Though he had booked only a modest cabin on C deck, Arthur Peuchen was enjoying the Titanic’s comforts and would later declare, “The Titanic was a good boat, luxuriously fitted up—I was pleased with her. But when I heard that our captain was Captain Smith, I said, ‘Surely we are not going to have that man.’ ” Peuchen thought Smith was rather too much the society captain. Opining about captains and ships was a common conversational gambit among the well traveled, and Peuchen no doubt pontificated about Captain Smith to his table companions, Harry Markland Molson, a member of the famous brewing family and director of the Molson’s Bank in Montreal, and Hudson J. C. Allison, who at thirty had already made a killing in Montreal real estate and stocks. Allison was traveling with his young wife, Bess, their two infant children, and four servants they had recently hired in England. Molson, the wealthiest Canadian on board, was a director of one of Peuchen’s companies and had been persuaded by him in London to travel on the Titanic rather than wait for the Lusitania.
A quiet, unassuming man with a clipped beard and mustache, Molson was still a bachelor at fifty-five—though not of the confirmed variety: his nickname “Merry Larkwand” (a play on “Harry Markland”) had been earned by his reputation as a playboy. In The Molson Saga, family chronicler Shirley E. Woods writes that Harry had for some years maintained an intimate relationship with Florence Morris, the attractive wife of one of his cousins. Florence’s husband seemingly acquiesced to the affair—his wife would often cruise alone with Molson on his yacht or stay with him at his summer house—and the ménage à trois was no secret in Montreal society. Before departing for England, Molson had changed his will, leaving one of his houses and a substantial sum of cash to Florence, “to be unseizable and entirely her own property.”
If the bespectacled “Hud” Allison and his wife had heard rumors of Molson’s mistress, they would have chosen to ignore them, since they were a quiet and conservative young couple, actively involved in church work at Montreal’s Douglas Methodist Church. While in England, they had arranged for their baby son, Trevor, to be baptized at a church in Epworth where Methodism’s founder John Wesley had once preached. In London, Hudson Allison had attended a directors’ meeting of the British Lumber Corporation, and it was perhaps there that he had encountered Peuchen and agreed to share a table with him on the Titanic during the crossing home.
While in his early twenties, Hudson Allison had spent two years in Winnipeg, where he had gotten to know some of the other Canadians now traveling in Peuchen’s shipboard coterie—Thomson Beattie of the “Musketeers,” for one, as well as the real-estate magnate Mark Fortune and his family. Mark Fortune had arrived in Winnipeg in 1871 when it was little more than a fur-trading outpost and he was a young man from rural Ontario sporting a name and an ambition worthy of a Horatio Alger story. He had shrewdly acquired a thousand acres of land through which Portage Avenue, the burgeoning city’s main street, would eventually pass, an investment that would earn him a fortune to match his name. By 1911 Fortune had also made his mark as a city councilor and had built a grand pseudo-Tudor mansion in the city’s poshest neighborhood. The following year he decided to take his wife, Mary; nineteen-year-old son, Charles; and three of his daughters, Ethel, twenty-eight, Alice, twenty-four, and Mabel, twenty-three; on a grand tour of Europe.
On the crossing from New York in January aboard the Franconia, Alice Fortune had found an admirer in William Sloper, an affable young banker’s son from New Britain, Connecticut, who found her to be “a very pretty girl and an excellent dancing partner.” Yet the twenty-eight-year-old Sloper was not about to tie himself down to just one girl on this trip of a lifetime. As he recalled in a memoir, there was also the “vivacious, good-looking niece” of a Connecticut couple who caught his fancy, along with “two attractive sisters from Chicago” whom he agreed to join for a few weeks on the Riviera in the spring. But before that there was a Mediterranean cruise to enjoy, followed by an excursion down the Nile. The first stop in Egypt for most tourists was Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, and when Sloper arrived there in February, he found that the Fortune family was already staying there. He joined them for drinks on the terrace one afternoon, and Alice Fortune soon noticed a small Indian man in a maroon fez waving his hands at them through the terrace balustrades and sent Sloper to fetch him. The Indian proved to be a fortune-teller who, while gazing at Alice’s palm, proclaimed, “You are in danger every time you travel on the sea, for I see you adrift on the ocean in an open boat. You will lose everything but your life. You will be saved but others will be lost.” This doleful prediction was immediately dismissed with a laugh, and the little fakir was quickly paid and dispatched.
