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

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Inside Cunard’s shed a hushed crowd stood in two lines, allowing a long, narrow passage between them for survivors. As one spectator described the scene, “A woman came hurrying through, refusing to be comforted by her supporting friends, wildly calling, ‘Where’s my husband; where’s my husband; where’s my husband?’ She passed on down the long line, her friends trying in vain to console her. A huddled and muffled figure came moaning by in a nurse’s arms. Then came a stalwart, healthy man, who apparently had suffered comparatively little. He gave a handshake and a cheery salutation to a friend in the crowd: ‘All right, Harry?’ the friend inquired. ‘All right,’ was the reply.” Probably this was the hardened cardsharp Harry Homer. A woman came down the gangplank peering anxiously on all sides. “She uttered a great cry of joy, burst from her friends, and fell into the arms of a man who rushed up the line to meet her. They kissed each other again and again, and uttered extravagant, delighted cries as they staggered together down the line in each other’s arms.” Babies whose mothers were lost were carried in the arms of porters: “one or two of them were crying; one or two were looking out with blank baby wonder.” Near the end came “a little, poorly clad, undersized steerage passenger, with a ghastly white face, bright eyes and cheek bones almost protruding through his skin.” Two women—“from their dress and manner they evidently belonged to the best social class in New York”—approached an official. One explained that her silent companion, who bore a “look of heavy settled despair,” wished to go aboard to seek her husband. The official inquired if his name was listed among the survivors. “No, but she must go and see. She doesn’t know whether he is alive or dead.” The official refused.54

  Similarly, the widow and children of Thomas Myles, an Irish-born land developer long resident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were loath to accept his death, though he was lost like almost all second-class male passengers. A daughter telegraphed his son Frederick with false assurances that their father was safe, and when Frederick discovered the trick, he went hurtling through the streets of Jersey City crazed with grief until detained by the police for disorderly conduct. Despite the absence of Thomas Myles from any survivor list, his physician son, Leo Myles, and two family attorneys went to the Cunard pier hoping to see the old man stamp down the gangway. The young sportswriter Homer Wheaton stood with Leo Myles. “When the last of the line had filed down the plank, and we knew the worst had come, I never will forget the look that came over his face. Hoping against hope he had kept up his courage all the way. When it was all over and he knew the worst, he turned away, and with heaving sides, but dry eyes, sobbed: ‘How can I tell mother?’”55

  Another group had come uncertainly to meet the survivors of the Wick party. Colonel George Wick had been the leading businessman in Youngstown, Ohio, and son of a pioneering banker in the Mahoning Valley. As a middle-aged widower he had married Mary Hitchcock, whose father’s ironworks had made him Youngstown’s first millionaire. Wick was active in all the iron and steel enterprises of the Mahoning Valley (the Titanic’s third-class decks had contained Croats and Lebanese on their way to work in Wick’s Youngstown foundries) and had promoted a great hotel that was being built at Youngstown in 1912. The Wicks had been touring Europe with his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Natalie, but his fourteen-year-old son had been left in Youngstown. The colonel was lost in the wreck, and until shortly before the Carpathia docked, it had been thought that his wife had perished, too. “When the mother stepped from the gangplank, the boy’s happiness that one of his parents had been spared, welling through his grief at the loss of the other, moved bystanders to tears.”56 Mary Wick, like the Myles family, could not accept that her man was dead—she had last seen him from lifeboat 8 standing at the rail waving good-bye—and insisted on remaining in New York for several days in the hope of better news. Only his body would convince her that he was dead. She sent someone to search for him among the recovered corpses lying at Halifax, but his body was never found.57

  The morning after the Carpathia docked, when definitive passenger lists were available, last desperate hopes were destroyed. The tram conductor Nils Pålsson, looking ashen and ill after four days of suspense, went on Friday to the offices of White Star’s agent in Chicago. In fractured English, he asked for news of his wife and four children. The clerk scanning the list of third-class survivors found no Pålssons, and suggested that perhaps they were traveling by another steamer. Then he checked the embarkation list, and found five Pålssons. Pålsson was stupefied, helped to a chair, doused in cold water to revive him, and taken home by an appalled friend who had accompanied him. Few people lost so much as Pålsson.

