Of the 892 crew, 699 had Southampton addresses. About 40 percent of these were Hampshire men, but many had moved south when White Star transferred its operations from Liverpool in 1907, and originated from Merseyside. Over a hundred catering crew and nearly forty engineers had signed on in Belfast and continued on the Atlantic voyage, although not all of them were from Ulster. A few crewmen were Londoners: Able Seaman Joseph Scarrott was the sort of cockney who used rhyming slang: his monthly wages of £5 he called “bees and honey.” Most were simple patriots, like Quartermaster Bright who referred to England as “Albion”; and some were bad husbands and fathers, like John Poingdestre, whose family in Southampton were faint with hunger when he embarked: the children were later put into care in Jersey, and his descendants repudiate his memory.
The stores needed by an Olympic-class floating hotel were reckoned at 75,000 pounds of fresh meat; 11,000 pounds of fresh fish; 8,000 head of poultry and game; 6,000 pounds of bacon and ham; 2,500 pounds of sausages; 35,000 eggs; 40 tons of potatoes; 7,000 heads of lettuce; 1¼ tons of peas; 2¾ tons of tomatoes; 10,000 pounds of sugar; 6,000 pounds of butter; 36,000 oranges; 16,000 lemons; 180 boxes of apples; 180 boxes of oranges; 1,000 pounds of grapes; 50 boxes of grapefruit; 800 bundles of asparagus; 3,500 onions; 1,500 gallons of milk; 1,750 quarts of ice cream; 2,200 pounds of coffee; 800 pounds of tea; 15,000 bottles of beer and stout; 1,500 bottles of wine; 850 bottles of spirits; and 8,000 cigars. All these perishables were taken on board the Titanic in the day or so before departure from Southampton. Officers worked night and day receiving stores, allotting duties, testing instruments and contraptions, signing chits and certificates. Other indispensable items that did not need to be fresh or refrigerated had been loaded earlier in Belfast. Linen included 45,000 table napkins; 25,000 towels; 15,000 bed sheets and pillowcases; 7,500 bath towels; 6,000 tablecloths; and 4,000 aprons. Crockery included 12,000 dinner plates; 4,500 soup plates; 3,000 teacups; 3,000 beef tea cups; 1,500 coffee cups; 1,500 soufflé dishes; and 1,000 cream jugs. Cutlery included 8,000 dinner forks; 1,500 fish forks; 1,000 oyster forks; 400 sugar tongs; 400 asparagus tongs; 300 nutcrackers; and 100 grape scissors. There were 8,000 tumblers; 2,000 wineglasses; 1,500 champagne flutes; 1,200 small liqueur glasses or brandy balloons; and 300 claret jugs. Cleaning and maintenance equipment included 12 mops, 12 squeegees, 58 paintbrushes, and 72 brooms.
There is no king as great as a sea captain on his ship, Darwin said. Captain Edward Smith was absolute lord of these men, women, and provisions. He had been born in 1850 in the Staffordshire pottery town of Hanley and attended a Methodist school until, at the age of twelve, he went to work at the Etruria Forge. At eighteen he left for Liverpool and enlisted on a clipper ship. His first command, at the early age of twenty-six, was a one-thousand-ton three-master on the South America run. In 1888 he received his first White Star command as captain of the Baltic. He captained a total of seventeen ships from the Baltic to the Titanic and is estimated to have sailed two million miles for White Star. Latterly, he had commanded their newest liners and was commodore of their fleet. He had experienced gales and fogs, but had never been in an accident worth mentioning, he told a reporter in 1907 after the Adriatic’s maiden voyage: “I never saw a wreck, and I have never been wrecked, nor have I been in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster.”8
Smith was paid £1,250 a year, with a bonus of £1,000 if he brought his ships to port in good order. He had married in 1887 and fathered a daughter in 1902. On land he enjoyed the comforting banality of an evening at home in his villa in Westwood Park, a Southampton suburb. With his sea salt’s beard and avuncular tubbiness, he looked solid, unflappable, and reassuring. He had a reputation as a safe seaman, a hospitable hotelier, and a good talker. Captains were often praised as raconteurs, for they had a fresh audience every week and could vary their repertoire according to need. Smith kept to the rule that large men should be jolly and lovers of life. “In the little tea parties in his private state room we learned to know the genial warm-hearted family man; his face would light as he recounted the little intimacies of his life ashore, as he told of his wife and the troubles she had with the dogs he loved, of his little girl and her delight with the presents he bought her,” recorded a first-class voyager who crossed the Atlantic with him on several ships. “He read widely, but men more than books. He was a good listener . . . although he liked to get in a yarn himself now and again, but he had scant patience with bores or people who ‘gushed.’ I have seen him quell both.”9
