Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  GEORGE BRERETON (1874–1942)

  Professional gambler George Brereton (also known as Brayton, Bradley, etc.) befriended passenger Henry Stengel on board the Carpathia and later tried to involve him in a horse-racing scam in New York. Brereton died of a gunshot wound to the head in 1942 and is believed to be another of the Titanic’s suicides. His cardsharp companion Charles Romaine died after being hit by a New York taxi in 1922. What became of Harry Homer is unknown.

  HAROLD BRIDE (1890–1956)

  Harold Bride was still in the Carpathia’s wireless room with Harold Cottam when Guglielmo Marconi came on board at Pier 54 to personally congratulate the two operators. Bride sold his story to the newspapers, and a photograph of him being carried off the Carpathia with bandaged feet was widely printed. After returning to England, he resumed work as a wireless operator and during World War I served on the small steamer Mona’s Isle as a telegraphist. He married in 1919 and had three children, and later moved to Scotland, where he worked as a salesman and died at the age of sixty-six, on April 29, 1956.

  MARGARET BROWN (1867–1932)

  Margaret Brown continued to travel and work on behalf of the issues she supported, such as women’s suffrage, literacy for children, historic preservation, and the Titanic Survivors’ Committee. During World War I, she worked with the American Committee for Devastated France to rebuild damaged towns on the Western Front and also helped provide care for wounded soldiers, which resulted in her being awarded the French Legion of Honor. Her husband, J. J. Brown (who had said of his wife after the disaster, “She’s too mean to sink”) died in 1922, and legal wrangles over his will consumed much of her time and money over several years. Always fascinated by the theater, Margaret began studying acting in the Sarah Bernhardt tradition in her late fifties and even toured in a play made famous by “the divine Sarah.” On October 26, 1932, while staying at the Barbizon Hotel in New York, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of sixty-five. An autopsy revealed that she had a significant brain tumor. After her death, a Denver Post reporter named Gene Fowler wrote a highly fanciful account of her life and dubbed her “Molly” Brown, which later led to the Broadway musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown, which became a movie starring Debbie Reynolds.

  FRANCIS M. BROWNE (1880–1960)

  Francis M. Browne became Father Browne SJ after his ordination in 1915, at which time he was immediately assigned as chaplain to the Irish Guards who were serving on the Western Front. There he was wounded several times and his lungs were damaged by mustard gas. After the war he was sent to Australia so his health could recover, a trip he documented carefully with his camera. On his death in 1960, an archive of more than forty-two thousand photographs was left to the Irish Jesuits, and this extraordinary legacy has since been featured in books and exhibitions.

  DANIEL BUCKLEY (1890–1918)

  After his testimony before the U.S. Senate Inquiry, Daniel Buckley was assailed as a coward for hiding under a woman’s shawl in a Titanic lifeboat. Yet during World War I he served his adopted country as an infantryman and was killed in 1918. He is buried in his hometown of Ballydesmond in County Cork.

  EMMA BUCKNELL (1852–1927)

  At the age of eighteen, Emma Ward, the daughter of a clergyman, had become the third wife of William Bucknell, a wealthy Philadelphian who was forty-one years her senior. The marriage produced a son and three daughters, but in his seventies Bucknell became irascible and stingy toward his wife and family, despite his considerable wealth, which had provided the principal endowment for Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Fortuitously, Bucknell died in 1890, leaving Emma a wealthy widow and allowing her the time and means to travel. After the Titanic disaster, Emma was outspoken about the ill-prepared crew and poor lifeboat provisions, and she was reportedly affected by the trauma of the disaster for the rest of her life. She divided her time between a home in Clearwater, Florida, and her Adirondack retreat on Saranac Lake, where she died of heart failure on June 27, 1927.