  Eleanor Widener, who had lost a husband and son, had to be helped down the gangway, and flung herself into the arms of her brother-in-law. At the Pennsylvania Railroad Station three special trains waited. One was to take the Wideners to Philadelphia and another was for the surviving Thayers. Philadelphia’s police chief, with a handpicked corps, escorted other Philadelphia survivors to taxicabs in which they were whirled to the station for the third special.58 At Lynnewood, Eleanor Widener (perhaps as the result of sedation) could not at first be roused. Draped in deepest mourning, she attended a Sunday service in the chapel of the Widener Home for Crippled Children, while her father-in-law rested under medical care in his palatial home. Besides the Widener and Elkins families, the cream of Philadelphia society and ninety-eight disabled boys and girls were arrayed in separate groups in the flower-banked chapel.59 Marion Thayer returned to their house at Haverford, which was guarded by Pennsylvania Railroad detectives, who barred the way to journalists. This did not prevent the Philadelphia Inquirer from reporting that “with a well-directed blow from an oar-lock,” Mrs. Thayer had knocked out a drunken sailor who had been rocking and almost capsizing her lifeboat.60

  Sid Blake, the New York hotelier, recorded his Cornish guests’ mournful journey to the docks to meet the Carpathia. “Everybody [was] trying to bear up. Mrs. Drew was one of the first [of the Cornish] to come off the boat, and with her Mr. William Drew’s boy. Mr. William Drew, I thought, would faint—after hearing that his boy was drowned, and to find him safe. He would hold him up and say, ‘Are you sure you are my boy?’, but his delight was short-lived, as he suddenly thought of his brother, but Mrs. Drew said he was gone. The last she had seen of him was when he assisted her and the boy into a lifeboat. He kissed her and the boy goodbye, and stepped back for more women to get into the boat and be saved.” Blake reported to the Cornish newspapers that Addie Wells with two children, Emily Richards with two children, Eliza and Nellie Hocking, and Ellen Wilks “were all, I think, of the Penzance folk who were saved.” There were poignant tales behind the Cornish death roll, as pronounced by Sid Blake. “Mr. & Mrs. John H. Chapman of St. Neot were right behind Mrs. Richards, and ready to step in the lifeboat, but when Mrs. Chapman found that her husband could not go, she turned back and said, ‘Goodbye, Mrs. Richards, if John can’t go, I won’t go either’.” The Penzance men, Harry Cotterill, Percy Bailey, and George Hocking, had helped their women into the boats. “As George Hocking put his mother into the boat (she was the last of the party to go), Mrs. Hocking begged him to come as well, but he said, ‘No, mother. These men are good enough to stand back for you, and I must stay back and let their wives and mothers go’. He then kissed her, and that was the last she saw of him. For such heroism Cornwall can be proud of her sons. Mrs. Hocking is in a very bad way. She is constantly calling out, ‘Poor George, poor George.’”61

  London held a Titanic memorial service at Saint Paul’s Cathedral on April 19. Thousands were turned away. The nave, aisles, transepts, and galleries were crowded with people dressed in black—the only bright color coming from the procession of the lord mayor. The altar was draped in black and white and stripped of its usual ornaments, except a crucifix between two tall candlesticks. The service opened with the vast congregation singing “Rock of Ages” in slow, subdued voices—the effect was overwhelming. After the dean read the lesson, all
rose and stood in solemn silence. Then, after a tense pause, the silence was broken by the subdued sound of drums. Almost imperceptibly, the drums grew louder, until their solemn rolling filled the church and reverberated like thunder to its dome. Then the drums gradually diminished until they had died away. There was another silence until trumpets sounded the first notes of that stately dirge, the “Dead March” from Saul. Women were led out fainting; and Pirrie’s brother-in-law, Alexander Carlisle, collapsed before the first roll of the drums was done. The simple singing by the whole congregation of “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” was the final act of this intensely moving service. After the band played Beethoven’s funeral march, the vast congregation silently dispersed.

