Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  In London similar scenes played out as names were posted at Oceanic House, White Star’s London office, near Trafalgar Square. Southampton was the hardest-hit city of all since that was where most of the crew and victualing staff lived—of whom only 212 out of 885 had survived. “In the humbler homes of Southampton,” the Daily Mail reported, “there is scarcely a family that has not lost a relative or friend. Children returning from school appreciated something of the tragedy, and woeful little faces were turned to the darkened, fatherless homes.”

  In their fog-shrouded limbo on board the Carpathia, the Titanic’s survivors had little idea of the impact the news of the disaster was having ashore. On Thursday morning, Daisy Spedden noted that “the people,” who had been fairly calm over the last two days, were becoming excited and nervous, and she had to admit that the prospect of landing made even her weak in the knees. By late afternoon crowds had begun gathering in Battery Park and at the liner piers in lower Manhattan.

  Sailor Alex Macomb had noted in his letter to his mother that the Carpathia was due to arrive on Thursday night, “and you can imagine the scene when the vessel gets in. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

  Crowds waited at Pier 54 after the Carpathia entered New York harbor. (photo credit 1.48)

  Mary Adelaide Snider was in a jam. She had spent most of the day trying to get a press pass to Pier 54, where the Carpathia was due to dock that evening—but there were none to be had. The city authorities had decided that access to the pier would be restricted to six news services, ten New York newspapers, and two London dailies. Special pleading that she had come all the way from Canada to cover the story for the Toronto Evening Telegram hadn’t helped her in the slightest. There were hundreds of newsmen—and they were all men, she noticed—trying to get onto the pier as well. The lucky ones had already tucked their pier passes into their hatbands. Others had hired tugboats and were out in the harbor waiting to meet the Carpathia.

  But Mary was not about to let this most plum of all assignments defeat her. She hadn’t become the Telegram’s first female reporter and worked her way out of the women’s pages for nothing. That afternoon she had hired the boyfriend of her hotel chambermaid, an out-of-work bartender named George, to help her navigate the waterfront. George had managed to get her through the police lines across West Street, but after two blocks their way was blocked by a dense crowd; by evening there would be more than thirty thousand people clogging the streets around Pier 54. Through the drizzling rain, Mary noticed an ambulance turning into the pier gates ahead and told George to flag down the next ambulance he saw. A minute later he spotted one slowing down to show its credentials to the police, and Mary raced into the street toward it.

  “Please take me on the pier, Doctor,” she said breathlessly through the window, to a young intern who pointed her to the doctor in charge. “I’ve been at the Customs House all day. I cannot get a pass,” Mary explained, turning toward the doctor. She added hurriedly that she had come down from Canada, and if she failed to make the assignment, her paper would think it was on account of her sex.

  “Jump in,” replied the doctor, “but mind, you’re a nurse.”

  Mary climbed aboard, and, as she later described it, “the ambulance entered the portals which were closed to multi-millionaires. The walls of Jericho had fallen before the small voice of pleading. The reporter was on the pier.”

  Over the past three days the press fever over “the story of the century” had been further stoked by the silence from the Carpathia. The rescue ship’s wireless operators had refused to accept outside inquiries, including one from President Taft, while they relayed survivor names and messages. Some papers resorted to speculation and outright invention to provide details on the tragedy that had taken fifteen hundred lives. A few even accused the Carpathia of deliberately withholding information.

  The reporters in tugs began coming alongside the Carpathia not long after it passed the Ambrose Lightship at around five that afternoon. Daisy Spedden was on deck and heard them “shouting all sorts of cold-blooded, heartless questions about the disaster.” Some of the newsmen had megaphones while others held up placards with questions like “Is Mrs. Astor there?” Several reporters waved fifty-dollar bills, trying to entice some of the Titanic’s crewmen to jump overboard and be picked up from the water. When the boat carrying the harbor pilot drew near, Captain Rostron spied journalists on it and instructed two of his crewmen to pull up the rope ladder behind the pilot as he climbed aboard. One newshound made a jump for it anyway, but missed and fell in the water. When the ship stopped briefly at the quarantine station, however, another reporter made a successful leap onto the deck but Rostron had him brought to the bridge where he was kept until the ship docked.

