Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  For the first few days of the voyage, nausea had kept Hélène Baxter confined to her cabin, which allowed her son more time to spend with Berthe. On the evening of Friday, April 12, Quigg may also have chosen the Ritz Restaurant as the place for them to dine. But whether Ben Guggenheim and Quigg Baxter ever spoke or the two curiously similar couples even acknowledged each other on the Titanic is unknown.

  AT 7:45 P.M. on that Friday evening a wireless message was received from the captain of the French liner La Touraine saying that they had “crossed [a] thick ice-field” and had then seen “another ice-field and two icebergs” and giving the positions of the ice and that of a derelict ship they had spotted. Captain Smith sent his thanks and compliments back and commented on the fine weather. While adding this information to the map in the chart room, Fourth Officer Boxhall remarked to the captain that La Touraine’s positions were of no use to them since French ships always took a more northerly course. “They are out of our way,” he noted as the ship’s helmsman guided the new liner onward through the calm, dark sea.

  (photo credit 1.64)

  Daisy Spedden (at right) took her son’s nursemaid, Elizabeth Burns (left), for a Turkish bath on Saturday morning. (photo credit 1.31)

  I took a Turkish bath this morning,” Daisy Spedden recorded in her diary entry for April 13. “It was my first and will be my last, I hope, for I never disliked anything in my life so before, though I enjoyed the final plunge in the pool.” Daisy had taken “Miss B,” her son’s nursemaid, Elizabeth Burns, for what was probably her first steam bath as well—Turkish baths had been popular in Britain since the 1860s but were less common in the United States. Installing them on ships was a White Star innovation, the first having been introduced on the Adriatic in 1907. For their Olympic-class liners, White Star had decided that the baths would be a showpiece amenity and had decorated them in a style hailed in The Shipbuilder as evoking “something of the grandeur of the mysterious East.”

  At the entrance to the bath complex on F deck, Daisy and Miss Burns were given a complete set of towels and directed to the small changing rooms at the far end of the cooling room. Upon entering this room, the nurse and even her more-traveled employer were no doubt momentarily dazzled by the décor, which, from its gilded ceiling hung with bronze Arab lamps to its intricate tilework and fretted “Cairo” screens, was pure Arabian Nights fantasy. Once they were swathed and turbaned in white toweling, the first stop for most bathers was the elaborate weighing chair, a canvas seat encased in a gilded wooden bench with brass scales that printed out a ticket of one’s weight. From there, they proceeded to the temperate room for fifteen minutes or so of moderate dry heat, before advancing to the hot room, which was maintained at around two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Daisy Spedden apparently soon fled the hot room to recline on one of the gilt-edged loungers in the cooling room, possibly taking a glass of water from the lion’s head faucet on the wall.

  After a cooling shower or plunge in the pool, bathers then went into one of the two “shampoing” rooms for a full body wash in showers with an encircling spray. Each of these rooms also had a long marble slab where patrons could receive a horizontal shower massage from an invention called a “blade douche,” an overhead pipe fitted with adjustable nozzles. The adjoining swimming pool in which Daisy Spedden took her plunge was filled with seawater warmed by heated salt water piped down from a tank on the boat deck. When finished, Daisy and Miss Burns likely returned to their cabins on E deck before heading to the dining saloon for luncheon—and the erasure of any weight loss shown on their post-bath weigh-in tickets.

  Much of the talk at luncheon, once again, was of the miles the ship had covered; today’s posted tally was 519 nautical miles, besting yesterday’s mileage and pleasing those who had guessed as much in the betting pool. It was also the subject of an after-luncheon conversation between J. Bruce Ismay and Captain Smith that was overheard by a passenger named Elizabeth Lines. Mrs. Lines was yet another American in Paris; she had taken up residence there some years ago with her husband, a doctor and former medical director of the New York Life Insurance Company. With her sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary, Mrs. Lines was making the crossing to New York to attend her son’s graduation from Dartmouth College. After luncheon, as had become her custom, she took her coffee alone in the Palm Room, finding a table in a quiet corner. Before long, Captain Smith and Bruce Ismay sat down together on a nearby settee. Mrs. Lines recognized Ismay from when they had both lived in New York some years before and confirmed his identity with her table steward. She also noted that the White Star director was doing most of the talking while the captain merely nodded his assent. Ismay compared the Titanic’s mileage to the Olympic’s and expressed great satisfaction with the new liner’s performance. He repeated several times that he was certain they would make an even better run of it tomorrow as more boilers were lit. Finally, he smacked his hand down on the arm of the wicker settee and said emphatically, “We will beat the Olympic and get in to New York on Tuesday!”