  HELEN CANDEE (1859–1949)

  Helen Candee recovered from the broken ankle she received while climbing into Boat 6, although she had to walk with a cane for a year. After publishing “Sealed Orders,” her account of the disaster, in Collier’s magazine in May 1912, she tried to put the Titanic behind her, though she requested $10,000 for personal injury and $4,646 for lost possessions in a class-action lawsuit against the White Star Line. In October of 1912 her large and lavish book on tapestries, simply called The Tapestry Book, was published and became her best-known work. In 1917, at the age of fifty-eight, she became a volunteer nurse with the Italian Red Cross and tended wounded soldiers in field hospitals just behind the battle lines. In Milan she helped care for a wounded young American ambulance driver named Ernest Hemingway, whose love affair with one of Helen’s coworkers helped inspire his novel A Farewell to Arms. In the 1920s Helen was drawn to travels in the Far East and wrote two acclaimed books, Angkor the Magnificent and New Journeys in Old Asia. In 1930 she returned to her love of textiles for her eighth and final book, Weaves and Draperies: Classic and Modern. During her seventies she continued to travel and often wrote articles for National Geographic. By age eighty, as she became physically weaker, she lived with her daughter Edith and in the summers visited her cottage in York Harbor, Maine. It was there, on August 23, 1949, at the age of ninety, that her productive, event-filled life drew to a close.

  CHARLOTTE CARDEZA (1854–1939)

  The largest claim for lost possessions was made by Charlotte Cardeza, who submitted a detailed inventory of the vast wardrobe she had brought on board, which she valued at £36,567 2s ($177,352.75). Charlotte continued to travel the world until the 1930s, when declining health caused her to settle in at Montebello, her Main Line mansion. When she died at the age of eighty-five, on August 1, 1939, the bulk of her estate was left to her son, Thomas Cardeza (1875–1952), who in his mother’s name endowed a foundation to study blood diseases at Thomas Jefferson University.

  PAUL CHEVRÉ (1866–1914)

  The official opening of the Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa was postponed due to the death of Charles Hays, and a rather subdued ceremony was held on June 12, 1912. Sculptor Paul Chevré’s bust of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier was installed in the lobby though Chevré himself would die less than two years later. His obituary claimed that he survived the sinking of the Titanic but never recovered from the shock of it.

  EUGENE DALY (1883–1965)

  Irish bagpiper Eugene Daly retained his love of music throughout his life, later taking up the flute when his wife objected to the sound of the pipes. He arrived penniless off the Carpathia and worked at various jobs in New York before going to war in 1917. His Irish girlfriend accepted his proposal and married him before he left for France. The couple returned to Ireland in 1921 when Eugene’s mother was dying and stayed on in Galway, where their only daughter, Marion (Mary), was born. Mary and her husband emigrated to America in 1952, and after his wife’s death in 1961, Eugene came over to join them and died in New York on October 30, 1965.

  ELIZA GLADYS “MILLVINA” DEAN (1912–2009)

  Two-month-old Millvina Dean, her mother Eva Georgetta “Ettie” Light Dean (1879–1975), and two-year-old brother Bertram Dean (1910–1992), returned to England aboard the Adriatic, where Millvina became the “pet of the liner,” with passengers vying to be photographed holding her. The family moved in with Ettie’s parents near Southampton, where Millvina and Bertram were educated with the support of a small stipend from a survivors’ fund. Millvina did not discover that she had been on the Titanic until she was eight and her mother was planning to remarry. Millvina herself never married; she was a cartographer’s assistant during World War II and later worked in the purchasing department of a Southampton engineering firm. In her seventies she became a Titanic celebrity and was in great demand to appear at conventions, exhibitions, and on radio and TV programs. During the final years of her life she became the last Titanic survivor and continued to graci
ously sign autographs and tell her story. She died on May 31, 2009, after a short illness, and her ashes were scattered in Southampton harbor, the scene of the Titanic’s departure ninety-seven years before.

