. The difficulties of the Lebanese in leaving Syria via Beirut were formidable, too.

  The largest category of foreigners in third class, outnumbering the British, was the Scandinavians. There were few voyagers from Mitteleuropa (the exceptions included the four laborers from Batic in Bosnia: Kerim Balkic, Redjo Delalic, Tido Kekic, and Husein Sivic, seeking work in the Bethlehem Steel plant at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania). White Star discouraged Eastern Europeans from their Southampton service, just as Cunard diverted their embarkation from Liverpool to Fiume, because it was believed that “their untidiness, rudeness, and other marks of semi-civilization” made them objectionable traveling companions.1 Arthur Rostron noted that when he was chief officer on the Pannonia, a Cunarder running Italian, Croat, Hungarian, Austrian, Greek, Bulgarian, and Romanian emigrants from Trieste to New York, most passengers were of “pathetic docility,” but a few wild men needed watching. “Hot tempers sometimes flared out and words would lead to the flash of a knife and an oozing wound. We had to treat these offenders with severity. That usually consisted of making them spend the night down the forepeak where, with rats for company, to the accompaniment of the pounding seas against the hull, added to the fact that it was pitch-black, they soon saw the reasonableness of better behaviour.”2

  The segregation of Mitteleuropeans—Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles, or “Hunkies,” as they were contemptuously called—was generally applauded. “There is a great improvement in the class of persons who travel third-class,” a publicist of the floating hotels averred in 1913. “Most British lines will not carry emigrants from Central Europe because of their dirty habits. This may seem unkind, but if you were to see the disgusting condition of some men and women who come from that part of the Continent, you would not wonder at the restriction.”3 Conditions were degrading on those steamships that would carry them, as an investigator for the U.S. Immigration Commission, disguised as a Czech peasant, had lately discovered. She reported that only low partitions separated the two-tier iron berths, with straw mattresses but no pillows. The wooden decks were neither washed nor disinfected during twelve days, although sand was lightly scattered to cover vomit. Washrooms were used by both sexes. There was no soap, there were no towels, and the tap water was cold and salty. Women’s lavatories were arranged over an open trough. They were filthy for much of the voyage but were cleaned and disinfected shortly before American inspection. Doubtless it was felt that no better was needed for voyagers coming from hovels that were inferior to a hunting millionaire’s kennels, from villages of filthy mud, churned by hoofs and wheels, defiled by horses and cows (though it is worth recalling that until 1915 there were few paved streets in Los Angeles, where streetcars b
ore a sign forbidding the shooting of rabbits from the platform). The open deck was cluttered with machinery, bespattered with cinders from the funnel, and a swagger-ground for the crew, who subjected passengers to oaths, insults, and crude gestures.4

  The Titanic’s third-class passengers included farmers, farm laborers, foresters, and blacksmiths; miners, machinists, and print compositors; engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters, a miller’s lad, potters, tinsmiths, locksmiths, wire makers, a fur cutter, a leather worker, a picture framer, boxers, chemists, jewelers, bakers, tailors, dressmakers, servants, shop salesmen, door-to-door peddlers, seamstresses, a laundress, cooks, barmen, grooms, and waiters.

  Some of these people, notably the servants and farmworkers, had never before had a week’s uninterrupted holiday. Third-class amenities endowed many passengers with an unprecedented emancipation from their hackneyed round of incessant toil: the voyage seemed like a succession of saint’s festival days in which they had no burdensome task but every chance to enjoy themselves. There was skipping on deck, cards in the smoking room, singing and dancing in the evenings, gossiping in the lounges, flirting in the corridors. The lounge on C deck contained a piano, card tables, and games tables. In the evenings, the musicians among them brought out their instruments and played in the saloon. It is doubtful if there had ever been as many days free of work for Erna Andersson, a servant girl of seventeen from Kulla Bay, Strömfors, Finland, since she had embarked at Hanko on the Polaris for Hull and then traveled across England to Southampton. As Willa Cather noted at this time, Swedish farmers’ daughters on the American prairies no longer lowered themselves by entering domestic service, so farmers’ wives recruited girls from Sweden and paid their fares. It was doubtless similar with the Finns. Girls stayed with the farmwives until they married, when they were replaced by sisters or cousins from the old country.5