  Standing at the very end of the pier, Mary Snider saw the Carpathia emerge out of the darkness and rain, illuminated by flashes from photographers’ magnesium flares. But the rescue ship went right past her, heading north toward the White Star Line terminal. The passengers standing on her decks thought the Carpathia might be going to dock there but soon they saw the Titanic’s lifeboats being lowered over the side. Four of them were loaded onto the deck of a tugboat and nine others were put in the water to be towed behind it. That these few boats were all that remained of the great liner seemed highly poignant and as one reporter noted, “A deep sigh arose from the multitude.”

  As the Carpathia slowly returned to Pier 54, an expectant hush fell over the crowd. Among them were Frank Millet’s two sons, Laurence, twenty-seven, and Jack, twenty-three. Laurence, who lived in New York and worked on Wall Street, carried a flask of whiskey and a box of cigars, two things he thought his father would welcome after his ordeal. His younger brother, Jack, had come down from Harvard on Monday and stayed with him all week. The news that their father was on the list of those rescued had buoyed their spirits, though they knew that nothing was certain until he walked down the gangway. Also waiting in the crowd was Major Blanton Winship, who had been a housemate of their father’s at Archie Butt’s home in Washington. Winship was one of several people sent to New York by President Taft with instructions to wire the White House with any news regarding Archie Butt as soon as the Carpathia docked. The president was still preoccupied with the fate of his aide, even though he was resigned to the fact that he had likely not survived. In a note sent on Wednesday to the British ambassador, Taft had written, “Archie was like my younger brother. His character was transparently sweet and loyal. We mourn his going deeply but when I heard of the number lost and the number saved, I knew he was one of those who went down.”

  At the White House that morning, Taft had met with Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan, who was also heading to New York for the Carpathia’s arrival. Smith was carrying subpoenas requiring J. Bruce Ismay and the Titanic’s officers and crew to give testimony at a U.S. Senate inquiry into the disaster. The senator had read Ismay’s intercepted “Yamsi” wireless messages that revealed his intention to spirit himself and the Titanic’s crew out of American jurisdiction as quickly as possible. Smith intended to head this off and hand Ismay the subpoena in person, and Taft had offered the senator his full support for the investigation.

  At approximately 9:30 p.m. Mary Snider saw what she later described as “the black-hulled ship warped in. Flashlight flares from the tugs alongside showed the passengers crowded on deck … Three or four of the wounded were first carried out on blanket-covered stretchers.” Helen Candee was one of those carried off the ship, and she was taken directly to hospital by ambulance to receive treatment for her broken ankle. The next day she visited her son Harold in another New York hospital and found that he was recovering well from the plane crash that had caused her to hurriedly book passage home on the Titanic.

  Ripples of anticipation ran through the subdued crowd as survivors began walking down the covered gangway. Among the first to appear was a young woman with disheveled hair and heavy-lidded eyes who seemed ready to drop from exhaustion. As she answered the cus
toms inspectors’ questions, a man in the crowd suddenly cried out “Dorothy! Dorothy!” and rushed forward and swept her into his arms. As Dorothy Gibson laid her head weakly on his shoulder, Jules Brulatour carried the prettiest girl all the way along the pier and down into a waiting taxicab. Only a few minutes later, Madeleine Astor appeared with her stepson Vincent Astor, who had gone on board to greet her. She was wearing a white sweater and appeared very pale under the white lights. Colonel Astor’s secretary William Dobbyn wrote, “I never saw a sadder face or one more beautiful, or anything braver or finer than the wonderful control she had of herself.” There was no need for the ambulance and nurse they had brought for Madeleine, and to avoid the press she was taken down a freight elevator to a waiting limousine.

  Philip Franklin was one of the first to slip up the gangway to the Carpathia after she docked. Having hardly slept since he was awakened early on Monday morning, the IMM executive now had the task of telling Bruce Ismay that more trouble awaited. He had been in Ismay’s room only a few minutes when William Alden Smith and another senator arrived to serve Ismay with a summons to appear before a U.S. Senate investigation. Lightoller and the other officers were also served with warrants for the pending inquiry which Lightoller considered “a colossal piece of impertinence.”