Sloper soon left Cairo on a Nile steamer with the Connecticut couple and their vivacious niece, while the Fortunes and “the Three Musketeers” set off on their own river excursion. They would not see each other again until Sunday, April 7, in London, when Sloper spotted the Fortunes taking tea in the Palm Court of the Carlton Hotel on Pall Mall. “When are you going home?” was Alice’s first question after he had joined them. Sloper replied that he had just booked a ticket on the Mauretania for Saturday. Alice suggested he try and change his ticket to the Titanic, which was sailing on Wednesday, and assured him there would be at least twenty people he knew from the Franconia on board. She also agreed to join him the following night for dinner and the theater. When Sloper called on her at the Carlton on Monday evening, he proudly announced that he had booked a stateroom on the Titanic. “You have forgotten that I am a dangerous person to travel with,” Alice replied playfully, reminding him of the fortune-teller’s prediction in Cairo. Sloper was merely amused at this and on Wednesday morning he met the Fortunes at Waterloo Station to board the Boat Train for Southampton.
BY FOUR O’CLOCK on Saturday, Daisy Spedden had finished her last hand of cards with Jim Smith and decided to have a tea tray brought to her in the lounge. After tea, she chatted with Malvina Cornell, the wife of a New York judge, and her sister Caroline Brown, whose husband was a partner in the Boston publishing firm of Little, Brown. A third sister, fifty-three-year-old Charlotte Appleton, was also on board, as the three women were returning from the funeral in England of an elder sister who had married a British diplomat. Archibald Gracie’s wife was a friend of “the Lamson sisters,” as these women had once been known, and on meeting them while boarding in Southampton, Gracie had volunteered to be their male “protector” on board, the same quaintly gallant service he had offered to Mrs. Candee. He later met a fourth and younger member of this all-female coterie, thirty-six-year-old Edith Corse Evans, a relation by marriage to Malvina Cornell, who boarded in Cherbourg. “How little did I know of the responsibility I took upon myself for their safety,” Gracie would later write regarding these four women.
In the late afternoon, the decks began to fill up once again with passengers taking their pre-dinner exercise. Norris Williams and his father had walked on the boat deck that afternoon in their fur coats, and Norris recalled that the main topic of conversation among those they met was “the speed of the boat and how she would prove by far the most popular boat on the ocean.” As the sun headed toward the Atlantic horizon for another end-of-day display, Steward Fletcher put his bugle to his lips to signal that it was time for passengers to dress for what would be the Titanic’s penultimate dinner.
Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, and her husband, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, seen fishing at his Aberdeenshire estate. (photo credit 1.73)
While Helen Candee, Edith Rosenbaum, and Ninette Aubart contemplated which of their Paris-designed gowns they would don for Saturday’s dinner, some of the other first-class ladies were selecting dresses created by the most fashionable English couturiere, Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon. That the designer of their exquisitely finished Lucile gowns was actually on board was not something many of them realized, since she was traveling under an assumed name. On the passenger list a “Mr. and Mrs. Morgan” appear as the residents of portside cabins A-16 and A-20 when, in fact, these room
s were occupied by Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon.
The “Morgan” pseudonym was likely employed to allow the Duff Gordons a quiet crossing, free from a flurry of shipboard invitations that would have required Lucile to spend her time charming the wealthy ladies who formed so much of her clientele. And for her husband, a reserved Scottish baronet, seven days of making small talk with ostentatious Americans would have been a week of purgatory. Sir Cosmo particularly detested the New York reporters who would be waiting at the pier to pester his wife with impertinent questions if they knew that she was on board. Lucile did not travel often with her husband, but this trip required his steady business hand as she was about to negotiate the lease for larger premises for the New York branch of Lucile Ltd. It was business that had first brought them together—Cosmo had invested in her fledgling fashion house in 1895—but he had soon become captivated by the small, spirited woman behind the enterprise. His mother, however, was adamantly opposed to a “scandalous union” with a divorcée, so they were not married until after her death in 1900.