  The third-class dining saloon on F deck could seat 394. It had chairs rather than benches. There were also two bars on D deck and one on C deck by the third-class smoking room. Diners had to master the Esperanto of transatlantic food, which was often very different from their usual diet. For breakfast on the final Sunday, third-class passengers were offered Quaker Oats with milk, smoked herrings and jacket potatoes, boiled eggs, bread and butter, marmalade with Swedish bread, tea or coffee. For (the final) Sunday dinner there was served: vegetable soup, roast pork with sage and onions, green peas, boiled potatoes, cabin biscuits, bread, plum pudding with sweet sauce; and for tea, ragout of beef, potatoes and pickles, apricots, bread and butter, and currant buns.

  Many of the Titanic’s third-class passengers had never seen an oceangoing vessel before. A German called Müller (about whom little is known) had signed on at a monthly wage of £4 10s as the interpreter-steward charged with helping third-class passengers without common languages to communicate. He doubtless supported the stewards in driving third-class passengers to retire to their little white cabins and perhaps go to bed by ten in the evening.

  The eight young Chinese firemen working for the Donaldson steamship line, who embarked as third-class passengers at Southampton, were old hands at ocean life. Other third-class voyagers were seasoned Atlantic travelers and familiar with American ways. They were part of the steady traffic of sojourners who traversed the Atlantic, doubled back, and later returned. Forty-year-old Carl Asplund had divided his adult life between Alseda, Småland, and Worcester, Massachusetts, the birthplace of American barbed wire and of Valentine’s Day cards. Thirty years earlier a Swede had opened a factory in Worcester to make grinding wheels, and had recruited hundreds of workers from his native district, Småland. More Swedes, Carl Asplund among them, had gone to work in Worcester’s famous Washburn & Moen barbed wire factory: Swedes were preferred by employers there because, unlike the Irish, they did not tend to get either fighting drunk or unionized. Asplund left the Swedish community in Worcester in 1907, after his father’s death, to settle family affairs, but was returning to Worcester with his wife, Selma Asplund, and their five children: Filip, aged thirteen; Gustaf, aged nine; five-year-old twins, Carl and Lillian; and Felix, aged three. Only Selma, Lillian, and Felix survived.

  Franz Karun was another sojourner. He had been born near Milje, in the upper Carniola region of Slovenia evoked in Louis Adamic’s immigrant memoir Laughing in the Jungle. He was married with five children and had some earnings as a padrone in Galesburg, Illinois—the railroad town through which the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroads both passed, which is so memorably anatomized in Carl Sandburg’s Always the Young Strangers. Karun also ran a boardinghouse or hotel on Galesburg’s Depot Street, where inmates were railway workers. He and his infant daughter, Manca, had returned to the old country, where he had sold some parcels of land said to be worth over $700. They boarded at Cherbourg in company with his brother-in-law, heading back to Galesburg. On the first anniversary of the Titanic’s hitting the iceberg, his hotel collapsed, the walls of his bedroom falling into rubble around him; and this reverse, coupled with the loss at sea of his money from the Carniola land sales, forced him to return to Milje shortly afterward.

