Finally there was Annie Clemmer Funk, a Mennonite missionary returning on her first furlough after five years in the Jangjir-Champa district of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh (often called the “Heart of India”). Miss Funk had been born in Pennsylvania in 1874. Her father was deacon at his local Mennonite church. She attended the Mennonite Training School in Northfield, Massachusetts, before toiling in the immigrant slums of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Paterson, New Jersey. In 1906 she was sent to India as the first female Mennonite missionary, serving in Janjgir-Champa, where she learned to speak Hindi and taught girls in a one-room school. Mennonite tenets required literal obedience to New Testament commandments and strict adherence to the ethics of Christ, especially self-denial, self-renunciation, and sacrificial martyrdom. They renounced aggression and violence; were active in humanitarian works; and shunned Catholicism, worldliness, and luxury. Mennonite women wore austere dresses with modest bonnets, shawls, and veils.
In 1912 Miss Funk was summoned home by a telegram announcing her mother’s illness. She entrained for Bombay, where she embarked on the Persia, a P&O steamship plying between England and Australia, which was torpedoed by a German submarine off Crete three years later. The Persia carried her to Marseille, from where she hastened by trains to Liverpool. There she was booked on the American Line’s Haverford, which ran the Liverpool-Philadelphia route. As its crossing was delayed by the coal strike, she transferred to the Titanic on a second-class ticket costing £13. The Friday of her voyage marked Miss Funk’s thirty-eighth birthday.29
Annie Funk was an inspiring woman with a creed of personal service and sacrifice. She was surely unaware that in second class there were several adulterers, a child kidnapper, and a handsome bachelor with his Ganymede. There were doubtless tricksters, too, seeking targets. They seem to have missed Leopold Weisz, aged thirty-three, who had left the Jewish quarter of Budapest to study ornamental stone carving in England, before moving in 1911 to Montreal where he was employed to carve friezes on newly built bank and museum buildings. He had returned to Europe to collect his Belgian wife and begin a new chapter in Montreal, and he was carrying a fortune in life savings. Tens of thousands of dollars were sewn inside the lining of his suit, and gold bullion secreted in his black Astrakhan coat with its fur collar.
Michel Navrátil, the kidnapper, had been born in Sered, a market town in southern Slovakia. From Sered there was a railway running to Bratislava, Slovakia’s major city, with its multifarious population of Austrians, Czechs, Germans, Jews, and Slovaks. Sered, too, had a busy traffic of barges and rafts carrying timber and salt along the river Váh, a tributary of the Danube. These easy transport links perhaps induced Navrátil to travel, first into Hungary and then to the French Riviera, where at Nice he became a women’s tailor with an elegant clientele. This was not an end to his journeying, for in Westminster, on May 26, 1907, he married an Italian, Marcelle Caretto. They had two sons, Michel and Edmond, known as Lolo and Momon, born at Nice in 1908 and 1910. His wife found that he had an odd temper, and he accused her of having a lover. The couple separated, and while they were in the process of divorcing, the boys lived with a cousin of their mother’s. At the start of April 1912, Navrátil collected the boys from this cousin and absconded with them. He left his wife a cruel note—“You will never see the children again: but never fear about them, for they will be in good hands”—and sent a further letter posted in Austria to mislead her, but she knew that he had fled to London. He had often spoken of going to America and bought second-class Titanic tickets costing £26 under his assumed name of Louis Hoffman, taken from the copain who had helped him to vanish.30
This tailor, accustomed in boyhood to Danube barges, boarded the great liner at Southampton with his two stolen boys. The elder child always remembered his thrill at playing on deck and looking down the awesome length of the ship—and eating eggs for breakfast with his father. Navrátil implied to fellow passengers that he was a widower, and seldom relaxed his control of his sons. He was armed with a revolver. On one occasion, he diverted himself by playing cards and left the boys in the charge of Bertha Lehmann, a Swiss waitress who ate meals at the same saloon table. She was on her way to join her brother in grandiloquently misnamed Central City, a hick settlement on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
As to the adulterers, Henry Morley, aged thirty-nine, was a citizen of Worcester, England, a confectioner with branches in Worcester, Birmingham, and Bristol—as well as a wife and child in Worcester. He eloped on the Titanic with a nineteen-year-old Worcester girl, Kate Phillips: they traveled under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Marshall. Similarly, Harry Faunthorpe, also aged about forty, a Lancashire carrot and potato salesman, was heading for Philadelphia with “Lizzie” Wilkinson, aged twenty-nine, his mistress rather than wife. They seem to have told fellow passengers that they were recently married and honeymooning or starting a new life in California.
