by Erik Larson
Any passenger who read that morning’s edition of the New York Times would have found explicit reassurance. In an article about the warning, the paper quoted Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner, as saying that in the danger zone “there is a general system of convoying British ships. The British Navy is responsible for all British ships, and especially for Cunarders.”
The Times reporter said, “Your speed, too, is a safeguard, is it not?”
“Yes,” Sumner replied; “as for submarines, I have no fear of them whatever.”
Passenger Ogden Hammond, a real-estate developer and a member of the State Assembly of New Jersey, asked a Cunard official if it was safe to cross on the ship and got the reply, “Perfectly safe; safer than the trolley cars in New York City”—a possibly ill-advised answer, given the high frequency of fatal trolley accidents in the city.
Aboard the Lusitania, there was a good deal of gallows humor, but it was spoken from a position of comfort and confidence. “Of course we heard rumors in New York that they were going to torpedo us, but we didn’t believe it for one moment,” said May Walker, one of the ship’s stewardesses. “We just laughed it off, and said they would never get us, we were too quick, too speedy. It was just the same kind of trip as it was any other trip.”
One of her tasks was to help manage passengers’ children. “There was all sorts of deck games. Quoits. And they had fancy dress parades for them,” Walker said. Children whose birthdays happened to fall during a voyage were given a party—“a little private party,” Walker said—and a birthday cake, with their names on it. “They had the time of their lives, and the run of the ship.”
On this voyage, she would have her hands full. Many British families were now returning home to do their part in supporting the nation in time of war, and the ship’s size and speed provided a degree of reassurance. The passenger manifest listed ninety-five children and thirty-nine infants.
Whole families came aboard. Cunard set aside a group of first-class staterooms for Paul Crompton of Philadelphia and his wife and their six children—one “infant” included—and their nanny, twenty-nine-year-old Dorothy Allen. (Cunard tickets did not identify babies by name, possibly out of quiet resentment that they traveled free.) Crompton was a cousin of Cunard’s chairman, Alfred Allen Booth, whose Booth Group owned the steamship line. Crompton headed the group’s leather-goods subsidiary. Cunard’s New York manager, Sumner, greeted the family just before boarding and “looked personally after their comfort for the voyage.” On the opposite side of the ship, one deck down, the Pearl family of New York took three first-class staterooms, E-51, E-59, and E-67. Frederic Pearl was headed to London for a posting at the American Embassy, and brought his wife and four children: a five-year-old son, two daughters under the age of three, and one infant. The Pearls brought along two nannies. The children, including the baby, stayed with their nannies in E-59 and E-67; the parents lounged in comparative bliss by themselves in E-51. Mrs. Pearl was pregnant.
William S. Hodges, en route to Europe to take over management of the Paris office of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, was traveling with his wife and two young sons. When a Times reporter on the wharf asked Mrs. Hodges if she was afraid of making the trip, she merely laughed and said, “If we go down, we’ll all go down together.”
There were parents sailing to rejoin their children, and children to rejoin their parents, and wives and fathers hoping to get back to their own families, as was the case with Mrs. Arthur Luck of Worcester, Massachusetts, traveling with her two sons, Kenneth Luck and Elbridge Luck, ages eight and nine, to rejoin her husband, a mining engineer who awaited them in England. Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.
AMONG THE less well-known, but still prominent, passengers who came aboard Saturday morning was a forty-eight-year-old woman from Farmington, Connecticut, by the name of Theodate Pope, Theo to her friends. She was accompanied by her mother, who came to see her off, and by a man twenty years her junior, Edwin Friend, with whom she was traveling to London. Prone to wearing a velvet turban, Theodate was an imposing figure, though she stood only a little over five feet tall. She had blond hair, a blunt chin, and vivid blue eyes. Her gaze was frank and direct, reflecting the independence that she had shown throughout her life and that had caused her to reject the path expected of women raised in high society. Her mother once scolded, “You never act as other girls do”; her contemporaries referred to her by that newly coined descriptive label feminist.
Theodate counted among her friends the painter Mary Cassatt, William James, and his brother, author Henry James, with whom she developed a particularly close friendship, to the point where she named a new puppy after him, Jim-Jam. She was one of America’s few female architects of stature, designer of a revered house in Farmington, which she named Hill-Stead. When Henry James first saw the house, even before he came to know Theodate, he crafted one of the more novel analogies of architectural criticism, likening the joy he felt to “the momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning, between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition.” Theodate had a competing passion, however. She was a spiritualist and served from time to time as an investigator of paranormal phenomena. Belief in such things was widespread in America and Britain at the start of the twentieth century, when an Ouija board was a regular fixture in drawing rooms, to be brought out after dinner for impromptu séances. With the advent of war, belief in an afterlife was poised for a resurgence, as Britons sought comfort in the idea that their dead sons might still be present, in some way, somewhere in the ether. It was Theodate’s interest in “psychical” research that explained why she and Edwin Friend were sailing to London.