Like Helen Candee, Lucile had made an unfortunate first marriage. At the age of twenty-one she had married James Stuart Wallace, a wine merchant who was twenty years her senior. Wallace soon displayed an excessive fondness for the product he sold and was serially unfaithful, giving Lucile what she called the worst six years she ever knew. After he abandoned her for a music hall dancer, she was determined to divorce him, an action that at the time was both expensive and stigmatizing for a woman. Left with a young daughter and no source of income, Lucy (as she was familiarly known) realized she must find work, though options for genteel women were limited. But soon she had an idea. “One morning when I was making a little dress for [daughter] Esmé,” she wrote, “I had a flash of inspiration. Whatever I could or could not do, I could make clothes. I would be a dressmaker.”
Lucy could indeed make clothes—for most of her life it had been a necessity. Much of her childhood had been spent in Canada, in what was then the backwoods town of Guelph, Ontario. Her father, Douglas Sutherland, an engineer from Nova Scotia, had met her mother, Elinor Saunders, the daughter of the local magistrate, while working there in 1859 on the construction of the Grand Trunk railway line. Shortly after their marriage in 1861, engineering work took Sutherland first to New York, then to Brazil, and finally to Italy. His wife went with him but stayed in lodgings in London while he was working in Italy, and it was there that Lucy was born in June of 1863. The following year another daughter, Elinor, was born in October of 1864, but only five months later Douglas Sutherland fell ill with typhoid and died. His wife was forced to return to Canada with her two small girls and live with her family at a farm called Summerhill on the outskirts of Guelph.
The household at Summerhill was dominated by Lucy’s grandmother, a formidable Victorian matriarch in black bombazine who was determined to instill genteel manners in her granddaughters. Life could be rather drab in the gray limestone house on the hill, particularly during the long winter months, but each year was brightened by the arrival of le tonneau bienvenue, a barrel sent from Paris by the family’s French relatives. The two girls shivered with anticipation as the top of the barrel was pried off to reveal brightly colored dresses, silk stockings, ribboned bonnets, frothy lace petticoats, corsets, and even gloves and wigs. Most important for Lucy, there were bolts of cloth, the scraps from which she used to create outfits for her handmade dolls.
Lucy Sutherland, aged ten (photo credit 1.89)
Before he died, Douglas Sutherland had made his wife promise that his daughters would be raised and educated in England. The only man in Guelph who could help the young widow fulfill this vow was a dour sixty-three-year-old Scotsman named David Kennedy, who had retired to a nearby farm. In October of 1871, Elinor Sutherland became engaged to Kennedy and a few months later, the two girls and their mother and new stepfather sailed for England. It wasn’t long before both sisters developed an intense dislike for Kennedy, whom Elinor described as a “crotchety, cranky invalid.” They settled in Jersey, a Channel island just off the coast of Normandy, where the living was cheap and the mild climate suited the poor constitution of their stepfather. Kennedy’s miserliness meant that the girls were indifferently educated by a succession of underpaid governesses and tutors. Luckily, they found much to fire their imaginations in the library of the handsome Georgian house that Kennedy had managed to rent quite inexpensively. It also had some first-class paintings on the walls, a Gainsborough, a Lawrence, and a Lely among them, and Lucy soon began sketching costumes inspired by the clothes she saw in the portraits and in books. Her sister Elinor’s romantic nature was stirred by the stories of kings and queens she devoured in the library.
Social life in Jersey revolved around Government House, the residence of the lieutenant governor, and Lucy and Elinor soon befriended the governor’s daughter. One day when Lucy was eleven, the girls became consumed with excitement when they heard that Lillie Langtry would soon be dining at Government House. Lillie was a local girl, a daughter of the dean of Jersey, who had married and gone to London, where her beauty caught the eye of painters such as John Everett Millais. In the one good black dress she owned, Lillie had also drawn the gaze of the Prince of Wales and soon became his mistress. This granted her entrée to his exclusive Marlborough House set, and before long she was the most celebrated beauty of the age; women imitated her unique style—from her simple coif to her habit of wearing only black or white.
On the night that the “Jersey Lily” was to appear at Government House, Lucy and Elinor hid under a dressing table in the cloakroom, peering through peepholes they had cut in its calico-and-muslin cover. Once Lillie Langtry entered the room, however, the girls’ excitement gave them away and the famous beauty pulled them out from beneath their hideaway. Years later, Elinor could still describe the details of Lillie’s “white-corded silk dress with a tight bodice and a puffed-up bustle at the back.” The “Jersey Lily,” too, would remember in her memoir “the two pretty red-headed girls” peeping from under the dressing table.
