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

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Pirrie cultivated close relations between Harland & Wolff and many shipping lines, but none was bound more tightly to the Belfast yards than White Star. In 1867 a Liverpool shipowner called Thomas Ismay bought for £1,000 an insolvent shipping firm specializing in transporting emigrants to the Australian goldfields. A bantering conversation during a billiard game two years later determined Ismay to divert White Star ships from their Australian routes, which never paid well, to the North Atlantic. It was a good moment to change tactics. The expansion of the United States since the end of the Civil War was attracting thousands of European immigrants who needed berths on transatlantic steamships. From the outset, in 1869, Harland & Wolff arranged the finance for Ismay’s expanded building program on condition that their Belfast yard got the orders.

  The first Harland & Wolff ship for White Star, the Oceanic, was launched at Belfast in 1870 and set new standards for size and comfort. At 3,078 tons it was the largest ship on the ocean: capable of fourteen knots it crossed the Atlantic in eight to ten days carrying up to 200 cabin and 1,000 steerage passengers, with 130 crew. First-class cabins were larger than was customary and boasted electric bells for stewards and baths with running water. The most conspicuous novelty in the Oceanic arose from the decision to abandon the Royal Navy’s quarterdeck tradition: passengers’ quarters had been near the stern, where the ship heaved in most weathers. In steamships, the juddering from the propeller was constant in the stern, while in rough conditions the propeller lashed through the air rather than the sea causing a nasty “racing” effect. Harland & Wolff shifted the first-class cabins amidships, where there was reduced heaving and racing, as well as less pungent galley smells. Cheaper steerage berths remained in the stern. “The change to midships was so universally appreciated that the White Star Line at once leaped to a foremost place in Atlantic enterprise,” recorded the Liverpool Daily Post in 1899. Competitors had to match White Star standards of comfort: “Mr Ismay was, in truth, the inventor of luxurious ocean travel.”7

  After the Oceanic, Harland built the Adriatic, Britannic, Germanic, Arabic, Coptic, Ionic, and Doric for White Star. In all there was an emphasis on the convenience of passengers. The intention was to make Atlantic crossings potentially enjoyable rather than certainly dreadful. In 1887 the keels were laid in Harland & Wolff’s shipyard of two important new White Star liners, the Teutonic and the Majestic. These were the first vessels built for White Star that relied solely on steam power and dispensed with square-rigged sails as backup. They had another innovation, twin propellers, which meant that they could achieve a speed of twenty knots. Their displacement was just under ten thousand tons. Until the Teutonic and Majestic, White Star liner accommodation had been divided between cabin class and steerage, but these new ships inaugurated the era of three classes. They had accommodation for 300 first-class passengers, 190 second-class, and 1,000 third-class. The Teutonic took the Blue Riband for a westward Atlantic crossing in five days, sixteen hours, and thirty-one minutes in 1891. This was the last time that a White Star liner held the Blue Riband, for their ships were built to be pleasurable rather than gustily high speed.

  Thomas Ismay—backed by Harland & Wolff—was challenging Cunard for North Atlantic business by the 1870s. In business he was prone to tyrannize. At home he was a martinet. Every self-made Victorian ogre had a domestic citadel built for himself: Ismay’s was an ornate mock-Elizabethan house south of Liverpool. Each morning at eight he began his daily walk to Thurstaston station. If he saw a fallen leaf on his carriage drive, he would put a stone on top of it, and woe betide his ten gardeners if the stone and leaf were still there when he returned in the evening. This was the sort of attention to detail, slyness, and intimidation in which Victorian businessmen took pride. Ismay cut a great figure in the world. The naval review at Spithead of 1897, a display of imperial might to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, was attended by all the Home Fleet, many overseas squadrons, and the Prince of Wales on the royal yacht, plus Thomas Ismay with his son Bruce on their liner Teutonic, sporting its eight guns as an armed merchantman. A few years later, in 1899–1900, both the Teutonic and the Majestic carried thousands of troops to the war in South Africa.