  MAHALA DOUGLAS (1864–1945)

  Mahala Douglas continued to live in Walden, the large house she and her husband Walter Douglas had built on Lake Minnetonka, and at her winter home in Pasadena, until her death at the age of eighty-one, on April 21, 1945. Her husband’s body was recovered by the Mackay-Bennett, and she is buried next to him in the Douglas family mausoleum at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

  LADY DUFF GORDON (1863–1935)

  The 1920s didn’t roar for Lucy Duff Gordon since Jazz Age flappers found her romantic gowns passé. As Cecil Beaton wrote, “The era of elaborate ornamentation was over.… It was a far cry from Lucile’s pastel chiffons to the jerseys and short skirts with which Chanel replaced them.” Lucy didn’t understand how the postwar world had changed and fired designer Edward Molyneux from her Hanover Square salon for producing sleeker, more modern designs. By 1923 Lucile Ltd. was bankrupt. It was left to the ever-kind Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon to explain how her capital had disappeared—as usual, Lucy blamed her business partners. Lucy continued to write her fashion columns and sometimes created designs for private clients from her small flat, in the way that she had started her career so many years before. “She had to learn … to get on buses, perhaps in the rain, and go to cocktail parties,” recalled her granddaughter. It didn’t help that her sister, Elinor Glyn (1864–1943), was enjoying great success in Hollywood as a screenwriter and even as a director. (When Clara Bow starred in the screen adaptation of Elinor’s novel It, she was dubbed “the ‘It’ Girl,” “It” being a coded term for sex appeal.) In 1932 Lucy published her autobiography, Discretions and Indiscretions, which became a bestseller. In it she describes her experiences on the Titanic and the scandal that followed. Lucy died of breast cancer in a Putney, London, nursing home on April 20, 1935, at the age of seventy-one, four years to the day after Cosmo’s death. They are buried together in Brookwood Cemetery near London. In recent years, exhibitions of Lucile fashions at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology have provided some recognition of Lucy’s place in the history of fashion.

  ALICE FORTUNE (1887–1961)

  Alice Fortune’s shipboard flirtation with William Sloper was likely intended to be little more than that, since on June 8, 1912, she married lawyer Charles Holden Allen, to whom she was already engaged. The couple had one daughter and lived in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and in Montreal. They retired to their summer home in Chester, Nova Scotia, and Alice died there on April 7, 1961. Her mother, Mary Fortune (1851–1929), did not remarry and died in Toronto in March 1929, aged seventy-seven. Older sister Ethel Fortune (1883–1961) was haunted by dreams of her brother Charles Fortune flailing about in the icy water. She married Toronto banker Crawford Gordon in 1913, and their son, Crawford Gordon II, was responsible for producing the prototype of the Avro Arrow aircraft in the 1950s. Ethel died in Toronto on March 21, 1961. The youngest sister, Mabel Helen Fortune (1888–1968), married a jazz musician from Minnesota and had one son, but the marriage was short-lived. Mabel soon met a woman from Ottawa and lived with her in Victoria, British Columbia, for the rest of her life.

  LILY MAY FUTRELLE (1876–1967)

  May Futrelle returned to “Stepping Stones,” the house on the harbor in Scituate, Massachusetts, and it is said that on every April 15 she would throw flowers into the Atlantic in memory of her husband, Jacques Futrelle. In the 1930s she taught creative writing in Boston and New York and was a national chair of the American League of Pen Women. She also hosted a radio show called Do You Want to Be a Writer? May died in Scituate at the age of ninety-one and is buried there.

  DOROTHY GIBSON (1889–1946)

  William Sloper wrote that he was invited to the wedding reception for Dorothy Gibson and Jules Brulatour in 1917 but was unable to attend. The prettiest girl’s affair with Brulatour had been made public in May of 1913 after Dorothy had struck and killed a pedestrian while driving Brulatour’s car. After Dorothy and Brulatour separated in 1919, she lived for a time in Manhattan and moved to France with her mother in 1928. She later became involved in Fascist politics but changed her affiliations during World War II and was arrested by the Germans in Italy as a suspected resistance supporter and imprisoned in Milan. Dorothy escaped in 1944 and died of heart failure at the Ritz in Paris on February 17, 1946, at the age of fifty-six. No print of Saved from the Titanic has survived; the only existing film from Dorothy’s movie career is a one-reel comedy, The Lucky Holdup, which premiered just before she sailed on the Titanic.

