(photo credit 1.23)
Francis Browne was up early on the morning of April 11 to capture the Titanic’s first sunrise on film. (photo credit 1.14)
Norris Williams awoke on Thursday morning to find his father standing by their cabin’s porthole looking out at the sun shining brightly on a calm ocean. By then Francis Browne was already up on the boat deck with his camera in hand. At sunrise he had taken a photograph of the sun breaking through the clouds. As an aspiring Jesuit, Browne probably also chose to make his morning meditation on deck at that hour. Certainly, he was eager to fit as much as he could into his last morning on the liner.
At approximately the time that Browne would have returned to his A-deck room before breakfast, a steward was carrying a tray to A-36, the starboard-side cabin opposite Browne’s. Each morning at seven o’clock steward Henry Etches brought tea and fruit to the Titanic’s chief designer, Thomas Andrews, whom he found always hard at work with plans and drawings spread out over the cabin. Though only thirty-nine, Andrews was already a managing director of Harland and Wolff, and it was his custom to travel on maiden voyages to observe a new liner in service and recommend improvements. He was also in charge of a nine-man “guarantee group” from Harland and Wolff that was on board to assist with any matters requiring special attention. On the rolled-up blueprints beside Andrews’s bed, there were sketched-in plans for shrinking the size of the underused reading and writing room to make way for additional staterooms. The papers that covered his desk and night table included notes on everything from reducing the number of screws in the stateroom hat hooks to staining the wicker furniture on one side of the ship a particular shade of green.
Andrews was a nephew of Lord Pirrie, Harland and Wolff’s chairman, but there was never a whisper that nepotism had boosted his career.
Thomas Andrews (photo credit 1.85)
He had joined the firm as an apprentice at the age of sixteen and had worked tirelessly in virtually every department since then, often arriving for work at 4 a.m. He took special pride in this particular ship and had taken his wife and one-year-old daughter to admire the Titanic before she left for Southampton. Andrews was universally popular at Harland and Wolff—his coworkers described him as being “sunny and big hearted” with “a wonderful, ringing laugh.” His wife Helen recalled being with him near the shipbuilder’s Queen’s Island works one evening when a long line of workers filed past. “There go my pals, Nellie,” he had said to her, adding later, “and they are real pals, too.” Stewardess Violet Jessop remembered that, before sailing, the stewards had given a gift and a vote of thanks to “Tommy” Andrews for the improvements he had made to their “glory holes,” the tiny stewards’ quarters on the lower decks. “Our esteem for him,” Jessop wrote, “already high, knew no bounds.”
Downstairs, in the first-class dining saloon that morning, many of those same stewards were already hard at work bringing breakfast to their assigned tables. Saloon steward Jack Stagg wrote to his wife that so far there had been “nothing but work all day long” even though with a mere “317 first” on board he might end up with only one or two tables to look after. “Still one must not grumble,” he added, “for there will be plenty without any.” (No tables meant no tips, an important supplement to a steward’s wages.) Lighter duties may have suited steward William Ryerson who was new to White Star procedures since all his previous jobs had been on Cunard ships. Steward Ryerson was unaware that he shared a family connection with the posh Ryersons up on B deck. He was, in fact, a third cousin once removed to Arthur Ryerson, who was returning home for the funeral of his eldest son.
The thirty-two-year-old Steward Ryerson had been raised in Port Dover, Ontario, a village on Lake Erie, but had left as a teenager to join the British Army, where he saw service in India before returning to London. There he married an English girl and, with jobs being scarce, had signed on as a steward with Cunard. His wealthy distant relative, by contrast, was the son of Joseph T. Ryerson, who had founded a Chicago steel company. Arthur Ryerson had practiced law in Chicago before retiring to a mansion in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and a summer estate overlooking Lake Otsego near Cooperstown, New York.
