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

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Potomak na Titanik, meaning “heir of the Titanic,” was the phrase by which inhabitants of the Troyan region of Bulgaria referred to descendants of the eight men from Gumoshtnik who perished. Two of them left pregnant widows, who gave birth to a girl and a boy, who later married. Their son, Petko Chakarov, who became a headmaster, was a local celebrity until his death in 2004.

  Standing on the pier in New York after the Carpathia docked, a young woman survivor was overpowered by anguish. “Oh! my God,” she cried, “he did it to save me! Oh, why didn’t I die? Oh, why didn’t I die?”73 Survivors asked themselves, with harsh remorse, why they still lived when so many others had perished. In many cases, their survival felt despicable. They knew that for them to live, it had been necessary for others to die; that if they had been lost, someone else would have been safe. Charlotte Collyer, who escaped on lifeboat 14, was never reconciled to leaving her husband to die, and haunted by the memory of the adolescent boy, Gaskell, lying facedown on the deck in despair after being ejected from the lifeboat. She died aged thirty-three, two years after her husband. Selma Asplund enjoined her daughter Lillian never to mention the disaster, and the latter preserved her silence until her nineties. William Carter and John Ryerson, aged eleven and thirteen when Lightoller tried to forbid their escape in lifeboat 4, both lived to their late eighties, but refused to discuss their experiences—feeling, perhaps, unworthy as survivors. To them and the Asplunds it seemed shameful to speak of how some had died and they had lived. It was only after 1970, when the children of 1912 reached retirement age and found vivifying new identities as disaster survivors, that they began to talk without disgrace. This extra interest kept some of them alive for decades.

  Winnie Troutt became an apricot picker in California. There in 1918 she married a man with whom she ran a bakery in Beverly Hills. She married for a third time at the age of seventy-nine and retired to Hermosa Beach, California. Two months before his resignation as president of the United States, in 1974, Richard Nixon sent her a congratulatory letter on her ninetieth birthday. She crossed the Atlantic ten times—the last in her ninety-ninth year. She was a cherished figure at Titanic conventions until her late nineties, and died in Redondo Beach after celebrating her century. The disaster proved, for her, life-enhancing and life-prolonging.

  Not so for others. Eliza Hocking’s violent death has already been mentioned. Six months later, in October 1914, traveling as a passenger on the Leyland Line Devonian, Annie Robinson, a survivor of the Titanic, where she been a stewardess, became so distressed as the steamship groped toward Boston, Massachusetts, in a dense fog, sounding its baleful fog horn, that she threw herself overboard. In 1919 Washington Dodge took a revolver to the garage of his San Francisco apartment building and shot himself in the head. In agony he then lurched into an elevator, ascended to his floor, and, with brains spilling out, staggered into his apartment to the horror of his wife. Oscar Palmquist, who had escaped the icy Atlantic waters in lifeboat 15, drowned in obscure circumstances in a shallow pond in Beardsley Park, Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1925. Henry Frauenthal, who had saved himself by leaping into lifeboat 5, killed himself by jumping from the seventh floor of his hospital in 1927, and his widow, Clara, was thereafter confined in an asylum for the last sixteen years of her life. Robert Hichens botched his attempts to shoot himself and cut his wrists in 1933, and was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude for the attempted murder, during an alcoholic binge, of a man against whom he nurtured a grudge. The cardsharp George Brereton, alias Brayton, fired a shotgun into his head in Los Angeles in 1942. In 1945 Jack Thayer, by then a Philadelphia banker and treasurer of the University of Pennsylvania, depressed by the death of his younger son in action, sitting in the driver’s seat of his wife’s sedan, parked near the trolly loop on Parkside Avenue, Philadelphia, used a razor to cut his wrists and throat. Frederick Fleet, the lookout who glimpsed the iceberg too late, ended up a husk of a man, selling newspapers on a street corner in Southampton, and hanged himself from a clothesline post in his garden in 1965.

  Ben Guggenheim’s daughters, Peggy and Hazel, never recovered their orientation after his death. In 1928 Hazel’s two sons, Terrence and Benjamin, aged four years and fourteen months, fell to their deaths from a sixteenth-floor roof garden in Manhattan, with the strong suspicion that she threw them during a spasm of madness—she had just separated from their father. Throughout her life she suffered Titanic nightmares and requested that at her funeral (in 1995), “Nearer, My God, to Thee” be played. Peggy, who died in 1979, said that every day she thought of her father’s foul death.