The Titanic was to be Smith’s last post before retirement. When the ship left Southampton, with flags flying high, he might have fancied that the cheers of all the captains of the world were ringing in his ears. He belonged to the greatest seafaring nation ever known; he was captain of the greatest ship that ever sailed; and his last voyage was to be the apex of his career—the maiden voyage of the Titanic. As the liner crossed from Southampton to Cherbourg, he conducted maneuvers to test his ship, which performed well. Next day, the Titanic steamed into the Atlantic from Queenstown on the extreme southern route for westbound ships that was used by liners between mid-January and mid-August each year. With an average speed of twenty-two knots, it made 386 miles on April 11, 519 on April 12, and 546 on April 13. Smith continued to monitor the ship and its crew during the first two days of the voyage, and ate in his cabin until Friday evening. Smith spent much of Sunday on the bridge, although at 10.30 A.M. he led a Christian service lasting forty-five minutes in the first-class dining saloon. Officers and seamen liked to sail under Smith’s command and admired his seamanship. “It was an education to see him con his own ship up through the intricate channels entering New York at full speed,” Lightoller recalled. “One particularly bad corner, known as the South-West Spit, used to make us fairly flush with pride as he swung her round, judging his distances to a nicety; she heeling over to the helm with only a matter of feet to spare between each end of the ship and the banks.”10
White Star liners were supposed to hold a lifeboat drill each Sunday morning, but it was canceled because of a robust breeze, which stopped blowing soon afterward—the Sunday, overall, was unusually windless. English regulations did not require a lifeboat drill; and Charles Andrews, a nineteen-year-old assistant saloon steward from Liverpool who had been four years at sea, had been mustered only for boat drills in New York Harbor and on Sundays crossing back to Europe.11 George Cavell, who had been a trimmer on White Star’s Adriatic, Oceanic, and Olympic before the Titanic, testified that he had never been mustered for a lifeboat drill at sea: “the only boat drill as I ever had” had been on Sunday mornings, in New York Harbor, when there were no passengers about.12
If first class on the Titanic was a Waldorf-Astoria and second class a Lyons Corner House, the bunkers and furnaces where Cavell labored were an inferno. Few of the engine crew of firemen, greasers, and trimmers who had delivered the ship from Belfast signed on again for the maiden voyage. The 280 men in the Titanic’s Engine Department included 13 leading firemen, 162 firemen, 72 trimmers, and 33 greasers (charged with cleaning and lubricating the moving parts of the engines). In 1911 Arnold Bennett was shown the innards of an Atlantic liner by the chief officer. He was taken up and down steel ladders, climbed over the moving chain of the steering gear, ducked past jets of steam, and stepped along greasy floors beside ramparts of machinery guarded by steel rails, with pressure dials everywhere. There were 190 furnaces with roaring, red-hot jaws. The vast, terrible stokehold seemed to stretch for an infinite distance. It was like hell superimposed on a coal mine: upstairs, on higher decks, Bennett reflected, confectioners were making petit fours while first-class passengers soared in elevators.13
Firemen and trimmers on an Edwardian liner often came on board careening drunk. They went to work immediately, raising steam before the ship put to sea. Every day at sea, they labored in two stints lasting four hours each. Coal was spaded from the bunkers into barrows, which were hurtled to the furnaces by trimmers running at full tilt. Ga
thering momentum, the trimmers dared not abate their pace, for their mates were running hard at their heels with more heavy barrows. This furious clattering convoy swerved through the ship as trimmers dodged the blistering steam pipes and furnace casings, especially when the liner rolled or pitched. Firemen in their way had to jump aside or be hurt. The leading firemen, known as “pushers,” had been promoted from the ranks of ordinary firemen. They monitored steam pressure, kept the coal at maximum heat, struck the stokehold floor with a shovel to signal when a furnace needed to be fired or stoked, and yelled at slackers among the firemen. The firemen spent seven minutes shoveling coal into the scorching furnaces, seven minutes clearing white-hot clinkers with long slicers, and another seven raking over the ashes. Every twenty-one minutes, after these three seven-minute bursts of work, the firemen rested and recuperated briefly until a gong signaled the beginning of another twenty-one minutes of strenuous exertion. This was the fireman’s cycle of work for four hours on end, twice a day, for the duration of the voyage. They wore gray flannel undershirts, which they would pull off to wring out when they were drenched in sweat and then put back on. They also wrapped a sweat rag around their neck, clenching its moist end between their teeth to stop their urge to gulp water, which caused cramp and stomachache. Little wonder that after this frenetic, dangerous, overheated work, they got drunk as soon as they went ashore and often stayed sodden until they had to reembark.14
