Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  In the wireless room, the work of transmitting survivors’ names continued, but the young operator, twenty-one-year-old Harold Cottam, was feeling the strain. He had been at his key for the last twenty-four hours and at one point had snapped, “I can’t do everything at once. Patience please.” Someone told Harold Bride, who was resting in the hospital with a sprained ankle and frostbitten feet, that Cottam was getting a bit “queer.” Bride offered to help and managed to hobble up to the wireless room where he sat on the bed with his foot propped up on a pillow, organizing the traffic while Cottam continued transmitting. That night they passed on 321 names of first- and second-class passengers, promising that the list of third-class passengers and crew would follow the next day. At one point, Cottam said to the Olympic’s operator, “Please excuse sending but am half asleep.” One of the names wrongly keyed in due to his fatigue was a “Mr. Mile,” which would cause Frank Millet to be reported as among the survivors the next day. But at Russell House in Broadway, Lily Millet already had a deep sense of foreboding that her husband was gone.

  It was not until 6:20 p.m. on the evening of April 15 that a message to the White Star offices in New York from the Olympic delivered the shattering news that the Titanic had sunk. Philip Franklin was so shocked that it took him several minutes to pull himself together. After telephoning two IMM directors, one of whom was J. P. Morgan Jr., he went to speak to the waiting reporters. Franklin began reading the Olympic’s wireless message aloud but got no further than the second line and the words “Titanic foundered at 2:20 a.m.” when the room suddenly emptied out as the newsman charged off to call in the biggest story of the new century.

  At 8:00 p.m. President and Mrs. Taft were sitting at Chase’s Theater in Washington, waiting for the curtain to go up on a comedy called Nobody’s Widow. A White House messenger arrived with an envelope for the president that was carried into their private box. Within minutes, the first couple had left the theater and were being driven back to the White House. The president went directly to the telegraph office in the executive offices next door and began reading the latest press bulletins. Taft’s round and normally genial face looked ashen, his jowls hung in folds. He telegraphed Philip Franklin to inquire as to whether Major Butt was among the rescued. A similar message was sent to the Marconi station at Cape Race, Newfoundland. Before returning to the White House, Taft asked the telegraph operator to keep him informed of all developments during the night.

  THE NEXT MORNING Lucy Duff Gordon awoke to light streaming in through the portholes and was surprised to find herself in an unfamiliar cabin. A stewardess came in with tea, and on seeing her instead of her Irish stewardess from the Titanic, Lucy suddenly remembered where she was. As memories of the disaster flooded back, she buried her face in the pillows and wept. A woman from the next cabin later helped her to dress, and the two of them went out on deck, where they encountered small groups of survivors, all of them discussing the tragedy. “All that day and for the remainder of the voyage until we arrived in New York,” Lucy wrote, “the Carpathia was a ship of sorrow as nearly all were grieving over the loss of somebody.”

  At breakfast in the first-class dining saloon, Margaret Brown suggested to those at her table that a fund should be started for “the poor foreigners who, with everything lost, would be friendless in a strange country.” This met with a positive response though Margaret soon found that not many of the men were willing to actually pledge money to her idea. But there was general agreement among the survivors that a fund should be started to express the gratitude of the rescued to Captain Rostron and his crew. At a meeting held at three that afternoon in the dining saloon, almost all of the cabin-class survivors turned up and $4,000 was pledged on the spot. It was agreed, however, that the needs of the destitute should be met first, and Margaret Brown, her friend Emma Bucknell, and two others were appointed to a committee for that purpose. A resolution of thanks to God and to the captain and his crew was drafted and signed by the newly formed Committee of Survivors, which included, among others, Karl Behr, Mauritz Björnström-Steffansson, Algernon Barkworth, Isaac Frauenthal, Frederic Spedden, and Frederic Seward, with Margaret Brown as its sole woman. The resolution also promised to thank the Carpathia’s officers and crew in a more tangible way and by Thursday approximately $10,000 had been raised. Money was distributed to the captain and crew before landing, and a silver cup for the captain and medals for the officers and crew would be presented when the Carpathia returned from the Mediterranean in late May.