  These were sudden deaths—with witnesses. A slow demise, a dwindling away, without startled bystanders, policemen taking notes, undertakers removing corpses, coroner’s inquests, or graveyard leave-takings, came in the Sargasso Sea, that lake in the open Atlantic, as Jules Verne called it. The Sargasso is the only sea in the world without shores. It is a gyre at the center of the North Atlantic, where the Labrador Current from the north meets the Gulf Stream from the west, the Canary Current from the east, and the North Atlantic Equatorial Current from the south. The Sargasso’s azure waters are warm, tranquil, and sometimes clear to a great depth. The surface is strewn with a brown floating seaweed called sargassum bearing berrylike bladders—hence the name of this uncanny, pretty place. Lower in the Sargasso Sea float millions and millions of a blue-green algae, Prochlorococcus, so tiny that a hundred thousand of them exist in a cubic centimeter of seawater, which absorb carbon dioxide and produce as much as 20 percent of the world’s atmospheric oxygen.

  Down to the Sargasso Sea the Labrador Current carried the iceberg that Henry Stengel likened to the Rock of Gibraltar. Its glassy pinnacles pointing at the sun were dissolved by warm rays. Some icebergs develop waterfalls or ponds as they melt. While they rend and fracture, they emit loud noises, like shots from a rifle, as if hurling protests at the sun. Remnants of dead creatures and plants lie fixed in the ice, and as the iceberg dissolves, the stench of decay becomes rank over the ocean. In the Sargasso Sea, at the Labrador Current’s confluence with the Gulf Stream, ridges of Greenland stone and detritus lie on the ocean floor, where they have sunk from melting icebergs. On the surface, at the confluence, sea mists make it an eerie stretch of midocean.

  The water is suddenly warmer in the Sargasso, and the iceberg that had sunk the Titanic and was already razed by the sun melted faster. Its pinnacles had receded, the uppermost exposed shape of ice turned sloshy and dripped down into the ocean, the subaquatic bulk, with its deadly protuberances, invisibly dissolved into seawater. The berg dwindled until it was not big enough to sink a canoe. Soon it was a shard of ice giving no sign of its murderous history. The ice turned to water, became formless, then void, deepening the blue Sargasso Sea.

  Acknowledgments

  Patric Dickinson, then Norroy and Ulster King of Arms, now Clarenceux King of Arms, spent assiduous days and nights reading this book in a preliminary version and made salutary suggestions that I have gratefully adopted. One must always think, said Henry James, of some good person as a point de repère. In writing Voyagers of the Titanic I set up David Kynaston as my landmark and reference point: indeed took his books as the model that I should try to emulate. He and Dickinson are old friends of one another, and have been generous friends to me. It is fitting that they should share the primary dedication of this book.

  David John is the chief begetter of Voyagers of the Titanic: it would not have been written without his intervention or the materials that he lent me. The welter of books and articles about the Titanic (swelling into a tumultuous outpouring as the centenary approaches) makes it impossible to avoid overlapping sources or inadvertent plagiary; but my endnotes show my debts to previous researchers. My greatest debt is to the enthusiastic volunteers who maintain the website Encyclopaedia Titanica and ensure that its facts are both varied and unimpeachable. The texts of letters written on the Titanic before it anchored off Queenstown, and of interviews given by survivors after the Ca
rpathia docked in New York, are available or duplicated in many sources: for the convenience of readers I have cited the most accessible texts, Titanic Voices: Memories from the Fateful Voyage, compiled by Donald Hyslop, Alastair Forsyth, and Sheila Jemima (Sutton Publishing, 1997), supplemented by the material collected in Nick Barratt’s Lost Voices from the Titanic: The Definitive Oral History (Macmillan, 2009).

  Authors often display a long, showy list of names, resembling a row of scalps, of those they profess to thank. Without, I hope, being meretricious, I must express gratitude for advice or pointers to Katherine Bucknell, Selina Hastings, Ian Jack, John Jolliffe, Philip Mansel, Frederic Raphael, and Frances Wilson. Susan Terner, and Thomas H. Cook provided hospitality and encouragement during my visit to New York. My stalwart agent, Bill Hamilton; my editors, Martin Redfern in London and Henry Ferris in New York; and my copyeditor, Kate Johnson, provided practical and effective help.