  Stephen Graham, as a third-class passenger on an Atlantic Cunarder, regarded some of his fellow English passengers as shady or dissolute. “Some young fellow turns out to be wilder than the rest of his family; he won’t settle down to the sober, righteous, and godly life that has been the destiny of others,” Graham surmised, “so parents or friends give him his passage-money and . . . send him away across the sea.” There were young forgers or petty embezzlers whose thefts had been discovered, for whom Atlantic crossings were merely new escapades. There were rovers with wanderlust, men who chafed at dull jobs, harum-scarum types, as well as prudent men who were persuaded to emigrate by plausible shipping company agents.6

  Many voyagers were persuaded to emigrate by relations rather than shipping agents. Frank Goldsmith was an aspiring, self-respecting Methodist, aged thirty-three, from Strood, across the River Medway from Rochester in Kent. He worked for Aveling & Porter, tractor and steamroller manufacturers, as a machinist. Goldsmith was traveling with his wife, Emily, and their small son, Frankie, in response to urgings from his father-in-law, who had moved to Detroit, and thought they would make a success of life there. They needed a clean start, for their younger son had died of diphtheria in December 1911. Goldsmith was reluctant to put his family through the ordeal of traveling third class, but the prelaunch publicity for the Titanic had overcome his doubts. The Goldsmiths’ luggage included a new set of tools, handmade as a parting gift by his mates in Strood, including callipers and scribing blocks used in toolmaking. Emily Goldsmith packed her Singer sewing machine in a packing case, and her son, who had recently swapped his whipping top for a cap pistol, dropped the toy beside the sewing machine.

  For months the nine-year-old had been elated about going to America, a land that he had been imagining from years of letters sent by an aunt in Michigan. His mother bought Eno’s Fruit Salts and Gibson’s Fruit Tablets as preventives of seasickness. Though the boy was not unwell on the trip, he guzzled the delicious patent remedies. It was thrilling on board. “Not only were we going to America, we were going to another land, France! Then bonus wise, we would also be going to Ireland next, two ‘fairy-tale’ places that tripled the joy in the eyes of a nine-year-old boy.” On the afternoon of their second day at sea, he stood with his mother near the stern rail, watching Ireland recede from view: “with a thumping heart I cried, ‘Mummy! At last we are on the ’lantic.’”7

  In Detroit, Emily Goldsmith’s father had an English neighbor who, hearing that the Goldsmiths were coming out, sent the cost of the fare to his kid brother, Alfred Rush, and arranged for him to travel with them. The party also included Thomas Theobald, a friend from Strood. Sunday, April 15, was Alfred Rush’s sixteenth birthday, which he celebrated by donning his first pair of long trousers. To his delight, he was refunded sixpence by the purser, who had overcharged for his baggage. “Lo
ok, Mrs Goldsmith! I’ve got a birthday present!” he exclaimed in delight. Rush was small for his age, and might have passed for a child when the lifeboats were being filled. Instead, proud of his birthday, he declared, “I am staying here with the MEN!” and hung back with Mr. Goldsmith.8

  John and Annie Sage were traveling with their nine children to Jacksonville, Florida, where he had paid a deposit on a citrus farm. He had been born in Hackney in 1867; his early work as a corn grinder and barman had led him to become a pub landlord in Norfolk and the proprietor of a baker’s shop in Peterborough. Then he had gone with his eldest son to Canada, where they are said to have worked as dining-car attendants on Charles Hays’s Canadian Pacific Railway, and was returning to America with his extensive family to begin a new life. Similarly, Frederick Goodwin was a forty-year-old electrical engineer from Fulham, whose brother had previously settled at Niagara Falls and encouraged him to obtain a job at the power station there. Goodwin booked a third-class passage for the entire family—his wife, Augusta, and their six children—on a cheap steamer out of Southampton; but its sailing was canceled because of the coal strike, and they were transferred to the Titanic. All eleven of the Sages and all eight of the Goodwins perished at sea. Bertram Dean, a twenty-five-year-old London publican, was moving to Wichita, Kansas, where he had relations who had written encouragingly of the life there. He intended to open a tobacconist’s shop. He was traveling with his wife, their two-year-old son, and a two-month-old daughter called Millvina: she had been born in February, was the youngest passenger on board, the smallest of the babies with their hunger, squalls, and smells; and when she died in 2009 was the last survivor of the Titanic. The Deans, too, had transferred to the maiden voyage because of the coal strike.