  In this spirit of giving, Cosmo Duff Gordon remembered that he had promised “a fiver” to the men in Lifeboat 1. Since he was without his checkbook he asked Franks to find some notepaper and write out bank drafts for him. The Duff Gordons then arranged for a presentation on deck and asked the crewmen to wear their lifebelts—causing alarm among several women when they appeared carrying them. Lucy brought along her lifebelt so that everyone could sign it as a souvenir. Group photographs of the twelve survivors from Boat 1 were then taken by a Carpathia passenger, Dr. Frank Blackmarr. A number of those on deck at the time thought the whole occasion was inappropriate—a few even claimed that someone called out “Smile!” as the photo was being snapped, which is likely untrue. But it did fuel rumors that “the lord and lady” had escaped in their own private boat, a story that would be repeated once they were ashore.

  Edith Rosenbaum, however, was completely won over when she finally met the famous Lucile in person. “Are you the one giving such interesting reviews in Women’s Wear?” Lucy asked Edith and then told her how much she had admired her stylish clothes on the Titanic. Edith recorded that they swapped fashion information and that Lucy regretted that “all her models [designs], as well as my own, had gone to the bottom of the sea, but we acknowledged that pannier skirts and Robespierre collars are at a discount in mid-ocean.”

  The small contingent from Lifeboat 1 poses for a souvenir photograph. Lucy stands at center, in front of Cosmo, and beside Mabel Francatelli. (photo credit 1.58)

  Dorothy Gibson also found that new apparel was difficult to come by in mid-ocean and so continued to wear the white silk evening dress she had donned for dinner on Sunday night. The prettiest girl sported a large diamond ring on her engagement finger, given to her by Jules Brulatour, the head of Eastman Kodak and an investor in Éclair Films, who was planning to marry Dorothy as soon as he could divorce his wife. There is a twinge of disappointment in William Sloper’s account as he acknowledges this. Sloper had seen Alice Fortune (whom he had once called his “Canadian girlfriend”) come aboard from the lifeboat with her sisters and their mother, Mary, who was in a state of near collapse. A sympathetic Dr. McGee had arranged for the Fortunes to use his cabin and an adjoining consulting room. Not wanting to intrude on their grief, Sloper left Alice alone until Thursday when he knocked on her cabin door to offer assistance in finding accommodation in New York. With a tear-stained face, Alice assured him that they were being met by friends from Winnipeg. Just before closing the door, she reminded him of the prediction made by the fortune-teller in Cairo.

  Norris Williams finally became acquainted with Karl Behr on the rescue ship and recalled that Behr and Helen Newsom and the Beckwiths were very kind to him. By taking walks every two hours, Norris felt his legs improve each day, and a few months later he was back on the tennis circuit. In 1914 he and Behr would compete together on the U.S Davis Cup team, and Williams would also become a U.S. singles champion, a Wimbledon doubles champion, and an Olympic gold medalist. Norris met another survivor on board who told him that he had been bringing home a prized dog on the Titanic and had gone to the kennels and released all the dogs a half hour before the ship went under. Norris described to him how when he was swimming away from the sinking liner he had spied the black face of a French bulldog in the water. This was no doubt Gamin de Pycombe, the French bulldog that Edith Rosenbaum had tucked into bed in Robert Daniel’s stateroom after the collision. Daniel himself was rescued from the water, though his bulldog was not
. The fact that three dogs had been saved from the Titanic when people were lost was a touchy subject among the survivors. On seeing a man (likely Henry Harper) cuddling his dog on deck, May Futrelle described him as the kind of man who would rather save a dog than a child. In addition to Harper’s Pekingese and Margaret Hays’s “little doggie,” the third surviving canine was Elizabeth Rothschild’s Pomeranian, carried by her into Boat 6.