  At the age of twenty-nine, in 1892, Bruce Ismay became managing director of White Star, after a spell as its New York agent, and he took charge after his father’s death in 1899. He was described (at the time of the Titanic disaster) as “a quietly dressed, rather youthful man of unassuming mien . . . speaking in a low, well-modulated voice that carried well . . . He looks and speaks so unlike the commonly accepted type of commercial monarchs as could well be conceived. A cultured cosmopolitan, if you like, but not a strong ruler of strong men.”8 He is often presented as a typical English upper-middle-class public schoolboy because he had good manners and Who’s Who recorded that he had been educated at Harrow. But this is misleading, for Ismay spent less than eighteen months at Harrow, which he left at the age of fifteen; he was, moreover, there in an undistinguished generation, for none of his classmates achieved distinction, and few of them enjoyed even middling hereditary privileges. Ismay was inescapably the son of a northern millionaire, who was trained in commerce after his interlude at Harrow and then sent to New York to be toughened in the transatlantic rate wars. He stood six feet four inches tall and was a robust sportsman, though not in the class of the shipping tycoon Hermann Oelrichs, who was ostracized in the New York Athletic Club because he was an insufferably successful all-rounder who thought nothing of swimming several miles out into the Atlantic alone.

  Like many self-made millionaires, old Ismay was stormy, egotistical, and showy; and like many sons of such men, Bruce Ismay disliked brouhaha and was guarded in his reactions, only relaxing when in the company of those he trusted. Bruce Ismay, though, commanded high prestige, for shipowners stood at the apex of British business. It was only in the 1880s that prime ministers began recommending to Queen Victoria that she bestow peerages on men who were company directors. Bankers and brewers secured the earliest peerages, but in 1897 Sir John Burns of Cunard became the first shipowner with a coronet, Lord Inverclyde. In the next quarter century—Britain’s shipping apogee, with the Titanic’s maiden voyage about halfway through—another eight peerages went to shipping directors. It is likely that but for the Titanic disaster a peerage would have gone to Bruce Ismay, as it eventually did to his shipping son-in-law Basil Sanderson.

  Ismay came to power at White Star at a time of keen competition from the two leading German shipping lines. Until the 1890s, Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher-Lloyd had specialized in emigrant traffic and left first-class passengers to Cunard and White Star. By 1903 German lines owned the four fastest ships in the world: their speed ensured that they attracted first-class travelers, and their patriotic names proved how much this was a matter of national pride as well as profit. Norddeutscher-Lloyd made so much money that Hermann Oelrichs, its head in the United States, had the millions to build a summer palace at Newport, Rhode Island—although he grew disgusted by the pomp, and preferred to eat in a chophouse. While Germans built their ships for speed, White Star targeted travelers who preferred a seven-day transatlantic journey in comfort, even luxury, to a five-day journey under conditions of relentless Teutonic propulsion.

  Pierpont Morgan was the most powerful personal force in the United States. He had the self-absorption of a pampered invalid. As a child he had suffered fits, which frightened his parents. As a teenager he suffered from eczema, lethargy, and rheumatic fever. Anxiety surrounded but also cushioned him. He came to expect all the consideration due to a confirmed valetudinarian. His lifelong habit of transatlantic journeys began when he was a boy: he finished his schooling at Vevey in Switzerland and attended Göttingen University; he spoke fluent French and German, loved Rome above all cities, had London tailors, and conveyed an air of patrician entitlement.

  The only touch of frivolity in Pierpont Morgan’s upbringing came from a feckless uncle who wrote that timeless ditty “Jingle Bells.”
At the age of twenty-four, in 1861, Morgan had a love match with a bride who died of tuberculosis four months after their marriage. In the years that followed he was smitten by recurrent collapses into melancholy, crippling headaches, and bouts of helpless lassitude, and convinced himself (and others) that to forestall collapses, which took him away from the office, he had an imperative duty to coddle himself. Luxury thus became for him a moral necessity. To be incommoded or thwarted made him ill. Morgan often felt worthless and slumped into despondency unless he could achieve something big that restored his sense of worth. “If you could pierce him through,” E. M. Forster wrote in 1910, “you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle.”9 For half a century he raked in the dollars yet seemed to one English diplomat, who met him in Egypt, “the saddest of millionaires.”10 It was in Egypt that he spent hours gazing at the temples of Karnak, fell into a depressed stupor in which he scarcely ate, became unresponsive, and in 1913 died in Rome.