Joseph Fynney, principal of the firm Joseph Fynney & Company, rubber merchants, of Brown’s Buildings in Liverpool, was on one of his recurrent visits to his widowed mother in Montreal. He was a handsome, dark-haired bachelor in his midthirties with a keen, alert expression and shrewd eyes who enjoyed the company of youths and worked with delinquent youngsters. “Well-known and highly respected in Liverpool,” reported an obituarist, “his cheery and bright disposition endearing him to all who knew him. Mr Fynney took an interest in the work of St James’s Church, Toxteth, particularly in connection with the Young Men’s Club, and matters appertaining to the welfare of boys and young men.”31 On each visit to his mother in Canada, he took a teenage companion: in 1912 it was a sixteen-year-old apprentice cooper, Alfred Gaskell, of 20 Dexter Street. In other circumstances, Fynney might have been a first-class voyager, but it was impossible for him to bring a working-class lad onto the same decks as Astors or Cardezas. The incongruity between the past experiences, future prospects, physical grace, and easy manners of young Jack Thayer and Alfred Gaskell would have been too pointed. Each second-class ticket bought by Fynney cost £26.
There were several traveling parties on the second-class decks, notably groups from Hampshire, Guernsey, and several from Cornwall.
From the hamlet of Fritham in Hampshire came three Hickman brothers and four of their friends. There was little at Fritham except ancient woodlands and the Schultze gunpowder factory, which had been located deep in the New Forest so as to limit loss of life in any accidental explosions. At the age of twenty Leonard Hickman had emigrated in 1908 to Neepawa, Manitoba, where he prospered working as a farmhand on a mixed-grain farmstead called Eden. He returned to Fritham for Christmas of 1911, intent on persuading the entire Hickman family of eleven to move to Eden. Because of the coal strike, only three brothers could get an immediate passage: Leonard, his elder brother Lewis (who worked in the gunpowder factory), and twenty-year-old Stanley. They traveled with four young companions from Fritham on a single ticket costing £73 10s—all of them upgraded from third class on another ship to second class on the Titanic. All seven Fritham men perished.
Over a dozen passengers from Guernsey traveled second class on the Titanic. There was a party led by William Downton, a well-established quarryman of Rochester in upstate New York. Downton was chaperoning his young ward, Lillian Bentham, who was heading for Holley, a village on the Erie Canal in the northwest corner of the state. The other Guernsey party members were another quarryman; a carpenter-joiner, who had made an earlier trip to the United States in 1907, with his wife and her two younger brothers, who were both carters; a young man who worked on his father’s smallholding; and the young daughter of a railway man, heading for Wilmington, Delaware, where her uncle was a grocer. Three men in their early or midtwenties were leaving Guernsey for a new life in America: a quarryman’s driver, a young ledger clerk at a general store, and a horse trainer who had transferred from the Olympic and was heading for a horse breeders’ in Minnesota (there was a demand for English grooms as horse trainers and riding instructors on American
stud farms). Lawrence Gavey, aged twenty-six, was returning to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he had settled five years earlier: he was a traveling fitter employed by a Rockefeller company, known for “his unfailing bonhomie and cheerful spirit.”32 An older Guernsey man was a sixty-eight-year-old farmer, trustee of the Ebenezer Wesleyan Chapel, member of the Central Douzaine of Saint Peter Port, and visiting his daughter in Rhode Island. He was traveling with a widower aged seventy-three, retired as both coach painter and boot shop proprietor, who was going to visit his sister in Toledo, Ohio. They were both Lyons Corner House sorts. None of the Guernsey men in second class survived.