“No men have ever had such hard and brutalizing work as the firemen and the trimmers in the big coal-burning steamers in the early years of the twentieth century,” wrote the Cunard officer James Bisset. “I felt pity for them as I saw them coming off watch and trudging wearily to their quarters, utterly done in, sweat squelching in their boots. Their faces, blackened with coal dust, and streaked with sweat, had a dulled animal-like look, and they seldom smiled. It was killing work.”15 Sixty-four firemen slept in one room lined by two-tier bunks, with just enough space for men to bend to tie their bootlaces. Their sweating was so profuse that most of them were lean and complained that they were underfed. A meal called “oodle” was their preference: large joints of beef, with diced carrots and onions, were put in water-filled buckets and simmered for hours until the soup could be ladled into plates for the twelve-to-four watch when they finished their night’s toil. Few firemen or trimmers ate their midday meals, which were slopped down the swill chute. “Men dared not risk a heavy meal prior to going down the stokehold to manoeuvre slice bars, wrestle molten clinkers out, inhale sulphur fumes and sweat non-stop,” recalled George Garrett, a fireman on the Mauretania. “The afternoon watch was relieved at 4 P.M. By the time all had queued their turn in the wash house, peeled off soaking clothes, swilled and tidied up, five o’clock was near. The ship’s tea, hash, made them long for their ‘oodle’ at 4 A.M. Those with pals in the four-to-eight room headed there at eight-thirty to bum some gubbins off the Black Pan. These black oblong trays placed on the floor were jumbled up with food remainders from the saloon tables. Chicken frames, scraps of meat, ham, chops, and assorted cakes, no longer presentable to passengers, were a colourful change from hash.”16 No wonder that under such conditions there was a receptive audience on board ship for a so-called sea-lawyer, defined as a sailor combining “a discontented disposition with a passion for grumbling, an uncanny knack of finding something to grumble at, the gift of the gab, and an elementary knowledge of a few of the legal points which may arise under the articles.”17
The crew of the Titanic was overwhelmingly British. The chief exception was the restaurant staff, many of whom were Italian: White Star’s great maiden voyage of 1912 was to provide a dark moment in the history of the Anglo-Italian community; over forty Italian restaurant staff perished. They had been recruited by Gatti, the à la carte restaurant manager, who ran two London restaurants named Gatti’s in the Strand and nearby Adelphi, hard by White Star’s Cockspur Street office. Gatti was the surname of the man who first imported ice from Norway to London and thus established the Italian dominance in the English ice-cream trade. White Star’s Luigi Gatti came from Montalto Pavese, south of Milan: after he had been awarded the catering contract for the Olympic and the Titanic, he took a house—which he named Montalto—in suburban Southampton for his family, and drew staff from his London restaurants to work on the liners. The original “Little Italy” in England was centered on the Clerkenwell district of London and comprised organ grinders and street hawkers with braziers selling hot chestnuts, potatoes, and peas and playing mouth organs to attract attention. In the 1890s a new Italian community—composed of people like Gatti from the northern provinces of Piedmont and Lombardy—settled in Soho. They became kitchen hands, porters, cooks, and waiters in the hotels, restaurants, and gentlemen’s clubs of central London. It took many years’ patience for an Italian boy of twelve or thirteen arriving in Edwardian London to rise from the back kitchens to serve in the salons and dining rooms; but the climb could be accomplished. Many good hotels preferred to employ Italians (although London was full of German waiters until 1914), and those like Gatti who climbed high in the hierarchy liked to employ compatriots.18