  Mrs. Lines’s recollection of this conversation has been disputed by historians who feel that Ismay has been made a scapegoat for the sinking. They point out that arriving in New York on Tuesday night could have caused docking problems and would have disrupted passengers’ arrival plans, not to mention the ceremonious harbor welcome for the maiden crossing. Moreover, Captain Smith himself had said to the press after the Olympic’s maiden voyage, “There will be no attempt to bring her in on Tuesday. She was built for a Wednesday ship.” Yet the New York arrival time was not measured by when the liner docked but by when it passed the Ambrose Lightship, a navigation beacon moored off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, where it marked the main channel into New York harbor. On her maiden voyage the Olympic had passed the Ambrose Lightship at 2:24 a.m. on Wednesday, June 21, 1911. Ismay knew that to beat the Olympic’s maiden crossing record and “arrive on Tuesday,” the Titanic had simply to pass the Ambrose Lightship before midnight and best her sister’s time by only two and a half hours. On her second westbound crossing, the Olympic had, in fact, reached the lightship at 10:08 p.m. on Tuesday, July 18. With the Titanic already achieving average speeds of just under twenty-two knots over the last two days, she was well on her way to making the Tuesday arrival that Ismay had so enthusiastically predicted.

  DAISY SPEDDEN SPENT most of Saturday afternoon playing cards with Jim Smith in the lounge. Smith and the Speddens moved in similar circles in New York society and even had a few relatives in common. Yet Daisy and Frederic Spedden were not drawn into the shipboard clique that Smith and his tablemates Archibald Gracie and Edward Kent had become part of by Saturday. To Walter Lord, this circle of seven people was “one of those groups that sometimes happen on an Atlantic voyage, when the chemistry is just right and the members are inseparable.” Archibald Gracie dubbed them “our coterie.” The queen bee of “our coterie” was the Washington socialite and writer Helen Churchill Hungerford Candee. She was one of the “unprotected ladies” on board whom Colonel Gracie, adhering to a rather quaint practice, had offered to “safeguard.” In “Sealed Orders,” her account of the voyage published in Collier’s Weekly, Mrs. Candee would dub Gracie “the talkative man,” and she soon found that she had more in common with “the sensitive man,” the Buffalo architect Edward Kent, who shared her interest in antiques and interior decoration. The tall, genteel Kent, fifty-eight, a lifelong bachelor, was remembered by the writer Mabel Dodge Luhan as a man “with a leaning toward beauty and lovely colors.”

  But it was another member of the coterie, a “cosmopolitan Englishman” named Hugh Woolner, who would kindle stronger feelings in Mrs. Candee. Woolner was eight years her junior and at six-foot-three towered above her small, stylishly dressed form. He was the son of an eminent Victorian sculptor and had been sent to the best schools and to Cambridge, where he had been on the varsity rowing team. Woolner’s upper-class manners were impeccable but his business dealings were less so. After his father’s death in 1892, he had used his inherita
nce to found a brokerage firm that ran into trouble during the South African war. In attempting to refloat his sinking fortunes, Woolner engaged in a number of illegal practices that resulted in his being barred from the London Stock Exchange. By 1907 he was bankrupt and also a widower, his American wife having died the year before, leaving him with a nine-year-old daughter. Woolner decided to put his daughter in the care of his American in-laws and seek opportunities in the western U.S. states, and by 1910 he had raised enough capital to discharge his British bankruptcy debt, permitting him to once again call himself a company director.

  Unaware of Woolner’s checkered business reputation and flattered by his attentions, Helen Candee allowed the suave Englishman to accompany her on long walks around the Titanic’s decks, as she describes in “Sealed Orders”: “ ‘Let us wander over the ship and see it all,’ said she of the cabin de luxe to him of the bachelor’s cabin. So they mounted the hurricane deck and gazed across to the other world of the second class and wondered at its luxury, and further across to the waves and wondered at their clemency.” In an unpublished memoir, Helen also pictures “the Two,” as she calls herself and Woolner, standing together at the prow of the ship. “As her bow cut into the waves, throwing tons of water to right and left in playful intent,” she wrote, “her indifference to mankind was significant. How grand she was, how superb, how titanic.” This depiction prefigures the famous pose of the lovers in James Cameron’s cinematic epic, but since the ship’s forecastle deck was off-limits to passengers, it may be also be a fanciful one.

  Hugh Woolner was not the first charming rogue to have won Helen’s attentions. In her mid-twenties, she had fallen for Edward W. Candee, a wealthy businessman from Norwalk, Connecticut. Her marriage to him produced a daughter and a son, but Candee proved to be an abusive drunk who eventually abandoned his wife and children. Helen could have turned to her family for help—the Churchill Hungerfords were a comfortably off and socially prominent clan—but she chose instead to generate her own income by becoming a journalist. Articles with her byline soon appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, and other women’s magazines, and in 1900 she produced a self-help book, How Women May Earn a Living, that became a bestseller. The next year she published her only novel, An Oklahoma Romance, which was praised by reviewers for its authentic descriptions of the western territory, though whether the passionate love affair it depicts is also authentic is unknown. Helen had spent several years in Guthrie, Oklahoma, in the mid 1890s to facilitate a divorce from Candee. To both seek a divorce and move to a frontier town was highly unconventional for a woman of her background, but Helen had an independence of mind that was well ahead of her time.