  Norris Williams made a full recovery from his ordeal and became a tennis champion. (photo credit 1.47)

  ON TUESDAY NIGHT a violent thunderstorm broke over the Carpathia. Karl Behr was jolted awake by a deafening crash and thought the ship had struck an iceberg. His immediate thought was to find Helen Newsom, and so he raced out onto the deck. There he saw flashes of lightning and with great relief returned to his bed on a smoking room table. Others who awoke to the lightning thought that distress rockets were once again being fired. The storm was followed by rain and fog that lasted for the next two days. This dismal weather kept most people indoors, and the mournful blasts of the foghorn on Wednesday seemed to echo the doleful mood on the “ship of sorrow.” Crowded into the public rooms, there was little for the survivors to do but talk—and talk they did. Accounts of the disaster were repeated and embellished with each telling. But one of the most disturbing stories would prove to be true. Emily Ryerson described to Mahala Douglas and some others how Bruce Ismay had showed her an ice warning message on Sunday and told her they were going to put on more speed. The news that ice warnings had been received and the ship had not slowed down spread quickly, and a group that included Lawrence Beesley sought out one of the surviving officers, who confirmed that this was indeed the case. Learning that the collision could have been avoided filled Beesley with a sense of hopelessness. And resentment toward Bruce Ismay, who remained secluded in his cabin, continued to grow.

  With a historian’s eye, Archibald Gracie attempted to separate truth from fantasy as he listened to the survivors’ stories, a potential book beginning to form in his mind. Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman regularly stopped by the small cabin Gracie shared with Hugh Woolner to discuss various aspects of the disaster. All agreed that the explosions heard during the sinking could not have been the ship’s boilers blowing up. From the discovery of the severed wreck in 1985 we now know that the “explosions” were actually the sound of the ship being wrenched apart. But Gracie and Lightoller firmly believed that the ship had sunk intact—a view that would become the prevailing opinion for the next seventy-three years. Gracie thought that Norris Williams and Jack Thayer, “the two young men cited as authority … of the break-in-two theory,” had confused the falling funnel for the ship breaking apart. But both Williams and Thayer knew exactly what they had seen, as did some other eyewitnesses. On the Carpathia, Jack Thayer described the stages of the ship’s sinking and breaking apart to Lewis Skidmore, a Brooklyn art teacher, who drew sketches that were later featured in many newspapers. The inaccuracies in Skidmore’s drawings, however, only bolstered the belief that the ship had, in fact, sunk intact.

  And what of the most famous Titanic legend of all—that the band played “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship neared its end? It’s often claimed that this was a myth that took hold among survivors on the Carpathia and captivated the public in the aftermath of the disaster. None of the musicians survived to confirm or deny the story, but Harold Bride noted that the last tune he heard being played as he left the wireless cabin was “Autumn.” For a time this was believed to be a hymn tune by that name, but Walter Lord proposed in The Night Lives On that Bride must have been referring to “Songe d’Automne,” a popular waltz by Archibald Joyce that is listed in White Star music booklets of the period. Historian George Behe, however, has carefully studied the survivor accounts regarding the music that was heard during the sinking and has found credible evidence that “Nearer My God to Thee” and perhaps other hymns were played toward the end. Behe also recounts that the orchestra’s leader, Wallace Hartley, was once asked by a friend what he would do if he ever found himself on a sinking ship. Hartley replied, “I don’t think I could do better than play ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ ” The legendary hymn may not have been the very last tune played on the Titanic but it seems possible that it was heard on the sloping deck that night.