  HENRY SLEEPER HARPER (1864–1944)

  “Louis, how do you keep yourself looking so young?” is how Henry Harper reportedly greeted Carpathia passenger Louis Ogden shortly after he arrived on the rescue ship. It’s possible that a similar insouciance regarding disaster contributed to the Harper & Brothers publishing firm’s slide into receivership in 1899 while Henry was a director. Henry kept a desk there for a time after the company was sold but increasingly had less to do with the firm. He and his wife, Myra Harper, had no children and liked to spend about six months of every year traveling abroad. Henry also loved the outdoors and became involved in protecting the Adirondack forests from logging. After surviving the Titanic, the Harpers continued to travel and while in America divided their time between New York City and a summer home in Winter Harbor, Maine. When Myra died in 1923, Henry married again and in his sixties fathered a son, also named Henry. Henry Sleeper Harper died on March 1, 1944, in New York City, after a two-year illness. His bowler hat was photographed still sitting on a bed in his stateroom during the filming of the Titanic wreck for James Cameron’s 3D documentary Ghosts of the Abyss. Harper’s Egyptian manservant, Hammad Hassab, returned to Egypt and continued to work as a dragoman through Thomas Cook and Sons. His calling card read, “Hammad Hassab, Dragoman, Having the distinction of being a survivor from the wreck of the Titanic.”

  IRENE (RENÉ) HARRIS (1876–1969)

  “Mrs. Harris was rich, racy and of infinite good humor,” remembered playwright Moss Hart of the woman who produced his first play in 1925. The twenties roared for René (who by then had become Renée), with song-and-dance man George M. Cohan regularly filling the Hudson Theater along with other hit shows. This allowed her an apartment on Park Avenue, a home in Palm Beach, and a yacht with a crew of four. Her social circle included Irving Berlin and Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and she had a string of male admirers, three of whom became husbands, though never for long. “I have had four marriages—but really only one husband,” she claimed, referring to her first, whom she always called “Henry B.” Renée would keep her “infinite good humor” but lose everything else when the Depression hit the theater business particularly hard. In 1932 she was forced to sell the Hudson Theater, for which she had once been offered a million, for only $100,000, and even that did not cover her debts. Down to only the clothes on her back, Renée moved in with her sister and survived the Depression directing children’s plays for the WPA’s Federal Theater Project and selling the occasional magazine story. By the early 1950s she was living in a one-room apartment in a hotel in Manhattan and spending summers at a retirement home for theater people on Long Island. She became a good friend of Walter Lord’s when he was working on A Night to Remember but was unable to sit through a screening of the 1958 movie version as she found it too realistic. On the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking in 1962, she gave an interview to NBC radio and attended a memorial service at New York’s Seamen’s Church with her old friend May Futrelle and some other survivors. Walter Lord encouraged her to finish writing the story of her remarkable life, and she was hard at work on it in late August of 1969, when she collapsed and was rushed to hospital. Renée died on September 2, 1969, at the age of ninety-three. All who knew her had to agree with the final notice she received i
n Variety, which said “The lady was something special.”

  MASABUMI HOSONO (1870–1939)

  The Titanic’s sole Japanese survivor was assailed for having brought shame on his country in the eyes of the West. In 1913 he lost his government job, though he was eventually rehired. Hosono wrote a description of his Titanic experience in which he (incorrectly) claimed that he was the last person to get into the last boat. He died on March 14, 1939.

  VIOLET JESSOP (1887–1971)

  Stewardess Violet Jessop had the distinction of surviving the Olympic’s collision with the British cruiser Hawke on September 20, 1911, and the sinking of both the Titanic and the third sister ship, Britannic, when it was sunk in the Aegean while serving as a hospital ship in 1916. Her memoir, Titanic Survivor, was edited by liner historian John Maxtone-Graham and published in 1997. Violet died in May of 1971 in Great Ashfield, Suffolk.