Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  As the Senate inquiry wrapped up its first day of hearings at the Waldorf-Astoria on Friday, April 19, Arthur Peuchen and his family left the hotel to board an overnight express train for the journey home. At Toronto’s Union Station the next day a large crowd waited to catch a glimpse of the man who had survived the tragedy that, according to the Toronto Globe, “has stirred two continents as they have not been stirred in a century.” Also greeting the Peuchens was a large headline in Saturday’s Toronto World: MAJOR PEUCHEN BLAMES CAPTAIN WHO WENT DOWN WITH HIS SHIP. In the article that followed, the major accused Captain Smith of “criminal carelessness.” At the Peuchen home on Jarvis Street, a telegram awaited requesting that the major give testimony before the Senate inquiry in Washington the following Tuesday. After two days at the Waldorf-Astoria, the hearings were to reconvene on Monday in the U.S. capital. Although utterly fatigued, Peuchen made arrangements to leave the following day. Before his departure, however, he found time to talk to one more reporter, to correct what certain newspapers had attributed to him. “I have never,” he asserted, “spoken an unkind word about Captain Smith.”

  On the following morning, as the major and his wife prepared to leave for Washington, the Titanic furnished a ready theme for Sunday’s sermons. At Peuchen’s own church, St. Paul’s on Bloor Street, his friend and neighbor Archdeacon H. J. Cody pronounced, “The men of our race have not forgotten how to die … sacrifice for a chivalrous ideal is one of the finest features of our history.” This theme was echoed in countless pulpits on both sides of the Atlantic. The Reverend Dr. Leighton Parks, of St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue in New York, could not resist a poke at the women’s suffrage movement by noting that while the men of the Titanic sacrificed themselves for women and children, “those women who go about shrieking for their ‘rights’ want something very different.”

  Major Peuchen took the stand before the Senate subcommittee on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 23. His testimony reads as if he were self-assured and even a little self-satisfied, but according to the New York Times, he seemed nervous and there were occasional pauses for him to recover his composure. At the end he asked to make a statement in which he repeated his denials of ever having said “any personal or unkind thing about Captain Smith.” He went on to state,

  I am here, sir, more on account of the poor women that came off our boat. They asked me if I would not come and tell this court of inquiry what I had seen, and when you wired me, sir, I came at once, simply to carry out my promise to the poor women on our boat.

  At least one of the “poor women” in Boat 6 would have greeted Peuchen’s statement with a derisive snort. Margaret Brown was already miffed that she had not been asked to testify before the Senate inquiry given her prominence on the Survivors’ Committee and the acclaim she was enjoying as a heroine of the Titanic. And as a supporter of women’s suffrage, Margaret was not shy about using her newfound fame to wade into the debate over gender equality swirling around the disaster. (One newspaper poet noted how the cry of “Votes for women” had become “Boats for women/When the brave/Were come to die.”) Margaret Brown stated in an interview that while “ ‘Women first’ is a principle as deep-rooted in man’s being as the sea … to me it is all wrong. Women demand equal rights on land—why not on sea?”

  In fact, the “women and children first” protocol for abandoning ship was not a particularly ancient one. It began with the HMS Birkenhead, a British troopship that was wrecked off Cape Town, South Africa, on February 26, 1852. The soldiers famously stood in formation on deck while the women and children boarded the boats, and only 193 of the 643 people on board survived. Hymned as the “Birkenhead drill” in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, it became a familiar touchstone of Britain’s imperial greatness and AS BRAVE AS THE BIRKENHEAD was a much-used heading in UK Titanic press coverage. A story that Captain Smith had exhorted his men to “Be British!” further burnished the oft-cited claim that Anglo-Saxon men had not forgotten how to die.

  It would be up to the blunt-spoken Ella White, one of only two women called to testify at the Senate inquiry (though five others gave affidavits) to throw some cold water on the selfless chivalry of the Titanic’s men:

  They speak of the bravery of the men. I do not think there was any particular bravery, because none of the men thought it was going down. If they had thought the ship was going down, they would not have frivoled as they did about it. Some of them said, “When you come back you will need a pass,” and, “You can not get on tomorrow morning without a pass.” They never would have said these things if anybody had had any idea that the ship was going to sink.

  Chivalrous or not, there was no denying that of the 1,667 men on board, only 338, or 20.27 percent, had survived as compared with a 74.35 percent survival rate for the 425 women. On April 21 the bodies of the Titanic’s victims began to be pulled out of the north Atlantic by the Mackay-Bennett, a cable ship that had been sent out from Halifax with a hundred tons of ice and 125 coffins on board. The Mackay-Bennett’s captain described the scene as resembling “a flock of sea gulls resting on the water.… All we could see at first would be the top of the life preservers. They were all floating face upwards, apparently standing in the water.” John Jacob Astor’s body was found floating with arms outstretched, his gold pocket watch dangling from its platinum chain. To the ship’s undertaker it looked as if Astor had just glanced at his watch before he took the plunge. It is often written that Astor’s body was found mangled and soot-covered and that he must therefore have been crushed when the forward funnel came down. Yet according to three eyewitnesses, Astor’s body was in good condition and soot-free, and like most of the other floating victims, he appeared to have died of hypothermia.