  Margaret Brown had little time for swapping Titanic stories since she was devoting most of each day to helping steerage passengers in need. Gladys Cherry wrote that she and Noëlle Rothes also “helped in seeing after these poor distressed souls, and it has helped us so much.” Daisy Spedden, too, worked tirelessly with “the people,” as she called them, cutting up blankets to make clothes for children who had escaped only in nightclothes. In a letter, Daisy wrote, “The number of widows is pitiful to say nothing of the motherless and fatherless children.” More pointedly she noted, “We spend our time sitting on people who are cruel enough to say that no steerage should have been saved, as if they weren’t human beings!” Margaret Brown, too, found that not everyone supported her altruism. Two of the women on her committee were approached by Dr. McGee as they made their way down to the third-class decks one morning. “Madam, we have the situation under perfect control,” he said to one of them regarding the steerage passengers, adding that “cutting up blankets would not soothe their tortured minds.” Since the doctor had just emerged from the room of Bruce Ismay, the committee-women suspected that he was taking orders from the “secluded plutocrat,” as Margaret Brown had dubbed him, and this simply increased their resolve to do more. A sign was posted in the third-class dining saloon stating that the members of the committee would be available to give aid at regular hours each day. Many survivors came forward and, in Margaret Brown’s words, “unburdened their sorrows that lay like a weight upon their breasts.”

  To Mrs. Brown, the attitude of the men who had been rescued was “pathetic,” and she recalled that they all tried to explain how they were saved “as if it were a blot on their manhood.” René Harris remembered that when Dr. Frauenthal came to examine her bandaged arm he began explaining how he had been rescued, and she assured him that he need not apologize for saving his life. René was less understanding when she learned that the Titanic’s three professional gamblers had survived. The cardsharp who had been pointed out to her on Sunday approached her not long after she came on board and said, “Do not grieve. It is God’s will.” René gave him such a scalding reply that whenever the gambler caught sight of her on the ship, “he would run away from me as if from a fury.”

  A group of women on the Carpathia sew blankets into clothes for children. Hard at work among them is Noëlle, Countess of Rothes (see arrow). (photo credit 1.59)

  The resentment of the widowed women toward the male survivors caused Arthur Peuchen to ask Lightoller for a note confirming that he had been ordered into a lifeboat. The second officer obliged and wrote that Major Peuchen had “proved himself a brave man.” Unbeknownst to the major, the question of how he had survived was already preoccupying his home city of Toronto. By Tuesday morning the sinking of the Titanic was headline news everywhere, and in the Toronto papers Major Peuchen was conspicuous as the only male in the “Saved” column. Based solely on the information that the survivors were mainly women and children, the disaster was already being hailed as a triumph for chivalry and Anglo-Saxon male fortitude. But this placed any man who had survived under immediate suspicion of cowardice. An editorial in the Toronto Star observed that Peuchen’s escape was “a subject of universal discussion in Toronto” and that “the dispute is hotly waged and participated in by everybody young and old.”

  In Washington, friends of Archie Butt, Frank Millet, and Clarence Moore were proclaiming that without a doubt they would have been the last men to leave the ship. “ ‘Poor Butt’ was the universal comment,” reported the Washington Times. “And perhaps the greatest compliment those who had known the military aide were able to bestow,” the newspaper continued, “found express
ion in the inevitable afterthought, ‘I’ll bet he died like a man.’ ” Another newspaper reported that “the employees of the White House were in a nervous condition which unfitted them for work during the days of uncertainty concerning Archie’s fate.” President Taft, too, was preoccupied by the fate of his aide and frustrated by his inability to receive word of whether Archie might be on board the rescue ship. On Tuesday, Taft instructed the secretary of the navy to send out two scout cruisers, the Salem and the Chester, to establish radio contact with the Carpathia.

  In New York, the city was in the grip of Titanic fever. Flags flew at half-staff, the Henry Harris theaters were dark, and even Macy’s department store had closed out of respect for Isidor and Ida Straus. Police had been called in to control the crowds in front of the White Star office at 9 Broadway. Alex Macomb, a sailor in the U.S. Navy on leave in the city, sent his mother a description:

  The scene in front of the steamship office was a tragedy in itself. As the list of those known to have been saved was printed on a large bulletin board, you could hear cries of joy and relief from various parts of the throng massed in front of the office. When they started the list of those who had not been heard of, cries of “Oh! Oh God!” could be heard everywhere, and the hysterical women seemed to fill the whole city with their screams. I have never seen anything so heart rending in my life.