The largest grouping of all on the Titanic’s second-class decks was Cornish. They banded together, looked askance at the English, and, with impassive faces, subjected them to banter. The route from Cornwall was well trekked, with recognized staging posts on the way. At Southampton there was Berriman’s Hotel, run by a friendly Cornishwoman and catering to Cornish voyagers, while in Brooklyn, John and Sid Blake ran the Star Hotel as a hospitable halt for Cornish coming in and out of America. “We were expecting to be very busy when the Titanic docked as there would be quite a number of Cornish people who would wait for the honour of traveling on her for her maiden trip,” Sid Blake recorded. “We had received personal letters from several people requesting us to meet them on their arrival, and assist them through the Customs. I meet all steamers sailing from Southampton, and whenever possible I see that Cornish passengers are looked after properly, baggage labelled right, etc., and that they are placed on their proper train for the West in good time. Besides, I always meet old friends who have gone home a few months before on a visit. It feels good to shake hands with them again, and hear them say, ‘There is no place like Cornwall.’”33
Two separate parties were traveling from Penzance to Akron—a boomtown of the epoch, prospering since the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company had been founded there in 1898, and thriving after Firestone Tire & Rubber had opened its plant two years later. The pervasive smell of rubber was unpleasant after the sea breezes of Penzance, but rubber connoted modernity and good money. Often Cornishmen went out to the United States alone, sending for their wives and children when they had saved enough money for tickets. Arthur Wells and his brother-in-law Abednego Trevaskis had migrated to Akron two years earlier. Now Addie Wells, daughter of a blacksmith and fish packer, wife of Arthur Wells, and sister of Trevaskis, was joining them with her two toddlers and household linen. A larger party was led by George Hocking, originally a Penzance baker, latterly a watchman in a rubber factory in Akron, who had returned home to collect his mother, Eliza Hocking, his sisters, Nellie Hocking and Emily Richards, together with his small nephews, William and George Richards. Nellie Hocking was on her way to marry a man in Schenectady. Emily Richards was joining her husband in Akron. George Hocking had sung in the YMCA choir in Penzance, which turned out to sing the party joyously on their journey. No doubt the provident Cornishwomen had packed the ingredients for a picnic fit for Cornish travelers, with pasties and the brightly colored, aromatic saffron buns relished by the Cornish.
George Hocking shared his cabin with an old Penzance schoolfellow, Harry Cotterill, who lived with his widowed mother, had just completed his apprenticeship with a Penzance builder, and had decided to go to Akron for work. The third boy berthing with them was Percy Bailey. Born in 1893, reared in Penzance, a butcher’s boy in the town, Bailey was proceeding to Akron, where he was to stay with a friend of his father and begin work as an apprentice butcher. Bailey initially booked on White Star’s Oceanic but transferred when he heard that his friends Cotterill and Hocking had tickets on the Titanic. He arrived in Southampton on April 9 and boarded the next morning. He started on his voyage full of high hopes, good resolutions, youthful excitement, and grateful love for his parents, as shown by the touching letter that he posted at Queenstown.
Dear Father and Mother,
We arrived on board this morning after a nights rest at Southampton. We put up at an Hotel named Berrimans, the lady who owns it is a Cornish lady, we had a good supper and a good breakfast of ham and eggs, we were doing it fine. I slept with a young man named Wells a brother to the man who married Mrs Trevaskis’ daughter, he came to Southampton to see [off] his sister-in-law. We had several people joined us at St Erth bound for the same place as we are going so we are a big family altogether. Well dear Mother, I suppose you are missing me but don’t be downhearted old dear, Percy will be behaved to you as a son ought to treat his Mother and Father. This going away from home will make me a better man and try and lead a good life. The Titanic is a marvel I can tell you, I have never seen such a sight in all my life, she is like a floating palace, everything up to date. I hope you are all well as it leaves me at present. . .
Father I shall never forget your kindness, you have done more for me than many Fathers have done for their sons. Well dear parents I don’t think there is any more news I can tell you now. Kiss Grandma for me and tell I am sorry for all my wicked thoughts which I said to her, but never again, will I cheek her.
Give my love to all who ask for me and tell Ethel to come and see you any time. I will draw my letter to a close hoping you one and all are quite well.