  On April 25 the body of the Buffalo architect Edward Kent was recovered. In the pocket of his gray overcoat was the silver flask and ivory miniature given to him by Helen Candee on the grand staircase, and these were later returned to her by Kent’s sister. Frank Millet’s body was found on the same day and identified by the initials F. D. M. on his gold watch. The next evening the Mackay-Bennett left for Halifax with 190 bodies on board, another 116 having been buried at sea. A second ship, the Minia, had arrived on the scene, but after a week’s search it retrieved only seventeen bodies, and two other ships would find only an additional five. The Mackay-Bennett landed in Halifax on April 30 to the tolling of church bells and flags flying at half-staff. Horse-drawn hearses took the bodies from the dock to a temporary morgue set up in a curling rink.

  Frank Millet’s eldest son, Laurence, had been waiting in Halifax for the Mackay-Bennett to arrive and at midnight was allowed to view his father’s body. Early the next morning he accompanied the casket to Boston on a train which also carried the bodies of Isidor Straus and a twenty-one-year-old passenger named Richard White. Heads were bowed at Boston’s North Station as the coffins were wheeled along the platform. Millet’s body was then taken to the chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, where a funeral service was held that afternoon. On viewing the body after the service, Jack Millet wrote to his mother in Broadway that his father’s face was undamaged and had a calm expression. He also noted, “We are so used to long absences that I can not quite get used to thinking that we shall never see him again.” Meanwhile, Major Blanton Winship remained in Halifax, sent there by President Taft to examine every corpse in search of Major Butt, though Archie’s body was never recovered.

  At Frank Millet’s funeral “Nearer My God to Thee” was not played, though the hymn was ubiquitous at most other Titanic memorials. It was sung by a congregation of twenty-five hundred at London’s Westminster Chapel on April 25, during a commemorative service for W. T. Stead that was attended by such notables as future prime ministers David Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald. The dowager Queen Alexandra sent a representaive and a message of condolence, and the service ended with the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Psychic messages had already been received from Stead in the afterlife reporting that it was he who had requested that the
Titanic’s musicians play “Nearer My God to Thee.” The hymn also concluded a packed memorial service for Major Butt held in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, on May 2. President Taft delivered an emotional tribute to his aide, giving an outline of Archie’s life and praising his loyalty and cheerfulness and noting that “never did I know how much he was to me until he was gone.” He also spoke of Archie’s devotion to his mother and said, “It always seemed to me that he never married because he loved her so.” At another large memorial service held in Washington three days later by Archie’s Masonic Lodge, Taft broke down during his eulogy and could not continue. The entire assemblage then stood and sang with great emotion “Nearer My God to Thee,” the hymn that Archie had chosen for his funeral because it appealed to his sentimental side.

  It would be another hymn that would cause tears at the service for James Clinch Smith, held in the same small white church in St. James, Long Island, that had seen Stanford White’s funeral six years before. After “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” was sung, Archibald Gracie mentioned to one of Smith’s sisters that it was the last hymn played at the Sunday service on the Titanic. She was very affected by this and told Gracie it was Jim’s favorite hymn and the first tune he had learned to play on the piano as a child. Gracie included this anecdote in The Truth About the Titanic, a book that he did not live to see published. On December 4, 1912, Archibald Gracie died from health conditions degraded by the hypothermia and shock he had experienced when the Titanic sank. From “our coterie” only Helen Candee, Hugh Woolner, and Mauritz Björnström-Steffansson remained alive by the end of 1912. Helen Candee wrote romantically of “the Two” in her article for the May issue of Collier’s magazine, but the affair with Woolner did not continue on land, and in August of 1912 he married the young widow of an American.

  Edith Rosenbaum also wrote about her Titanic experiences and described for readers of Women’s Wear Daily how her new friend Lady Duff Gordon “made her escape in a charming lavender bath robe, very beautifully embroidered, together with a pretty blue veil.” The questionable taste of this description was barely noticed amid the furor surrounding Cosmo Duff Gordon’s supposed bribery of the crewmen in Boat 1. In England the story had blown up into a huge scandal and Lucy described the scene that greeted them when they stepped off the Lusitania in mid-May:

  All over the [train] station were newspaper placards—“Duff Gordon Scandal” … “Baronet and Wife Row Away from the Drowning” … “Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon Safe and Sound While Women Go Down on Titanic.” Newsboys ran by us shouting, “Read about the Titanic coward!”