A surviving menu from the first breakfast served in the first-class dining saloon reveals a wide selection of hearty British favorites—grilled mutton kidneys and bacon, lamb collops, Findon haddock and fresh herrings [sic]—with some nods to the American palate in the offerings of Quaker Oats, boiled hominy, buckwheat cakes, and corn bread. Both W. T. Stead and his American table companion, a New York lawyer named Frederic Seward, would therefore have had no trouble selecting familiar breakfast fare from the menu card. The two men bonded early in the voyage, and the fact that they were both minister’s sons likely provided some common ground for table talk. Stead’s upbringing as the son of a Congregationalist preacher in a small Yorkshire town was the matrix for much of his reformist zeal. As a young boy, he had once expressed indignation at an injustice by exclaiming, “I wish that God would give me a big whip that I could go round the world and whip the wicked out of it!” In later years Stead’s father would inquire wryly, “Aren’t you going to leave a little for the Lord Himself to do, William?”
With cards and letters left to write, Stead would not have lingered long over breakfast. Francis Browne, too, soon left the table he shared with the Odell family to go back up on deck for more photographs. A shot he took from the aft end of A deck shows the arc of the Titanic’s wake through the water as the ship took a twisting path in order to test her compasses. Browne would label another photograph on the same album page “The Children’s Playground” since it shows six-year-old Douglas Spedden spinning a top beside a cargo crane on A deck, while his father, Frederic, looks on.
Frederic Spedden and his wife, Margaretta, known as “Daisy,” were both heirs to Gilded Age fortunes and divided their time between their home in Tuxedo Park, a fashionable enclave north of New York City, and a summer “camp” near Bar Harbor, Maine. In the winter the couple boarded the liners for warmer climes, and this year’s itinerary had included stops in Algiers, Monte Carlo, Cannes, and Paris. The Speddens were devoted to their only child, Douglas, and a nursemaid, Elizabeth Margaret Burns (nicknamed “Muddie Boons” by Douglas), was traveling with the family along with Daisy’s maid. Daisy dabbled in writing and kept a diary in which she had written after boarding the Titanic in Cherbourg: “She is a magnificent ship in every way and most luxuriously, yet not too elaborately, outfitted.”
In his enthusiastic shooting that morning, Francis Browne made two double exposures that would have been discarded had they not proven to be of such historical significance. One photo showing an unidentified couple taking a stroll on A deck is overlaid with a ghostly view inside the private promenade deck of Charlotte Cardeza’s deluxe suite where a “Bon Voyage” bouquet of flowers can be seen standing on a wicker table. The second is of even more significance because it is the only photograph taken inside the Titanic’s wireless cabin, or Marconi Room as it was known. Browne snapped two shots in one exposure of the junior Marconi operator Harold Bride sitting at the telegraph key wearing his headphones. Curving downward on the wall in front of him are two brass pneumatic tubes that brought passenger messages up from the Enquiry Office three decks below. For a charge of twelve shillings and sixpence ($3), passengers could leave a message of up to ten words with a charge of ninepence (35 cents) for each additional word. The message was then placed in a cylinder and sent up to the Marconi Room where it dropped out the bell-shaped end of the pneumatic tube into a wire basket.
While Browne continued snapping photographs that morning, Captain Smith made his inspection tour of the ship accompanied by his senior officers. Each day at 10:30 a.m. Smith took a walk through all decks of the ship, including the public rooms in all three classes, the dining saloons and galleys, the hospital, workshops, and storage areas, until he finally reached the engine rooms, where he was greeted by the chief engineer. On this first morning at sea, there had been
an emergency drill with the sounding of alarm bells and the closing of the steel doors that sealed off the liner’s sixteen watertight compartments. An assistant electrician named Albert Ervine described this rehearsal in his last letter to his mother, and concluded: “So you see it would be impossible for the ship to be sunk in collision with another.”
Captain Smith (at right) with Purser McElroy (photo credit 1.26)
Following his daily inspection, Smith returned to the bridge and reviewed with his officers any matters arising from the tour and also checked on the ship’s progress, looking over the charts and reading any radio messages sent forward by the Marconi Room. The captain was likely aware that some tension existed among his senior officers, stirred up by his last-minute installation of Henry Wilde as chief officer. This change had caused William Murdoch to be bumped down from chief to first officer while Charles Lightoller was demoted to second officer, and the previous second officer had left the ship in Southampton. According to Lightoller,
the ruling lights of the White Star Line thought it would be a good plan to send the Chief Officer at the Olympic, just for the one voyage, as Chief Officer of the Titanic, to help, with his experience of her sister ship. This doubtful policy threw both Murdoch and me out of our stride; and, apart from the disappointment of having to step back in our rank, caused quite a little confusion.