  A pall of gloom was cast over the nation. Asquith, the prime minister, and his family moved into a new house on the Thames at Sutton Courtenay in the week the Titanic sank. Three thousand pounds to buy and decorate the house had been advanced to his wife by Pierpont Morgan, who could see the advantage if they were obligated to him. Friday morning’s newspapers carried reports of the Carpathia’s docking, and Asquith and his wife, Margot, cried together after breakfast. That evening, when the adult Asquith children gathered for a housewarming party, one son read aloud new survivors’ stories from late edition newspapers: the prime minister was deeply moved. On Saturday morning Margot sobbed again over the Times. Then her daughter Elizabeth, “white & dark-ringed round the eyes & tears rolling down her distorted face,” interrupted as she was dressing. “Oh! Mother,” Elizabeth wailed, “those poor poor people, all the young married women having to leave their husbands, & some of the boats half-full, & that wonderful Phillips & Bride going on to the end at the wireless telegraphy, & then Phillips dying of exposure—I can’t, I won’t hear it.’”62 The calamity also touched Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s other daughter. “The man Guggenheim! who changed into his dress clothes to die is one of the most funny & pathetic touches. The cruelty of the separations is almost unbearable—19 widows under 23—& one honeymooning couple of 18 & 19—torn from each other & the one drowned & the other saved.” She despised the American harassment of Ismay. “I suppose he was wrong to leave the ship—but no-one has a right to arraign him for it . . . he is probably going through hell enough to atone for anything he has done.”63

  Once the Carpathia docked and solid facts emerged, journalists could have adjusted their coverage. It was clear that women had died and men from first class had survived in greater numbers than initially reported: 201 out of 324 first-class passengers survived, 118 out of 277 second-class passengers, 181 out of 708 third-class passengers. Gender was more decisive than class in determining the survival of passengers: 74.3 percent of female passengers survived, 52.3 percent of children, and 20 percent of men. Women traveling third class were 41 percent more likely to survive than men from first class. When interpreting the survival rates of the different classes it must be remembered that 44 percent of first-class passengers were women, but only 23 percent of third-class voyagers. In first class, a third of the men (57 out of 175), 97 percent of the women (140 out of 144), and all but 1 of the 6 children (little Lorraine Allison) survived. In second class, 8 percent of the men (14 out of 168), 86 percent of the women (80 out of 93), and 100 percent of the 24 children survived. In third class, 16 percent of the men (75 out of 462), 47 percent of the women (76 out of 165), and from a total of 79 children, 27 percent of the boys and 45 percent of the girls survived.

  Of the crew, 24 percent (212 out of 885) survived, including 65 percent of the Deck Department, 22 percent of the Engine Department, and 20 percent of the stewards; 87 percent of the female crew members were saved (20 out of 23) but only 22 percent of the male crew (192 out of 885). The interpretation of these statistics has been stormily debated for a century—and always unproductively if gender is not weighed in the balance with class. One question deserves prominence, even if it cannot be answered definitively. The men in second class had easier access to the boat deck than those in third class, yet only 8 percent of them survived: were they more unselfish, stoical, self-consciously well-behaved, or conformist to rules than those above or below them?

  After the Carpathia survivors began to recount their stories of confusion and fear during the loading of the lifeboats, newspaper editors continued to give a version of events that emphasized masculine chivalry, selflessness, and duty. A century after the Titanic, tutored by two world wars and several genocides, we are accustomed to the random causation of events and haphazard consequences; but in 1912 most people could only envisage what had happened in terms of personal codes and social rules. If American journalists, politicians, and public opinion soon began to criticize the English crew for bungling, funk, and self-preservation, their English equivalents adulated them for their composure, courage, and sacrifice. Somehow, the English imagined the Titanic’s sinking into a counterpart of Drake’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 or Nelson’s victory over the French at Trafalgar in 1805. Journalists everywhere transmuted the dead—the captain, the bandsmen, Ida Straus, Phillips the Marconi operator—into legendary creatures. They ended up duped by their own sentimental inventions and weepy over sob stories that they had concocted. The tales that Captain Smith had swum with a child in his arms to a lifeboat and after handing it to safety had been swept away by a wave, or that he had shouted at the last, “Be British, boys, be British!,” were absurd and vulgar. To celebrate such fantasies, sand models were sculpted on Bournemouth beach, entitled “Britannia Mourns,” “Captain Smith and Baby,” and “The Plucky Little Countess,” guarded by imitation life jackets inscribed “Women and Children First” and “To the Heroes of the Titanic.”64