  Making matters worse was the testimony given the week before at the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry by Charles Hendrickson, one of the firemen in Boat 1. He claimed that he had suggested they row back to pick up survivors, but Lady Duff Gordon had protested, saying they would be swamped, and Sir Cosmo had backed her up. The British Inquiry had begun on May 2 and was being presided over by John Bigham, First Viscount Mersey. In a bid to clear their names, the Duff Gordons offered to appear before the inquiry—the only passengers to do so. Cosmo was scheduled to testify first on Friday May 17, and Lucy noted the day before in a letter to Margot Asquith that he “shuts himself in the library for hours on end, dear man, worrying and looking a fright when he emerges, he is so downcast.” Margot Asquith and many other society friends packed the gallery at the Scottish Hall on Monday, May 20, for “Lucy’s day in court.” The women were dressed in their new spring frocks and hats—to the New York Times correspondent, the scene resembled “a fashionable matinee in aid of a popular charity.” Lucile wore a black ensemble with a white lace collar, and a hint of mourning was suggested by her large black hat and veil. When called, she spoke clearly, emphatically denying Hendrickson’s testimony and what the “clever reporter” had put into the New York American story. She denied hearing any cries of the drowning after the Titanic sank, though years later in her autobiography she would recall that “the air was rent with awful shrieks.”

  Lucy’s time before the inquiry was brief since she followed Cosmo who had already been grilled for several hours that morning and on the preceding Friday. Cosmo’s aristocratic reticence did not make him a particularly forceful witness in his own defense. When asked if it occurred to him that more people could have been saved in Boat 1, he replied, “There were many things to think about, but of course it quite well occurred to one that people in the water could be saved by a boat, yes.” His harshest questioner was W. D. Harbinson, the counsel for the seafarers’ union, who took direct aim at class privilege. At one point he had to be cautioned by Lord Mersey “not to try to make out a case for this class or that class or another class, but to assist me in arriving at the truth.” When Harbinson asked Cosmo if a fair summation of his position was “that you considered when you were safe yourselves that all the others might perish,” Lord Mersey interrupted again to object to the unfairness of the question and to point out, “The witness’s position is bad enough.”

  The Duff Gordons’ friends were supportive, as was some of the press coverage. One journalist wrote that “Torquemada never placed his victims more unfairly on the rack of the Inquisition than have Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon been placed on the rack of cross-examination.” In his report, Lord Mersey found that “the very gross charge” against Sir Cosmo was unfounded, but this was not enough to vindicate the Duff Gordons in the court of public opinion. As Lucy later noted, “A great deal of the mud that was flung stuck to us both. For myself, I did not mind … but I minded very much for Cosmo’s sake. To the end of his life, he grieved at the slur which had been cast on his honor.” The whole affair, in her words, “well-nigh broke his heart and ruined his life.” With her customary insouciance, Lucy claimed that the notoriety actually helped her business. (“Now all the women of London seem to want a nightdress like the one that could compel Lady Duff Gordon’s admiration in such an hour of peril,” Women’s Wear Daily noted on June 4, 1912.) Certainly, the next few years were good ones for Lucile Ltd., and when the Great War diminished the European appetite for fashion she focused her activities on New York, and in 1915 opened a Chicago salon as well. Cosmo stayed with Lucy for a time in America but when a Russian gigolo she dubbed “Bobbie” became a permanent part of the household, he stormed off to England in the spring of 1915 and lived apart from her until his death in 1931.

  Lord Mersey’s report found that J. Bruce Ismay had also been unjustly vilified and noted that if the White Star chairman had not jumped into Collapsible C, “he would merely have added one more life, namely, his own, to the number of those lost.” But Ismay, too, suffered keenly from the social ostracism directed toward him and after resigning as president of the International Mercantile Marine and chairman of the White Star Line in June of 1913, spent most of the remainder of his life out of the public eye. In private, his wife, like Lucy, would remark that the Titanic had ruined her husband’s life.

  The only real blame assigned by Lord Mersey’s report was toward Captain Lord and the officers of the Californian, concluding that their ship was only between five and ten miles away from the Titanic and that if they had come to the rescue on first seeing the distress rockets “[they] might have saved many if not all of the lives that were lost.” Stanley Lord lost his job with the Leyland Line, and until his death in 1962 tried to clear his name. In recent decades his case has been championed by a legion of defenders known as “Lordites,” who argue that the Californian was either not “the mystery ship” seen by the Titanic or was too far away to have reached the Titanic in time. But it is undeniable that if the Californian’s wireless set had been turned on, the Titanic’s distress call would have been heard and the ship could have taken action. The report of the U.S. Senate inquiry recommended that wireless on ships should be in operation twenty-four hours a day. It also proposed that ships carry enough lifeboats for everyone on board, that regular lifeboat drills be conducted, and that crewmembers should be skilled in the lowering and operation of lifeboat
s.

  Lord Mersey’s report, by contrast, had to step gingerly around the issue of lifeboats since the inquiry was conducted by the British Board of Trade, whose outdated regulations had allowed a ship the size of the Titanic to carry only sixteen regular lifeboats. But Mersey did recommend that lifeboat capacity be based on the maximum number of people a ship could carry rather than its gross tonnage. His report also found no evidence that third-class passengers had been treated unfairly, despite that fact that 532 of the 710 aboard were lost. Lord Mersey is often accused of wielding the whitewash brush for finding neither Captain Smith nor the White Star Line responsible for the disaster. Lightoller’s insistence that Smith was simply following standard nautical procedure in maintaining full speed and trusting the lookouts to spot the ice in time clearly swayed the inquiry, though Mersey noted that this practice would “without doubt be negligence in any similar case in the future.”