One consequence of this change was the missing binoculars for the lookouts. On the trip to Southampton from Belfast, the lookouts had used the now-departed second officer’s binoculars, which he had locked in a drawer in his cabin before he left the ship. When Lightoller inquired about binoculars for the lookouts, he was told that none were available for them.
Lightoller assigned the responsibility for the last-minute officer shuffle to head office rather than to Captain Smith since he remained unfailingly loyal to “E.J.” and believed that any man ought to have beeen willing to “give his ears” to sail under him. With his white beard, immaculate uniform, and soft-spoken manner, Captain Edward J. Smith was also a favorite with the passengers, and many frequent travelers would plan their crossings to sail with him. His thirty-eight years of service with the White Star Line had earned him the title of Commodore of the White Star Fleet and the honor of commanding new ships on their maiden voyages.
On this particular morning, Captain Smith likely timed his inspection tour to be back on the bridge to greet the Queenstown harbor pilot, John Whelan, who was well known to Smith and had guided the Olympic during its maiden stop in Queenstown the year before. Whelan had spent the night in the pilot’s signal tower onshore and, upon sighting the liner flying a red-and-white signal flag indicating that his services were wanted, had climbed into a small whaling boat and been rowed out to the ship.
As Francis Browne watched the approach of the pilot’s boat from up on deck, someone standing nearby asked him, “What fort is that?” pointing to a massive structure on the west side of the harbor entrance.
“Templebreedy, one of the strongest in the kingdom” was Browne’s reply. Cork Harbor, a magnificent natural harbor, had long been an important British naval base, and the ruins of older fortifications dotted the hills around it. Templebreedy was a new fortress, completed only three years before, and giant modern guns bristled in its battery.
“And do Redmond and his Gang want to take that place?” another voice asked.
“And why do you call them a ‘Gang,’ Sir?” a third person challenged.
John Redmond was an Irish Member of Parliament and a longtime campaigner for home rule, a form of self-governance for Ireland within the United Kingdom. The issue was highly topical as the Third Home Rule Bill supported by Redmond and his party was receiving its first reading in the British House of Commons that very day. And this time it looked as if home rule for Ireland might become a reality. Francis Browne, however, refrained from being drawn into a political discussion, since, with Cork Harbor in view, it was time for him to take his last luncheon on board. He carried his camera to lunch with him, and took the only surviving photograph of the Titanic’s first-class dining saloon in service. It is another less-than-perfect photograph, but in spite of its flaws it gives an intimate view of passengers sitting at tables set with white linen, silver, and upright menu cards, beneath the room’s elaborately plastered ceiling.
While Frank Browne and the Odells had lunch, two tenders, the Ireland and the America, departed from the White Star jetty in Queenstown. The Ireland was the first to leave, carrying ten first- and second-class passengers along with some newspapermen going out for a look at the new liner. The tender steamed over to a quay a few hundred yards away to pick up 1,385 sacks of mail to be carried to New York. (The ship’s mail service had earned it the designation RMS for Royal Mail Steamer.) Only three first-class passengers boarded at Queenstown: William Minahan, an Irish-American doctor from Fond-du-Lac, Wisconsin; his wife, Lillian; and his sister, Daisy. The Minahans had been visiting relatives in the “auld sod,” and William had sent a postcard from Killarney to friends in Wisconsin, saying “It’s a good place to come from but U.S.A is a better place to live.”
The tender America followed slightly later, having been delayed by the late arrival of the train from Cork. It was heavily loaded with 113 third-class passengers, most of them Irish emigrants seeking a new life in the place for which their tender was named. Twenty-one-year-old Daniel Buckley, a farm laborer from Kingwilliamstown in County Cork, led a group of six friends, two of them teenaged girls aiming to become parlor maids. From County Mayo there was a similar group of fifteen, headed for Chicago. The night before they left home, dozens of their friends in Castlebar, County Mayo, had given them what was known as a “live-wake” with fiddle music and dancing. During the half-hour trip out of the harbor, a twenty-nine-year-old weaver from Athlone named Eugene Daly raised the spirits of all by playing his bagpipes, known as uilleann, or elbow pipes. One song that was greeted with applause was the nationalist anthem “A Nation Once Again,” and many mouthed the words to the rousing chorus: “A Nation once again! A Nation once again,/And Ireland, long a province, be/A Nation once again.” With the news about the Home Rule Bill filling the newspapers that morning, the song seemed particularly timely.