  Pierpont Morgan was an inarticulate, rough-mannered man. He was incapable of small talk and expressed himself in grunts. He reached his unassailable position as ruler of Wall Street after intervening to save the U.S. Treasury from defaulting on the gold convertibility of the dollar in 1895. He consolidated his position as the banker who had only inferiors twelve years later. An outbreak of jitters on Wall Street in 1907 caused the collapse of a bank, a trust, and a brokerage firm. Individuals could not obtain money for daily use; businesses went bankrupt; railroad building was suspended; industrial output fell; unemployment rose. Wall Street floundered until Morgan rallied other dismayed bankers and shored up the tottering fabric of American finance by raising $50 million to support troubled banks and trusts. “Morgan,” declared an observer, “has saved the country from a terrible catastrophe, and all America is ringing with his praises.”11

  The 1907 crisis intensified American suspicions that bankers were fraudulent, inept, overweening, and reckless. However, until the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which passed shortly after Morgan’s death, the United States had no central bank: he instead acted for nearly twenty years as the nation’s central banker, upholding the value of the dollar, bolstering confidence at times of crisis, protecting investors’ interests, providing capital, organizing the mergers that created America’s corporate trusts. He was an overseer in the transformation of a chiefly agrarian nation into the world’s most powerful industrial state and in the vast transfer of wealth from Europe to the United States. He ruled a paper kingdom, bristling with interim prospectuses, listed stocks, paper securities, collateral trusts, cumulative dividends, uncomputed millions; there was money for him in manufacturing, but more money in mergers.

  Morgan was the sort of patriot who felt sure that his own aggrandizement served the good of his country. He saw no distinction between the national interest and his personal interest. Although adept in handling people whose interests coincided with his own, he was obtuse in dealings with people who felt their interests diverged from his. He did not believe in laissez-faire or the invigorating power of a competitive market. Trusts, pools, syndicates, and market rigging seemed to him rational and orderly, and he therefore made himself their master. He provided resolute leadership that enforced stability by taming the prowling, mauling lions of market forces and caging the frisky, destructive monkeys of speculative profiteering. With similar resolve he forced economic adversaries—whether chiefs of rival corporations or representatives of clashing employers and strikers—to open negotiations and agree to truces. He seldom repined over the past but lived in the present and was indifferent to what would come after he was gone.

  Sir Clinton Dawkins, who ran his London office, described the Napoleon of Wall Street at his apogee in 1901. “Old Pierpont Morgan and the house in the US occupy a position immensely more predominant than Rothschilds in Europe . . . Taken together the Morgan combination of the US & London probably do not fall very far short of the Rothschilds in capital, are immensely more expansive and active, and . . . the US is going to dominate in most ways.”12 Visiting New York a few months later and installed in Morgan’s offices at 23 Wall Street, Dawkins was tired but exhilarated. “This is the place where things ‘hum’, and they have been humming a great deal and not always agreeably since I have been over here. But it is extremely interesting to find oneself in the very heart of the Wall Street excitement and combinations, and to note the prodigious amount of nervous excitement and energy the Americans throw into their work. Part of the buoyancy and excitement is also due, I suppose, to the comparative youth of the vast majority of them. Few of them live through it to advanced years except physical and intellectual giants like Morgan who has something Titanic about him when he really gets to work. Most of them drop out suddenly. Total collapse very often . . . all this stress & excitement is carried on in a climate like Alexandria at its worst, aggravated by asphalt streets, tall houses and elevated railways.”13 Dawkins proved to be one of several directors who died in his forties because of the crushing overwork and nerve-wracking pressure created by Morgan’s business methods.