The next day, the girls spied Mrs. Langtry walking in the town wearing black velvet and furs. Lucy drew a sketch of her that inspired a gown she would make for one of the first balls she attended at Government House. “It was in black velvet,” she remembered, “which fell in soft folds to the feet, and there was a little tight bodice finished with a deep belt.” While wearing this same black frock at another dance, Lucy met a handsome young army captain who became her first love. Just when it seemed as if marriage to him might be a possibility, however, a lovers’ quarrel erupted. Ignoring her mother’s advice, the ever-volatile Lucy packed her bags and went to stay with relatives in England. “I decided that there was only one thing to be done,” she later wrote. “I must let him [the army captain] see that I did not care. So to this end I married the next man who asked me, and he happened to be James Stuart Wallace.”
Lillie Langtry (photo credit 1.5)
After her marriage to Wallace ended in divorce in 1893, Lucy was practically penniless and living in her now-widowed mother’s flat near Berkeley Square. Not long after she had her epiphany about becoming a dressmaker, a friend who moved in society circles came to call and mentioned that she needed a new tea gown for an upcoming country house party. Tea gowns, or “teagies” as they were known, were worn without corsets at teatime—a time of day when gentlemen called on their mistresses—and they were filmy, pretty creations designed with just a hint of the boudoir. Lucy set to work creating a tea gown with soft, accordion-pleated folds inspired by one she remembered seeing in a play. At the country house party it drew a host of admiring comments, and before long every woman who had seen it wanted Lucy to make a tea gown for her. Soon she had to hire an assistant to help her fill the demand.
Most fashionable women in 1890s London bought their clothes in Paris, from couturiers like Worth or Doucet, or perhaps took a design from a magazine to their favorite “little dressmaker” to be copied. Lucile could have remai
ned yet another of London’s many “little dressmakers” had she not come up with the idea of creating original designs that were not copies of Paris originals. When society women discovered they could have dresses made that would never be seen on anyone else, Lucy’s order books quickly filled up. The finishing touches in Lucile’s frocks were much admired as well—tiny buttons, frills of lace and ribbon, and delicate silk flowers that became a kind of Lucile signature. By 1893 Lucy had hired four assistants and opened a shop in Old Burlington Street. At Royal Ascot the following June, the society columns noted that frocks by Lucile were much in evidence.
But even more comment would by caused by Lucile’s creation of a room at Old Burlington Street where undergarments—hitherto known as “unmentionables”—were displayed. And instead of the plain white cambric underwear that proper women were supposed to wear, Lucy’s taffeta-hung Rose Room offered pastel knickers and pale pink lingerie. “In those days virtue was too often expressed by dowdiness,” she recalled. “I loosed upon a startled London, a London of flannel underclothes, woolen stockings, and voluminous petticoats, a cascade of chiffons, of draperies as lovely as those of ancient Greece.” According to her memoir, “Half the women flocked to see them though they had not the courage to buy them at first. Those cunning little lace motifs … those saucy velvet bows … might surely be the weapons of the woman who was ‘not quite nice.’ ” To the aristocratic set surrounding the Prince of Wales, being “nice” was an utterly déclassé notion, and when Lucile’s cobweblike creations were adopted by women such as the Countess of Warwick, one of the prince’s favorites, others in society soon followed.
“Daisy” Warwick was a friend of Lucy’s sister, Elinor, who in 1892 had married Clayton Glyn, a bluff Essex squire with an estate not far from the Warwicks’ imposing Easton Lodge. Elinor had devoted most of her twenties to finding a wealthy mate from a “good” English family. With no dowry to bring to a marriage, she had had to rely on the allure of her striking looks—bright red hair, green eyes, and perfect pale skin—all complemented by eye-catching clothes made by her sister. After her marriage, however, Elinor was unhappily surprised to learn that Clayton’s means were more modest than they seemed. Yet this didn’t deter her from dressing in style as she and her husband mixed with “the crème de la crème of English aristocracy” at Easton Lodge house parties.
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage Page 12