  Outside on the pier, René Harris’s brother waited nervously in the crowd. He dreaded having to tell his sister that Harry had not been saved. But when René came down the gangway, she simply announced to him and the others waiting for her, “I have come alone,” and everyone understood that she already knew that her “boy” was gone. The arrival was harder for May Futrelle. When she walked alone into a New York hotel room where family members were waiting, there was shock and dismay, particularly from her teenaged daughter, who was expecting to see her father. Laurence and Jack Millet, too, began to worry when so few men were seen leaving the ship. Jack joined a line of people seeking information and heard a man ahead of him ask if there was any news of Frank Millet. When he overheard that his father was not among the survivors, Jack cried out “My God!” and burst into tears.

  Mary Snider was beginning to worry about finding a Canadian to interview when suddenly she spied the man all of Toronto had been talking about. “Carelessness, gross carelessness!” Arthur Peuchen was proclaiming to a clutch of reporters. “The captain knew we were going into an ice field, and why should he remain dining in the saloon when such danger was about?” After days of confinement, the major was a man ready to talk. Mary elbowed her way in beside Peuchen, whom she described as “stalwart, sunburnt and manly-looking,” and managed to secure the promise of an interview for that evening. All through his reunion with his family and till after midnight in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, Peuchen told his story again and again as Mary Snider and other reporters scribbled furiously. “I have a clear conscience” and “It was my training as a yachtsman that saved me” and “If there is room for one more let it be a woman, I am no coward” are just some of the quotes attributed to the major in the next day’s editions. Mary Adelaide Snider filed three stories under her byline about the Carpathia’s arrival, a highlight to a career that earned her the encomium that she was “quite equal to a man and possibly far more brilliant.”

  In another suite at the Waldorf that evening, William Sloper’s brother had to forcibly push a scrum of reporters out the door. While on the rescue ship, William had written an account of his experiences, which he wanted to save for his hometown paper, the New Britain Herald, and for Connecticut’s largest paper, the Hartford Times. The next morning, several New York tabloids ran nasty references to Sloper, and one paper later claimed, “William T. Sloper, son of a prominent Connecticut banker, was rescued from the Titanic disguised in a woman’s nightgown.” Sloper, like some other male survivors, would spend years living down this accusation.

  But it would be Lucy Duff Gordon who would make the most disastrous press blunder of the night. The Duff Gordons had been greeted at the pier by a party that included interior designer Elsie de Wolfe and her companion Bessie Marbury, and whisked off to a suite at the Ritz that Elsie had filled with flowers and where new clothes for them were laid out on the beds. Champagne, bouquets, and congratulatory messages kept arriving at the suite, and over dinner Lucy delivered a colorful account of their escape from the Titanic. Among those at the table was Abraham Merritt, the editor of Hearst’s New York American for which Lady Duff Gordon wrote a fashion column. Later that evening, Merritt telephoned Lucy and said that Mr. Hearst was insisting on having her story for the next morning’s paper and asked her if he could tell it as he heard it. Still heady from champagne and relief, Lucy gave her assent. Merritt then telephoned his recollection of Lucy’s narrative to a reporter, who wrote it up under Lady Duff Gordon’s name, burnished with such choice quotations as Lucy saying to Cosmo while the lifeboats were being loaded, “Well, we might as well take the boat; it will be only a pleasure cruise until morning.”

  This set other reporters to questioning why there had been so few passengers in Lifeboat 1. A Titanic crewman, who had not been in the lifeboat but had heard stories about it, told one newspaper that a wealthy man in “the millionaire’s boat” had offered the crew a reward if they would row away quickly from the sinking liner and that the crewmen were later given £5 bank drafts on the rescue ship. Denials were issued by those who had actually been in Boat 1 but rumors that an English lord had bribed crewmen to row away from the cries of the drowning only gained momentum. When picked up by the press in Britain, where class antagonisms were running high, the story would cause a sensation.