  My supreme obligations, however, are to Christopher Phipps, who improved my early drafts by his raillery and gave wise advice in every phase; and to Jenny Davenport for her gentle patience and inspirational courage, and for providing merriness and discipline during low points of sullen drudgery. David Gelber’s supportive friendship has been priceless.

  I thank the archivists at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (papers of Viscount Milner, the Countess of Oxford and Asquith, Earl Winterton, and the Marquess of Lincolnshire), Cambridge University Library (papers of the Marquess of Crewe), Hertfordshire Archives and Local Records Office (papers of Lady Desborough), the House of Lords Record Office (papers of Earl Cadogan), the Lidell Hart Centre at King’s College London (diary of Lady Hamilton), the National Archives (Board of Trade, Colonial Office and Foreign Office papers), and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (papers of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava). The amenities of the London Library were indispensable to my researches.

  Quotations from Lord Lincolnshire’s diary are made with the permission of the Hon. Rupert Carington, on behalf of the Carington family; and the extract from Lady Oxford’s diary is by courtesy of Christopher Osborn and the Bodleian Library. The extract from Louis MacNeice’s poem “Autumn Journal” is published by permission of David Higham Associates. The two extracts from John Masefield’s poem “The Wanderer” are reproduced with the consent of the Society of Authors, as the literary representative of the estate of John Masefield. Excerpts from Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg, copyright 1916 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and renewed 1944 by Carl Sandburg, are published by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  Le Meygris, Ailhon, February 2011

  Statement on Monetary Values

  The calculation of 2012 values for 1912 dollar or sterling figures is neither a simple nor precise business. Many historical writers convert values too confidently, or provide figures with a bogus exactitude. Calculations based on the consumer price index give a rough idea of the cost of commodities. Calculations based on gross domestic product per capita give a general idea of the comparable values of personal incomes. On this basis:

  $1 in 1912 is the equivalent of about $24 in 2012 calculated according to the consumer price index, and $121 calculated by GDP per capita.

  £1 in 1912 is the equivalent of about £73 in 2012 calculated according to the consumer price index, and £441 according to GDP per capita.

  The 2012 value in U.S. dollars of £1 of 1912 can be approximated in the region of $105 to $112.

  Some previous writers have been prone to vagaries on Titanic values. Margaret Brown paid just under £28 for her first-class ticket. This was the equivalent of about $140 in 1912. This cost has been variously calculated as the equivalent—a century later—of anything between $2,500 and $48,000. I put the value of £28 in 1912 as about $3,000 in 2012. Others will disagree.

  Emma Bucknell’s first-class ticket from Cherbourg to New York cost just over £75 in 1912. This is best reckoned as the equivalent of about $8,000 in 2012. Figures that are not rounded have a spurious precision.

  Notes

  Prologue: From Greenland’s Icy Mountains

  1. Sir Arthur Rostron, Home from the Sea (1931), 19.

  Chapter 1: Boarding

  1. H. G. Wells, Anticipations (1901), 79, 82–83.

  2. Estelle Stead, My Father (1913), 342.

  3. G. K. Chesterton, “Our Notebook,” Illustrated London News, April 27, 1912, 619.

  4. Ian Jack, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain (2009), 106.

  5. Edward A. Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (1906), 40–41.

  6. Michael McCaughan, The Birth of the Titanic (1998), 1–2.

  7. R. A. Williams, The London and South Western Railway (1973), 2:134.

  8. “ ‘Titanic’ Insurances,” Economist, April 20, 1912, 846.

  9. “To Reassure Mr. Morgan,” New York Times, January 30, 1912.

  10. Rollin Hadley, ed., Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner 1887–1921 (1987), 388.

  Chapter 2: Speed

  1. “The Titanic’s Departure from Southampton,” Southampton Daily Echo, April 15, 1912.

  2. Nick Barratt, Lost Voices from the Titanic (2009), 101.

  3. Arthur Mee, Hampshire (1939), 332–33.

  4. Emile Zola, La bête humaine (1890), chapter 7.

  5. “Passenger’s Impressions,” Belfast Evening Telegraph, April 15, 1912, 7. This account was written by a first-class passenger who disembarked at Queenstown. By a process of elimination this may be deduced to be a passenger named Nichols about whom nothing is yet known.