  By 1904, Helen and her children were living in Washington, D.C., and within a few years the Washington Times would describe her as “a member of the city’s most exclusive smart set” who had “attained a reputation as a brilliant hostess” and at whose Rhode Island Avenue mansion “some of the world’s most prominent persons have visited.” This style of living was made possible by an inheritance she had come into after her mother’s death, but Helen continued to earn money through her writing and by advising some of Washington’s leading ladies on how to decorate their homes. Among her clients was Mathilde Townsend Gerry, Archie Butt’s lost love, as well as both of the first ladies Archie served, Edith Roosevelt and Nellie Taft. Helen had grown up with antiques—a chair owned by Mayflower elder William Brewster was a family heirloom—and her advocacy for their use was featured in her 1906 book Decorative Styles and Periods. Horses had also been part of her childhood in the Connecticut countryside, and in Washington she rode with Clarence Moore and his wife at the Chevy Chase Hunt Club. Helen was an active campaigner for women’s voting rights and would lead a contingent of smartly dressed equestriennes in the historic Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington on March 3, 1913.

  Although fully committed to the cause of female suffrage, Helen declared that, unlike some of the more severe supporters of votes for women, she had no interest in “dressing like the matron in an asylum.” The social columns often commented on the elegant attire of the “lovely Mrs. Churchill Candee,” who was fond of black velvet and ermine and the large feathered hats then so much in fashion. An equally chic but more modest hat crowned her head as she sat reading on the Titanic’s enclosed promenade deck, where she usually reserved two steamer chairs, “one for myself and the other for callers, or for self protection.” Returning there after luncheon one day, Mrs. Candee found all six of her “coterie” waiting by her chairs. In addition to Gracie’s trio and Hugh Woolner, her other admirers were two acquaintances that Woolner had made on board. One was Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson, the twenty-eight-year-old son of a Swedish pulp baron who was pursuing technical studies in Washington, and the other was a jolly, rotund Irish engineer named Edward Colley, who had a home in Victoria, British Columbia.

  “We are here to amuse you,” one of them announced. “All of us here have the same thought, which is that you must never be alone.” Her solicitous admirers were well aware that Mrs. Candee was returning to America to be at the bedside of her injured son, Harold. Archie Butt and Frank Millet, two Washington acquaintances, may also have stopped at her steamer chair to offer some polite words of concern during their daily walks around the decks. Ella White’s companion, Marie Young, frequently spotted them out walking together and later described how the “two famous men passed many times every day in a vigorous constitutional, one [Archie] talking always—as rapidly as he walked—the other a good and smiling listener.”

  Helen Candee was frequently to be found reading in a steamer chair on the enclosed A-deck promenade. (photo credit 1.72)

  (photo credit 1.65)

  Marie Young had been a music teacher to the Roosevelt children in Washington and knew who both Archie and Frank were, though she was not an acquaintance. On her regular visits to the galleys on D deck, where she went to check on “the fancy French poultry we were bringing home,” Marie also enjoyed seeing some of the workings of the ship. She would later describe “the cooks before their great cauldrons of porcelain and the bakers turning out the huge loaves of bread, a hamper of which was later brought up on deck, to supply the life boats.” She had asked the ship’s carpenter to have crates built for the hens and roosters, and when she paid him with gold coins, he thanked her by saying, “It is such good luck to receive gold on a first voyage.” Meanwhile, the hens laid eggs busily, and Marie relayed each day’s count to Ella White, who remained cabin-bound in their C-deck stateroom, recovering from her fall while boarding.

  Another passenger who was keeping to his cabin was Hugo Ross, the ailing member of the Canadian “Three Musketeers” who had been brought aboard in Southampton on a stretcher. His companions Thomson Beattie and Thomas McCaffry would often look in on his A-deck stateroom, as would another old friend, Major Arthur Peuchen, a Toronto millionaire, militia officer, and yachtsman. Ross had crewed for Peuchen on his sixty-five-foot yacht, the Vreda, while a student at the University of Toronto, and had often joined him in post-race celebrations on the veranda of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club overlooking Lake Ontario. Peuchen had no doubt invited Ross to visit “Woodlands,” his estate on Lake Simcoe north of the city, where boating was combined with rounds of tennis, golf, and croquet on the grassy acreage that surrounded the high-gabled red-brick house. All of this, along with a substantial home at 599 Jarvis, then Toronto’s grandest street, was made possible by Peuchen’s development of an innovative method for extracting acetone (a chemical once primarily used in making explosives) from wood. His Standard Chemical Company owned large tracts of timber in Alberta and factories in Ontario and Quebec, which shipped crude alcohols to refineries in England, Germany, and France. Peuchen’s wide-ranging business interests made him a frequent transatlantic traveler; the Titanic’s first crossing would be his fortieth, and he was aiming to be home for his fifty-third birthday on April 18.

  Peuchen was one of thirty Canadians tr
aveling in first class, and they comprise a fascinating sampling of the young dominion’s business elite. If America’s Gilded Age plutocracy was a small world, then Canada’s was a village. Major Peuchen knew most of the prominent Canadians on board, and he was to his shipboard circle what Colonel Gracie was to “our coterie.” The similarities between the two men continue even further: both were born in 1859; both were comfortably off and owed their military titles to fashionable militia regiments; both were similarly mustached (though Peuchen also sported a small goatee)—and both were expansive, often garrulous, men.

  Major Arthur Peuchen (photo credit 1.17)