As the tenders drew alongside the Titanic, passengers already on board crowded the decks to watch them being unloaded. Second-class passenger Lawrence Beesley, a thirty-four-year-old English schoolteacher making his first Atlantic crossing, wrote that “nothing could have given us a better idea of the length and bulk of the Titanic than to stand as far astern as possible and look over the side from the top deck, forwards and downwards to where the tenders rolled at her bows, the merest cockle-shells beside the majestic vessel that rose deck after deck above them.” A number of “bumboat” vendors hawking Irish linen, lace, and other souvenirs had also come out with the tenders. This was a popular feature of any stop at Queenstown and many passengers were eagerly waiting to view their wares. John Jacob Astor was seen haggling with a shawl-clad woman before pulling out a wad of U.S. bills to purchase a lace jacket for Madeleine. Up on the boat deck a small incident occurred when a stoker with a coal-blackened face poked his head up through the fourth funnel. Shrieks were heard from several startled women who hadn’t realized that this funnel was a dummy, used only for ventilation shafts from the galleys. The stoker had simply climbed up an interior ladder, likely to get a breath of fresh Irish air, but this innocent occurrence would later be recalled as yet another “ill omen” for the maiden voyage.
A woman watches from the boat deck as departing passengers board the tenders for Queenstown. (photo credit 1.27)
As the Titanic prepared to raise anchor at around one thirty, Francis Browne headed down to board the Ireland with the Odell family. With him was his brother William, a Catholic priest, who had come out on the tender to have a look at the Titanic. At the gangway, Browne greeted Purser McElroy and one of the postal clerks, saying, “Goodbye, I will give you copies of my photos when you come again [to Que
enstown]. Pleasant voyage.” From the tender, Francis continued to snap photos, taking the last shot of Captain Smith as he looked over the side from the starboard wing bridge. On the Ireland, Browne spotted a fellow photographer he knew, Thomas Barker, who had been taking pictures on board for the Cork Examiner. Barker’s photographs along with Browne’s and twelve by Kate Odell today comprise most of the photographic archive documenting the Titanic’s short life. Over the next two days, the Cork Examiner ran two stories about the Titanic, extolling both her splendid public rooms and also her safety features, noting: “Nothing is left to chance, every mechanical device that could be conceived has been employed to secure further immunity from risk either by sinking or by fire.”
As the returning tender passed Roche’s Point to enter the harbor, Queenstown came clearly into view, despite a blue haze that had descended. The town had originally been called Cove as in “The Cove of Cork” but was named Queenstown in 1849 to commemorate a visit by Queen Victoria. (After Irish independence, it would be renamed Cobh in 1922.) At the top of the town stood St. Colman’s Cathedral, where Browne’s uncle was bishop and where, following the Titanic disaster, as Francis Browne wrote, “we gathered … to pray for those who had departed and for those on whom the hand of sorrow had fallen so heavily.”
Among the fortifications that dotted the hills around the harbor were stone Martello towers, similar to the one made famous by James Joyce in the opening chapter of Ulysses. The young Joyce had been a classmate of Francis Browne’s at Belevedere College and also at the Royal University in Dublin, and a character named “Mr Browne, the Jesuit” makes several appearances in Joyce’s last novel, Finnegan’s Wake. As the Titanic began to make its departure, Francis Browne took a shot of the liner in profile with a flock of gulls swarming around its bow. Not far from where Browne stood, a twenty-four-year-old stowaway, John Coffey, a stoker from Queenstown, lay hidden under a pile of mailbags. “I’m going down to this tender to see my mother,” he’d told another stoker before disappearing. While Coffey headed homeward, other young Irish men and women were finding their tiny berths in the Titanic’s lower decks. Single men were mostly berthed in communal cabins below the bow, while single women were housed in the stern. There was less of a scramble than there had been in Cherbourg since, as one of the stewards noted, “at least this lot spoke English.”
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage Page 7