As the sole child of a wealthy Cleveland couple, she had spent her early life mostly alone. Her father, Alfred, was an iron tycoon; her mother, Ada, a socialite. They lived on the city’s Euclid Avenue, better known as Millionaire’s Row. “I have no memory at all of ever sitting in my mother’s lap,” Theodate wrote. “My father was so occupied with [business] affairs that I was fifteen years old before he realized he was losing his child.” She described her youth “as the extreme of what the lives of only children usually are” but credited this solitary time—punctuated by bouts of crushing boredom and depression—as instilling in her a strong sense of independence. From the age of ten on, she drew plans for houses and sketched their facades, and dreamed of one day building and living in a farmhouse of her own design.
To her parents, tuned to the high-society mores of the day, Theodate was doubtless a chore. At nineteen she changed her birth name, Effie, to Theodate, her grandmother’s name, out of respect for the woman’s devout belief in the Quaker principle of emphasizing the spiritual over the material. She had little interest in “coming out” as a debutante, and none in marriage, which she perceived to be a wall that foreclosed any future ambitions she might have. She called it the “gold collar.” Her parents sent her to a private school in Farmington, Miss Porter’s School for Young Ladies, expecting that once her education was completed she would return to take her place among Cleveland’s upper crust. Theodate liked Farmington so much, however, that she decided to stay. She became a suffragist; at one point she also joined the Socialist Party, and she loved riling her father with her talk of socialism.
On a lengthy journey through Europe in 1888, when she was twenty-one, she grew closer to her father. He was devoted to travel and to collecting art and was among the first collectors to fully embrace the impressionists, at a time when their work was widely deemed eccentric, even radical. It was he who suggested she consider architecture as a profession. They spent time together scouring art galleries and artists’ studios for works to bring back to Cleveland; they bought two paintings by Claude Monet. Theodate sketched elements of structures she found appealing, a pilaster here, a chimney there. She had little interest in Paris, which she described as “the greatest blot on the face of the earth,
” but she adored England, in particular its cozy country homes with sagging roofs, half-timbered walls, and welcoming doorways. She drew sketches of her vision of the ideal farmhouse.
Architecture being a field then largely barred to women, Theodate created an architectural education for herself, first through private studies with members of Princeton University’s art department. With her father’s support she bought a house in Farmington with 42 acres. Her parents, at her urging, resolved to retire to Farmington and build a house that would showcase Alfred’s art collection, which, in addition to the two Monets, included works by Whistler and Degas. Her father suggested she design the house, under the supervision of a practicing architect. She chose the firm of McKim, Mead & White, which, no doubt because of Alfred’s wealth, agreed to the plan. Theodate’s subsequent letter to founding partner William Rutherford Mead revealed her to be a woman of strong if not imperious character. She wrote, “As it is my plan, I expect to decide in all the details as well as all more important questions of plan that may arise.… In other words, it will be a Pope house instead of a McKim, Mead and White.”
The design and construction of the house became for Theodate an architectural apprenticeship. But the project, completed in 1900, exhausted her. That fall she wrote in her diary, “I have wrung my soul dry … over father’s house.”
By 1910 she was a full-fledged architect, soon to become the first female architect licensed in Connecticut. Three years later, in August 1913, her father died of a cerebral hemorrhage. It was a shattering blow, and in her grief she resolved to build a preparatory school for boys in his memory—a school, however, that would be very different from any then in existence. She envisioned a campus structured to mimic a small New England town, with shops, town hall, post office, and a working farm. Her plan was to emphasize the building of character by requiring that students devote a significant portion of their days to “community service,” helping out on the farm and in the shops, where they would learn such arts as carpentry and printmaking. In this she was very much in step with the Arts and Crafts movement, then in full sway, which held that craftsmanship provided both satisfaction and rescue from the perceived dehumanization of the industrial revolution. By 1910 the movement had swept America, yielding collectives, like fellow passenger Elbert Hubbard’s Roycrofters, and a new and simple approach to design, evident in the furniture of Gustav Stickley and in the simple, well-made homes of the so-called Craftsman style. It inspired as well the founding of magazines like House Beautiful and Ladies’ Home Journal.
By Saturday morning, May 1, 1915, Theodate was again in the grip of a profound weariness. The past winter had been difficult, professionally and emotionally. One incident in particular underscored the challenge of being a woman in a male profession: a publisher, thinking the name Theodate was a man’s, asked to include her photograph in a book on leading architects in New York. Upon learning in a phone call that she was female, he withdrew the offer. She also suffered one of her periodic descents into depression, this one sufficiently severe that she needed the assistance of a home nurse. In February 1915, she wrote, “I am having such persistent insomnia that my nights are waking nightmares.”
She believed, however, in the regenerative power of setting off on a journey. “There is nothing like the diversion of travel for one who is mentally fagged.”
Once aboard the Lusitania, Theodate was led by a steward to her cabin, a stateroom on D Deck on the starboard side. She deposited her hand luggage and made sure her cabin bags had arrived. If she hoped to sleep well that night, she was soon to be disappointed.
CHARLES LAURIAT, the Boston bookseller, now climbed the gangway, accompanied by his sister, Blanche, and her husband, George Chandler. “I was surprised that access to the steamer was allowed so freely,” Lauriat wrote. He found it odd that his sister and brother-in-law “were allowed to pass aboard without question.” Other passengers likewise noted the ease of access for friends and family who came aboard to see them off.