Although three of the Titanic’s five postal clerks were American, few if any of the crew were. Americans were reputed to be unsatisfactory as liner stewards. “Our boasted democracy,” Theodore Dreiser reflected after crossing the Atlantic in 1912, “has resulted in little more than the privilege every living, breathing American has of being rude and brutal to every other, but it is not beyond possibility that sometime as a nation we will sober down into something approximating human civility.” When he traveled by Cunard to Liverpool, he appreciated the English stewards. “They did not look at one so brutally and critically as does the American menial; their eyes did not seem to say, ‘I am your equal or better’, and their motions did not indicate that they were doing anything unwillingly.” In his experience American hotel staff were grudging in their service, and American stewards were despots who treated him as an interloper to be repulsed; but the crew on his English ship proved conspicuously civil. “They did not stare me out of countenance; they did not gruffly order me about . . . I didn’t catch them making audible remarks behind my back . . . in the dining saloon, in the bath, on deck, everywhere, with ‘yes, sirs’, and ‘thank you, sirs’, and two fingers raised to cap visors occasionally for good measure. Were they acting? Was this a fiercely suppressed class? I could scarcely believe it. They looked too comfortable.”19 Dreiser’s low opinion of his fellow Americans is endorsed by a historian of Atlantic liners who judged that the ships of the United States Line lacked panache. “ ‘Standards maintained by the United States Line,’ said one of that line’s brochures, ‘are American standards.’ That was always the trouble.” The service manual compiled for United States Line stewards had to specify that stewards must not be unshaven, reek of alcohol or tobacco, wear scruffy shoes, pick their teeth, snap their fingers or hiss to attract attention, solicit tips, or count tips in front of passengers. Waiters taking orders must never, the manual stressed, lean their arm on the chair or passenger.20
That English stewards were less contented than Dreiser imagined is clear from Titanic stewardess Violet Jessop, who compiled informative memoirs that were edited with sympathy by John Maxtone-Graham. Jessop, who was aged twenty-four in 1912, had been born in the Argentine pampas, the first child of Irish emigrants. After the death of her sheep-farmer father, the family returned to England, where her mother took work as a Royal Mail Packet Line stewardess. When her mother’s health failed, Jessop left convent school to become a Royal Mail stewardess on the routes to Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. When she switched to White Star’s Majestic, working seventeen hours a day for a monthly pay of £2 10s, she was shaken by the battering of North Atlantic storms and needed all her willpower to remain at work. Conditions for stewards were hard, she recalled. “Men worked sixteen hours a day, every day of the week, scrubbed and cleaned from morn till night, moved mountains of baggage, carved and served food, cl
eaned a host of apparently useless metalwork until their very souls seemed permeated with metal polish, and kept long watches into the night, all for hasty meals standing up in a steamy pantry where decks were awash with the droppings of the last meal.”21 Jessop felt that White Star’s managers were remiss. “Had employers consciously set themselves to kill the spirit of their men, they could not have succeeded more effectively . . . because there was too much regimentation and too little consideration for the dignity of the individual. Any initiative was usually quashed.” Although stewards at sea had to be strenuous, resilient, forbearing, and flexible, they were shunned when they applied for jobs ashore. This gave them “an inferiority complex,” she said, which they sheltered behind a false exterior of bravado: they were “the kind of man who, on the slightest provocation, gets up and shouts, ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves!’ and then flops back into apathy.” The liners’ officers, “often mediocre themselves,” regarded stewards with “undisguised contempt.”22
“Even the worst kind of ship has some advantages over the best kind of hotel,” Evelyn Waugh wrote after a trip on a Mediterranean liner in 1930. “As far as I can see, a really up-to-date ship has every advantage over a hotel except stability and fresh meat.”23 The avarice was less obtrusive in shipboard culture than in a hotel. White Star did not count the number of hot baths and cups of tea taken during a voyage and add them to the bill, as hotel managers did. Having paid for their tickets, passengers were not caught by cunning additional expenses. Hotel employees were always soliciting tips, even when their attention had been as brief as swinging open doors or summoning taxis. But at sea, there was one grand reckoning for tips at the end of the voyage. The avidity of servants was less dispersed and harassing, for individual stewards had more direct personal responsibility for passenger comfort than hotel staff, and everyone knew that dues would be paid in the hours before docking.
Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From Page 18