  6. F. T. Marinetti, “Manifeste du futurisme,” Le Figaro, February 20, 1909, front page.

  7. “Pékin-Paris En Aéroplane,” Le Matin, April 16, 1912, 1; “Channel Flown by a Lady Aviator,” Daily Telegraph, April 17, 1912, 9; “Une Aviatrice Passe la Manche,” Le Matin, April 17, 1912, 1; “Un Match Tragique Entre Deux Aviateurs,” Le Matin, April 19, 1912, 3.

  8. George Harvey, Henry Clay Frick (1936), 359.

  9. Archibald W. Butt, Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt (1930), 2:468.

  10. Eric Homberger, Mrs. Astor’s New York: Social Power in a Gilded Age (2002), xiv.

  11. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, eds., Letters of Edith Wharton (1988), 225.

  12. Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree (1907), 31.

  13. Carl Sandburg, Always the Young Strangers (1953), 281.

  14. Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New (1914), 113.

  15. Ibid., 154.

  16. Lawrence Beesley, The Loss of the SS Titanic (1912), 27.

  Chapter 3: Shipowners

  1. Denys Sutton, Letters of Roger Fry (1972), 1:226.

  2. Bruce Ismay, testimony to Senate inquiry, day 1, Hearings Before a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Commerce, to Investigate the Causes Leading to the Wreck of the White Star Liner S.S. Titanic, United States Senate, 62nd Congress, Second Session, S. Doc. 726 (#6167). Consulted via www.titanicinquiry.org.

  3. Arthur Pound and Samuel Taylor Moore, eds., They Told Barron: Conversations of an American Pepys in Wall Street (1930), 7.

  4. Edwin Green and Michael Moss, A Business of National Importance (1982), 28.

  5. W. T. Stead, “Lord Pirrie,” Review of Reviews 45 (March 1912): 243.

  6. Herbert Jefferson, Viscount Pirrie of Belfast (1948), 308–9.

  7. “Death of Mr. T. H. Ismay,” Liverpool Daily Post, December 1, 1899, quoted in Nick Barratt, Lost Voices from the Titanic (2009), 15.

  8. Daily Sketch, June 5, 1912, quoted in John Wilson Foster, The Titanic (1999), 206.

  9. E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), chapter 27.

  10. Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (1958), 61.

  11. Sutton, Roger Fry, 292.

  12. Sir Clinton Dawkins to Sir Alfred Milner, February 8, 1901, Milner Papers 214, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  13. Dawkins to Milner, July 13, 1901.

  14. Sutton, Roger Fry, 230.

  15. David J. Jeremy, ed., Dictionary of B
usiness Biography (1984), 2:258.

  16. Michael Moss and John Hume, Shipbuilders to the World (1986), 106.

  17. Green and Moss, Business of National Importance, 20.

  18. “The Anglo-American Shipping Combine,” Economist, April 26, 1902, 645–46.

  19. “The Troubles of the Shipping Trust,” Economist, July 23, 1904, 1227.

  20. “A German View of British Shipping,” Economist, June 1, 1907, 934.

  21. Julia Davis and Dolores Fleming, eds., Ambassadorial Diary of John W. Davis (1993), 394.

  22. Sutton, Roger Fry, 251.

  Chapter 4: Shipbuilders

  1. Shan F. Bullock, Thomas Andrews (1912), 8, 11, 17.

  2. Ibid., 21–23, 43.

  3. Rudyard Kipling, “The Secret of the Machines” (1910).

  4. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, eds., Letters of Edith Wharton (1988), 125.

  5. Violet Jessop, Titanic Survivor (1997), 104–5.

  6. Diary of Earl Winterton, September 28 and 29 and October 6, 1912, Winterton Papers 11, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  7. Alexander Carlisle, testimony to Lord Mersey’s inquiry, day 20, Q 21401, Wreck Commissioners’ Court, Proceedings Before Lord Mersey of a Formal Investigation into the Circumstances Attending the Foundering on the 15th April 1912 of the British Steamship Titanic (HMSO, 1912). Accessed online at www.titanicinquiry.org.

  8. Sir Alfred Chambers, testimony to Lord Mersey inquiry, day 23, QQ 22875, 22965.

  9. Carlisle, Mersey inquiry, Q 21358.

  10. Captain Maurice Clarke, testimony to Lord Mersey inquiry, day 25, QQ 24173–4.

  11. Captain Arthur Rostron, testimony to Senate inquiry, day 1.