Chandler carried Lauriat’s briefcase and valise; Lauriat carried the extension suitcase containing the drawings and Dickens’s Carol. Chandler joked that the contents of that one were so valuable he “preferred not to touch it.”
The three walked to Lauriat’s room, B-5, the cabin closest to the bow on the starboard side of B Deck. Though seemingly a prime location, it was an interior stateroom, with no portholes. Lauriat was accustomed to traveling like this. One of the first things he did was place a matchbox in his room within easy reach, in case the ship’s electric dynamo failed. He had crossed the Atlantic twenty-three times so far, mostly on Cunard ships, but this would be his first voyage on one of the celebrated “greyhounds.”
Lauriat saw that the trunk and shoe case that he had checked at the station in Boston were already in his room. He tested the locks on his various bags, and then he, Blanche, and Chandler went back out on deck, where they remained until all visitors were asked to leave the ship. When Lauriat returned to his room, he took the drawings from the extension case and put them in the top tray of his shoe box, which was easier to lock; he put Dickens’s Carol in his briefcase.
Before boarding, Lauriat had read about the German Embassy’s warning but had paid little attention; the idea of canceling never entered his mind. He wore his Knickerbocker suit, and that new innovation, a stem-winding wristwatch, which he kept set to Boston time, always, no matter where he was; it was his way of grounding himself in the world. He told no one about the drawings.
DWIGHT HARRIS, the New Yorker with the engagement ring and custom life belt, took his valuables to the purser’s office for safekeeping. These included a diamond-and-pearl pendant, a diamond-and-emerald ring, a large diamond brooch, $500 in gold, and of course the engagement ring. He took a few moments before sailing to write a thank-you note to his grandparents, who had given him a bon voyage present. He used Lusitania stationery. The German warning seemed not to have given him pause. His mood was full of exclamation points.
“A thousand thanks for the delicious Jelly Cake and Peppermint Paste!” he wrote. “I can hardly wait for tea time to come!” He noted that the weather had begun to improve. “I am glad it has cleared!—my cabin is most comfortable—and I shall proceed to unpack after lunch!” He added that his Cousin Sallie had sent a basket of fruit and that another family member, Dick, had sent a large supply of grapefruit. “So I am well supplied!”
His note was among those that made it into the last bag of mail to leave the ship before departure. The envelope was postmarked “Hudson Terminal Station.”
THE STEWARDS announced that all visitors had to disembark. Ship reporter Jack Lawrence left without even trying to talk to Captain Turner. The captain, he wrote, “was of that brand of deep sea skipper who believes that a newspaperman’s place is at his desk on Park Row or in Fleet Street and that there ought to be a law to prevent him from prowling around the decks of ships.” On every prior encounter, Turner had been cold and unfriendly. “He seemed to me to be an austere, aloof sort of a man who knew his business and didn’t wish to discuss it with anybody.”
Lawrence admired Turner, however. He saw him on the ship’s main stairway, talking to another officer, and noticed “what a splendid figure he made.” His uniform was dark blue, double-breasted, with three-inch lapels and five buttons on each breast, only four to be actually buttoned, as specified in the Cunard officers’ manual. The jacket cuffs—the real show—were each edged with “four rows of gold wire navy lace ½-inch wide,” according to the manual. Turner’s cap, also dark blue, was trimmed in leather and black mohair braid, fronted with the Cunard badge: the Cunard lion, mocked gently by crew as the Cunard “monkey,” surrounded by a wreath of gold stitching. “When a British skipper knows how to dress, and he usually does, he is the very last word in what the well-dressed merchant captain should wear,” Lawrence wrote. “He knows not only what to wear but how to wear it. He achieves a jauntiness that is incomparable. Turner, that day, was master of one of the grea
t greyhounds of the North Atlantic—and looked the part.”
ROOM 40
BLINKER’S RUSE
IN LONDON, CAPTAIN HALL SAW THAT HIS NEW SCHEME for “mystifying and misleading the enemy” was beginning to have an effect.
It was a prime example of the kind of gamesmanship at which he excelled. His goal was to convince German military commanders that a British invasion of Schleswig-Holstein, on the North Sea, was imminent, and thereby cause the Germans to divert forces from the main battlefield in France. Teaming with an officer of Britain’s domestic counterintelligence service, MI-5, Hall had supplied German espionage channels with detailed, but false, information, including a report that over one hundred warships and transports were being massed in harbors on Britain’s west and south coasts, rather than the east-coast ports that were typically used to resupply Britain’s continental forces. As a final touch, Hall persuaded the Admiralty to order a halt to all ship traffic between England and Holland starting on April 21, the kind of order that might precede the launch of an invasion.
German military leaders were at first skeptical, but this new announcement proved persuasive. Room 40 listened in on wireless messages sent on April 24, from a German station at Antwerp. “An untried agent reports from England: Large transport of troops from south and west coast of England to Continent. Large numbers of troops at Liverpool, Grimsby, Hull.”