  The string trio playing in the Café de Paris had been led by twenty-three-year-old Georges Krin, who had been born in Paris and grew up in Liège, accompanied by twenty-year-old Roger Bricoux, who had been born in Lille and worked in Monte Carlo before going to sea. The valor of all the bandsmen was saluted in France. “During the protracted agony of the sinking, the musicians played polkas and waltzes with redoubled brio,” opined Le Matin. “Perhaps it was a poor choice of music: Beethoven would have been more sublime. Blowing hard into a cornet, flattening the keys of a piano, striving for exquisite pitch, avoiding flat notes, all the time knowing that you’re going to die in the black and icy waters—this is heroism at its most stirring . . . the polkas helped to maintain calm and discipline on board during the evacuation. Often, during blazes in music halls, orchestras obey the example of their leader: their oompahs subdue panic and save life. Honor to the musicians of the Titanic who stayed at their music stands till the death! One can wield a clarinet as bravely as a sword.”65

  On Sunday came the pulpit oratory. Charles Parkhurst, who claimed Isidor Straus and William Stead as his friends, preached a Titanic sermon in the Madison Square Presbyterian Church on April 21 that was reproduced across America and publicized in Europe, too. “The picture which presents itself before my eyes is that of the glassy, glaring eyes of the victims, staring meaninglessly at the gilded furnishings of this sunken palace of the sea; dead helplessness wrapt in priceless luxury; jewels valued in seven figures becoming the strange playthings of the queer creatures that sport in the dark depths. Everything for existence, nothing for life! Grand men, charming women, beautiful babies, all becoming horrible in the midst of the glittering splendor of a $10,000,000 casket!” He upheld the disaster as “the terrific and ghastly illustration of what things come to when men throw God out of the door and take a golden calf in at the window.” He inveighed against Ismay and his codirectors: “the vivid drama of men leaping to their death, bidding long goodbyes to their loved ones, and all to the accompaniment of the infernal music of the orchestra, ought to give them a foretaste of the tortures of the damned.”66

  A similar line was taken by Edward Talbot, bishop of Winchester, preaching in Southampton on April 21. A congregation of over a thousand was headed by Lord Winchester, lord lieutenant of the county. No one could recall “s
uch a plunge from ease and security to darkness and destruction,” preached the bishop. “It was a thing to darken the imagination, to turn the brain, and crush the nerves.” He believed God meant that “the cruel and wanton waste of money, which was needed on every hand for the help of the needy,” should be rebuked by such a catastrophe. It was “a mighty lesson against our confidence and trust in the strength of machinery and money” and in the iniquity of “hyper-luxuries . . . The Titanic in name will stand for a monument of warning to human presumption.”67

  On Wednesday, April 17, William Alden Smith, Republican senator from Michigan, had proposed a subcommittee to investigate the disaster. Three Democrat and three Republican senators were appointed alongside him. Smith consulted the attorney general to confirm that he had powers to prevent British visitors from leaving the United States, visited Taft at the White House, and went to New York on Thursday. Ten minutes after the Carpathia docked, Smith, the Senate master-of-arms, and a sheriff hustled their way on board and into Ismay’s cabin.

  Who was this new actor in the Titanic drama? Smith had been born in 1859 in Dowagiac, a hamlet near Lake Michigan, where in 1912 the first-class passenger Dickinson Bishop was kingpin. Smith’s poverty-stricken family moved to the furniture-making town of Grand Rapids when he was twelve. As a boy he delivered newspapers and telegrams, sold popcorn on the streets with the help of a friend who drew attention by playing “Camptown Races” on a banjo, became a pageboy in the state legislature, a janitor for a law firm, then an attorney, joined the Republican Party, was rewarded with a sinecure as Michigan’s first game warden, married the buxom daughter of a Dutch lumberman, and served in the House of Representatives for eleven years before his election as senator for Michigan in 1906. Smith was a populist who roused voters against big business with rhetorical alliteration and longed to injure Pierpont Morgan’s interests. He was all rush and humbug, prone to sum up situations on scant facts.