I remain your loving son.34
Apart from the Penzance to Akron crowd, several dozen Cornish miners traveling second class on the Titanic were heading for the Houghton County copper belt in Michigan. Until the Guggenheims developed Bingham Canyon and Chuquicamata, Houghton County was the richest copper district in the world. It lies on the Keweenaw Peninsula, a fir-covered, craggy promontory fifteen miles wide and fifty miles long, jutting into Lake Superior as Cornwall juts into the Atlantic. When men were needed in the mines, or a job was going, someone always knew a man in Cornwall who was suited for it: “Cousin Jack.” Cornishmen formed working groups (often from the same family or village) that contracted with mine managers to find and blast copper-bearing rocks at an agreed rate. Sturdily independent and absurdly touchy, they convinced themselves that they worked for no one but themselves: no Cornish Jack would stoop to pick up a tool from the ground in the presence of his shift boss lest it seem that he was working for a superior.35
Several parties heading for Houghton came from the Saint Ives district. William Berriman, aged twenty-five, a farmworker, and his brother-in-law William Carbines, aged nineteen, a miner, were bound for the Calumet Iron Mine in Houghton, where Carbines’s brother was already settled. Stephen Jenkin, aged thirty-two, son of a Nanjivey tin miner, had become a U.S. citizen during his nine years at the Champion Copper Mine in Painesdale, Houghton County. Jenkin was returning there after a long visit to his family.36 Maud “Maudie” Sincock hoped to celebrate her twenty-first birthday in New York on April 17. She was traveling to join her plumber father, from Halsetown, near Saint Ives, who had emigrated during the previous September to Houghton, where he worked at the Quincy Mine. She accompanied her mother’s friend Agnes Davies, a widowed dressmaker whose first husband had been a stonemason and her second husband a miner. She was leaving Saint Ives with her eight-year-old son, John Davies, and his nineteen-year-old half-brother, Joseph Nicholls, and heading for Houghton, where her eldest son lived. She had sold all her possessions and intended to run a lodging house for Cornish miners.
Helston was the origin of another set of Cornish voyagers in second class. A cattle-market town with tin mines outside, Helston was the birthplace of Henry Trengrouse who, after the drowning of over a hundred men in a Cornish shipwreck, had a hundred years earlier designed the first distress rockets for ships in trouble at sea. Frederick Banfield was a miner in his midtwenties who had left a job in Nevada to spend three months with his parents at Helston. His destination was Houghton. Banfield embarked with Samuel Sobey, a quarryman in Houghton who was returning after a visit to his family in Porthallow, a pilchard-fishing village near the mouth of the Helford River, and with Joseph Fillbrook, an eighteen-year-old painter-decorator from Truro. In addition to Banfield and Sobey, there was
an older man, William Gilbert, originally from a hamlet outside Helston, who had been apprenticed as a joiner and wheelwright and had steady work in a joinery shop at Butte, Montana. He had returned for three months to visit his mother and brother, and with a ticket costing 10 guineas was resuming life in Butte. William Gilbert was a man of calm, precise temperament whose hobbies were electrical tinkering and technical drawing.
Near Helston, in the southeast tip of Cornwall, lay Constantine and Porthleven. Constantine, a village atop the wooded creek that heads the Helford River, was the departure point of James Veale, a granite carver in his forties, who had returned from Barre, Vermont, to visit his family. Another established American emigrant in his forties, James Drew, also left from Constantine. Drew had emigrated in 1896 to Greenport, a harbor town on the North Shore of Long Island and the terminus of a branch of the Long Island Railway. There he ran a monumental marble business with his elder brother William. He and his wife were childless, and in 1911 had left on the Olympic with their motherless seven-year-old nephew, Marshall Drew, for a visit to their Constantine relations. The trio was now returning to Long Island Sound.
Porthleven was a small Cornish fishing port where the cottages were perched on rocky slopes above the granite harbor, with its 465-foot pier jutting into the sea. Two brothers, Edgar and Frederick Giles, sons of a farmworker who had left Porthleven to join their elder brother training horses in Camden, New Jersey, were transferred to the Titanic from the Oceanic. On the savage, wreck-strewn coast southwest of Porthleven, fields of buttercups and clover ran near to the shore with the bleak moorland of the Goonhilly Downs behind. There were touches of modernity: the golf links serving the hotel at Mullion Cove, and near the golf links the weird-looking Marconi wireless station at Poldhu. This was the earliest permanent wireless station in the world, with four scaffold towers soaring over two hundred feet, surrounded by a trellis of posts, wires, and lower towers. It was from Poldhu that Marconi messages reached Atlantic ships, enabling first-class liners to publish daily news bulletins throughout their voyage—“a very wonderful thing, when we remember how completely a sea voyage used to cut one away from news at home.”37 Poldhu was soon to be humming with messages about the Titanic.
Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From Page 14