  While the Duff Gordons drank champagne at the Ritz that Thursday night, Margaret Brown was still on the Carpathia, helping out with the steerage passengers. Immigration and health officials had come on board to spare the Titanic’s third-class survivors the customary hiatus at Ellis Island, but it was after eleven o’clock before the first of them began to leave the ship. Still wearing the black velvet suit she had donned after the collision, “Queen Margaret,” as some in first class had dubbed her, worked to organize the disembarkation of the steerage women and help with their travel arrangements. The Countess of Rothes was doing likewise, and one passenger of particular concern for her was Rhoda Abbott, who was unable to walk due to her ordeal in Collapsible A. Although Rhoda assured the countess and Margaret Brown that she would be looked after by the Salvation Army, she was transferred by ambulance to New York Hospital at Noëlle’s expense and later to a hotel room that Mrs. Brown arranged for her. The small, slim countess eventually walked down the gangway and into the arms of her husband Norman, the Earl of Rothes, and before long, she, too, was in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. But Margaret Brown remained on the ship, where she improvised beds in the lounge for the remaining steerage women and spent the night with them. The next day her brother, who had come from Denver to greet her, came on board and told Margaret that her ailing grandson—the reason she had come home on the Titanic—was recovering well. This encouraged her to stay in New York, where she set up headquarters for the Titanic Survivors’ Committee in her suite at the Ritz-Carlton.

  At breakfast on Friday morning a crowd of curious hotel guests gathered around Arthur Peuchen in the Waldorf-Astoria’s dining room and made him recount his story once again. In the hotel’s largest ballroom, meanwhile, seven U.S. senators were preparing to question J. Bruce Ismay, the first witness to appear before the U.S. Senate investigation. As he began his testimony that morning, Ismay still seemed shaken by the disaster, and his voice was almost a whisper as he expressed his “sincere grief at this deplorable catastrophe” and offered his full cooperation to the inquiry. Yet his answers were guarded and often prefaced with “I presume” or “I believe” and concluded by “More than that I cannot say”—giving his testimony an air of evasiveness. His claims that he was simply a passenger like any other and that the Titanic was not pushed to its maximum speed were greeted with skepticism by the senators and with open hostility by the press. The Hearst
newspapers famously dubbed him J. “Brute” Ismay and ran his photograph framed by those of Titanic widows. Edith Rosenbaum was among the few survivors who thought that the White Star chairman was being made a scapegoat and made a point of telling reporters that it was Ismay who had put her into a lifeboat.

  J. Bruce Ismay (at center) was the first witness called to testify at the Senate Inquiry in the East Room of the Waldorf-Astoria. (photo credit 1.49)

  The tabloid villain of the story was followed by its newly minted hero. Captain Arthur Rostron made only a brief appearance in the Waldorf’s ballroom since the Carpathia was due to resume its voyage to the Mediterranean that evening. The energetic, blue-eyed Rostron won over the senators with his description of how he had raced to the Titanic’s distress position even though, as he acknowledged, it was at some risk to his own ship and its passengers. Senator Smith responded by telling the captain “Your conduct deserves the highest praise.” Rostron would later receive a Congressional Gold Medal and a “Thanks of Congress” resolution.

  Senator William Alden Smith (photo credit 1.50)

  In the afternoon, it was Second Officer Lightoller’s turn to answer questions, the first of nearly two thousand he would be asked by this committee and the British inquiry that followed. Throughout his testimony, Lightoller acquitted himself well and skillfully steered criticism away from Captain Smith and the White Star Line even while he considered the American inquiry to be “nothing but a complete farce.” The second officer came to have particular contempt for Senator Smith, whose ignorance of nautical matters led to him being ridiculed by the English press as “Watertight Smith” for asking whether the watertight compartments were meant to shelter passengers. The London Globe called Smith “a gentleman from the wilds of Michigan” who felt it necessary “to be as insolent as possible to Englishmen.” British resentment toward America’s waxing power was captured by the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who wrote in his diary that if anyone had to drown it was best that it be American millionaires. To the English elites, the U.S. inquiry seemed to be yet another example of American muscle flexing. But a Labor parliamentarian, George Barnes, noted more dispassionately that “it may be humiliating to some to have an [American] inquiry into the loss of a British ship but … the average person realizes that Americans get to work very quickly, and the average person, I think, is rather glad it is so.”