  After 1900, Morgan became one of the great collectors of the world. High noblemen disposing of exquisite rarities knew him as one of the few men able to afford their prices. Dilapidated gentry realized with inward sobs of relief that his acquisitive mania would save them. Gibbering, importunate touts thronged the halls of his hotels to the exasperation of other guests and thrust every sort of rubbish at him. More suave dealers called by appointment at his houses and waited civilly in antechambers when he was late. The thought of what he owned was a comfort to him, but the thought of what he might buy next week enlivened him. Morgan and similar American collectors were a different species from the collector dukes and bachelor connoisseurs known for centuries in Europe. They staked higher claims as they amassed their collections. Morgan ranked himself with the pharaohs and popes, the ruling houses of Medici, Hapsburg, and Bonaparte, the princes and dukes whose collections he dismembered and acquired. His monarchical aura was noticed by the English art critic Roger Fry, who once traveled to Washington, D.C., in Morgan’s private railway carriage. “He behaves not as a host but exactly as a crowned head . . . the whole thing regal and yet somehow infinitely provincial,” Fry described. “I felt, as I sat next to him, like a courtier who has at last got an audience, and as though, for a few minutes, I wielded absolute power.” Morgan’s circle seemed oddly malleable, “for they’ve not got anything but money to intimidate you with. There’s precious little distinction or cachet about the whole lot.”14

  At the start of the twentieth century, Morgan engineered not only his most successful set of mergers, which culminated in the creation of U.S. Steel, but his worst failure, the amalgamations that produced International Mercantile Marine. The tale of IMM began in Blackfriars railway station in London in 1892, when a middle-aged English shipowner called Frederick Leyland startled the porters by collapsing and dying. Leyland’s shipping interests came under the control of John Ellerman, an accountant not yet thirty years old but a man with the Midas touch, who was to become, within fifteen years, the richest man in England. Ellerman took charge of the Leyland Line and led its bold expansion into the North Atlantic trade. With a modernized fleet, Leyland paid an average dividend of 11 percent over the eight years that it was headed by Ellerman. He was a reclusive man, fixated on the beauty of numbers, for whom moneymaking seems to have been an incidental satisfaction. His fortune was not based on stock exchange ramps and plunder. He had no interest in becoming an English version of Pierpont Morgan, controlling banks, factories, and human destinies, and indeed he is notable for his lack of annihilating ego. He had no public life, no enemies, and was described by the Daily Mail as “the Silent Ford—the invisible Rockefeller.”15

  Morgan had a millionaire amateur’s interest in seamanship. He owned a series of fast, luxurious yachts named Corsair and was a commodore of the New York Yacht Club. During 1900 he agreed to finance a merger involving the Atlantic Transport Company of Baltimore, to advance
the money to build six new ships and to arrange the sale of preferred stock. In 1901 his London office offered $3.5 million for Leyland, but Ellerman pushed them up to $11 million in cash. White Star was the Morgan combine’s next target. Pirrie sat on White Star’s board, controlled the second largest block of White Star shares after Ismay, recognized that Harland & Wolff could win a great deal of work from the new combine of shipping companies, and considered that if White Star was caught in a rate war with IMM, the amount available for Harland & Wolff orders would fall. He wanted to defend Harland & Wolff’s tied market by cooperating with the combine, and traveled to New York to agree on tactics with Morgan. Then, using Pirrie as their intermediary, Morgan’s men approached Bruce Ismay about the inclusion of White Star in IMM. Ismay’s first reaction was that the proposal was “a swindle and a humbug,”16 but he was ultimately coaxed into an agreement to sell White Star. Pirrie was keen to tighten his shipyard’s connection with Hamburg-Amerika, and insisted that Albert Ballin’s company be involved in the scheme. With Morgan’s support, he arranged for the purchase of 51 percent of the German company by Harland & Wolff. Both the German and the White Star arrangements were finalized in February 1902. Pirrie’s patriotism in promoting the mergers was challenged: “Mr Pirrie has about as much sentiment as a Muscovy duck,” complained a shipping journal.17

  Pierpont Morgan wanted to include Cunard in the combine but found that its stock was too dispersed to be easily bought up. His interests offered to buy Cunard at up to 80 percent above its market value, but Cunard declined this offer, while indicating that they might later accept a higher price. Subsequently, its young chairman, the second Lord Inverclyde, convinced the British government that Cunard could compete with neither government-subsidized German lines nor the American-financed IMM without government aid. He dangled before the British government the possibility that Cunard shareholders would sell to IMM if a high enough price was tabled. This persuaded the government to loan £2.4 million to Cunard to build two fast liners for the North Atlantic and to grant an annual operating subsidy of £150,000. In return, Cunard undertook that it would not sell to IMM or anyone else for twenty years. The two new liners were launched in 1907 as the Lusitania and the Mauretania. It was in response to them that Ismay and Pirrie determined to build the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic.