Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  CHARLES LIGHTOLLER (1874–1952)

  Despite his staunch defense of Captain Smith and the White Star Line, the Titanic’s senior surviving officer was never made a captain of any White Star ship. Charles Lightoller did become a full commander in the Royal Navy during World War I and on returning to White Star after the war was made chief officer of the Celtic. Realizing he was never going to achieve a better posting, Lightoller retired after twenty years of service, and he and his wife for a time ran a guesthouse. He purchased and refitted a steam motor launch, which was dubbed the Sundowner, and on June 1, 1940, the sixty-six-year-old Lightoller took the Sundowner across the Channel to rescue men from the beaches of Dunkirk. During World War II he would lose two of his three sons in combat. Charles Lightoller died on December 8, 1952, at the age of seventy-eight.

  HAROLD LOWE (1882–1944)

  Harold Lowe confessed to Margaret Brown on the Carpathia that he regretted the swearing in the lifeboat that had so upset Daisy Minahan. He also had to retract from his testimony at the U.S. Inquiry that he had fired his pistol to prevent “Italian immigrants” from jumping into Boat 14, after a complaint was filed by the Italian embassy. (He explained that he meant “immigrants of the Latin race.”) In September of 1913, Lowe was married, and the couple had two children, a boy and a girl. During World War I he became a commander in the Royal Naval Reserve, but like the other surviving officers from the Titanic never achieved a command in the merchant service. Lowe retired to his native Wales and died on May 12, 1944. He is buried at Llandrillo Yn Rhos, Colwyn Bay, North Wales.

  BERTHE MAYNÉ (1887–1962)

  Hélène Baxter and her daughter ’Zette seemingly bonded in their grief with Quigg Baxter’s lover, Berthe Mayné, since she stayed in Montreal with the Baxter family for a brief time before returning to Europe and resuming her career as a singer. She never married and eventually retired to a comfortable house in a suburb of Brussels, bought for her by a wealthy admirer. As an elderly woman, she would sometimes mention that she had been on the Titanic with a young Canadian millionaire, but was never really believed. Only after her death did a nephew discover a shoebox filled with letters, photographs, and clippings revealing that “Tante Berthe’s” story was actually true. Hélène Baxter (1862–1923) died in 1923 in Montreal, and her daughter, Mary Hélène (’Zette) (1885–1954), left her husband Dr. Fred Douglas in 1923, remarried, and died in Redlands, California, in 1954.

  DAISY MINAHAN (1879–1919)

  By April 24, 1912, Daisy Minahan and her sister-in-law Lillian were back in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and on May 2 Dr. William Minahan’s body, recovered by the Mackay-Bennett, was shipped home for burial. Not long after the funeral, Daisy was admitted to a sanatorium for pneumonia. In 1918 she moved to Los Angeles, and died there on April 30, 1919, at the age of forty. Her sister-in-law, Lillian Minahan (1875–1962), also moved to California, where she married twice more. She died in Laguna Beach, California, in 1962, at the age of eighty-six.

  JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN (1837–1913)

  On Wednesday April 17, 1912, J. P. Morgan received a flood of messages at the spa in Aix in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday. He wired his thanks in return but added “Greatly upset by loss Titanic … my heart … very heavy.” The International Mercantile Marine had not been a financial success for years, and now it was associated with this shocking tragedy. Morgan died in his sleep on March 31, 1913, at the Grand Hotel in Rome, where a year before he had met with Frank Millet to discuss the American Academy. Flags on Wall Street flew at half-staff and the stock market closed for two hours in his honor. In November 1926, the IMM sold the Oceanic Steam Navigation Co., Ltd., of which the White Star Line was a major part, to the Royal Mail Group for £7 million. In 1932 the White Star Line once again became an independent company, but it merged with the Cunard Line in 1934 to become Cunard–White Star.

  MARIA JOSEFA (“PEPITA”) PEÑASCO (1889–1972)

  Maria Josefa Perez de Soto y Vallejo Peñasco y Castellana, to use her full, aristocratic name, was met at Pier 54 by the ambassador of Uruguay at the request of her family, and she and her maid, Fermina Oliva y Ocaña (1872–1969), were taken to the Waldorf-Astoria. Pepita’s father soon arrived in New York and took Fermina to Halifax with him in search of his son-in-law’s body, but no corpse identified as being that of Victor Peñasco was recovered. Pepita married a Spanish baron six years later and had two sons and a daughter and lived a comfortable life similar to the one she would have had with Victor. Fermina continued to work for her for some years and then retired to live with her sister and work as a dressmaker, dying in 1969, at the age of ninety-six.

  ARTHUR PEUCHEN (1859–1929)

  Major Peuchen’s promotion to lieutenant colonel and commanding officer of the Queen’s Own Rifles went ahead as planned in May of 1912 despite rumors to the contrary. He retired from Standard Chemical in 1914 and for the first year of World War I was commander of the Home Battalion of the Queen’s Own. From 1915 to 1918 he lived in London, where his son was a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery and his daughter married an officer from the same regiment. He returned to Canada after the war. In a family memoir, a nephew recalls that “the backlash of the Titanic disaster played havoc with my uncle’s enterprises.” He further claimed that Peuchen eventually lost most of his money and that even “Woodlands” on Lake Simcoe had to be sold. “Years after, when I would mention my uncle,” he recalled, “people would say, ‘Oh yes, he’s the man who dressed in women’s clothes to get off the Titanic.’ ” Peuchen certainly sustained losses in 1924 after the collapse of the Home Bank, and it is believed that for a time he lived in a lumbermen’s dormitory in Hinton, Alberta, where he owned tracts of forest. But he died at his home in a fashionable Toronto neighborhood on December 7, 1929. In 1987 his wallet was retrieved from the ocean floor and inside it were a few business cards and some streetcar tickets.

  HERBERT PITMAN (1877–1961)

  In July of 1912 “Bert” Pitman became the third officer on the Oceanic, and later served on the Olympic but in the purser’s office, due to his deteriorating eyesight. During World War II he worked aboard the troopship SS Mataroa as a purser, and in March of 1946 was given an MBE (Member of the British Empire) award for his wartime service. He retired shortly after this to Pitcombe, Somerset, and died there on December 7, 1961, aged eighty-four.

  EDITH ROSENBAUM (RUSSELL) (1879–1975)

  “I’m accident prone,” Edith Rosenbaum once noted. “I’ve had every disaster but bubonic plague and a husband.” It took Edith several years to recoup her Titanic losses—she submitted a large claim for her missing merchandise but was compensated for only a fraction of its worth. In 1916–17 she became a war correspondent for the New York Herald, and after the war changed her name to Russell since the French fashion industry was boycotting those with German-sounding names. During the 1920s Edith continued her fashion importing and writing for magazines. She traveled extensively, weathering other catastrophes, such as car accidents and tornadoes, and once danced with Benito Mussolini and raised dogs for Maurice Chevalier. In the mid 1940s she made London her home base, living at Claridge’s and then at the Embassy House Hotel. She made a lifelong friend in the young actor Peter Lawford and became godmother to the children he had with presidential sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford. Edith, too, befriended Walter Lord, bequeathing him her “good luck” musical toy pig. In 1958 she served as an advisor to William MacQuitty, the producer of the film A Night to Remember, and tried to persuade him to allow her to design the costumes. In old age Edith became increasingly eccentric and litigious and died in a London hospital on April 4, 1975, at the age of ninety-five.

  LUCY NOËLLE MARTHA, COUNTESS OF ROTHES (1878–1956)

  Noëlle Rothes (pronounced Roth-ez) was hailed as “the plucky little countess” in the aftermath of the disaster, following tributes to her in the newspapers by Seaman Jones and other survivors from Lifeboat 8. Noëlle and her husband, Norman, escaped from the press attention by traveling a
cross the country to Pasadena, California, where the earl had planned to acquire a citrus farm. It was this prospect that had brought Noëlle and her husband’s cousin, Gladys Cherry (1881–1965), to make the crossing on the Titanic. In the end, the Earl of Rothes decided not to settle in California and the couple returned to Scotland, where Noëlle had been proclaimed a national heroine by the newspapers. She was sympathetic to the grilling that Seaman Thomas Jones and Steward Alfred Crawford had received at the British Inquiry and sent each of them an engraved silver pocket watch. Seaman Jones eventually gave the countess the brass number 8 from the lifeboat, mounted on a plaque. The Earl of Rothes was wounded twice in World War I, and after the war both his health and finances deteriorated, requiring the sale of Leslie House in 1919. Norman died in March of 1927, and on December 22 of that year, Noëlle married an old family friend, Colonel Claude Macfie, and went to live with him in the village of Fairford, Gloucestershire. In the early 1950s, while corresponding with Walter Lord regarding A Night to Remember, she recalled that when dining at a London restaurant in the spring of 1913, she had been suddenly overcome with emotion. Soon she realized that the orchestra was playing the “Barcarolle” from The Tales of Hoffmann, a tune she had last heard played in the Palm Room on the night of the sinking. Noëlle died of heart failure on September 12, 1956, at the age of seventy-seven. Her cousin-in-law and traveling companion, Gladys Cherry, married a man named George Pringle and died in Godalming, Surrey, on May 4, 1965.

  EMILY RYERSON (1863–1939)

  On April 22, 1912, Emily Ryerson, her three daughters, and son John attended a funeral service in Philadelphia for the two Arthur Ryersons, father and son. Emily soon devoted herself to charity work, and during World War I worked on a fund for French orphans and wounded soldiers which won her the Croix de Guerre. She also traveled with President Herbert Hoover on a goodwill tour of South America. On a visit to China in 1927, the sixty-four-year-old Emily met and later married forty-five-year old Forsythe Sherfesee, a financial advisor to the Chinese government, and the couple made their home in Cap Ferrat. While traveling in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1939, Emily suffered a fatal heart attack and her body was brought back to Cooperstown for burial in the Ryerson family plot overlooking Lake Otsego.

  WILLIAM SLOPER (1883–1955)

  William Sloper went home to New Britain, Connecticut, and became a managing partner in a private investment firm. He married a widow, Helen Lindenberg, in 1915 and helped raise her three daughters. In 1949 he published a biography of his father, The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson Sloper, which is today most noteworthy for its chapter on his own Titanic experiences. William died on May 1, 1955, and is buried in Fairview Lawn Cemetery, New Britain.

  ELEANOR WIDENER (1861–1937)

  After returning to Philadelphia by private train, Eleanor Widener, like Emily Ryerson, had to prepare funerals for both her husband and her son. At the dedication ceremony for the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library at Harvard in June of 1915, she met Dr. Alexander Rice, a physician and keen explorer. They married that same year and on their honeymoon embarked on a five-thousand-mile expedition in a steam launch deep into South America. The couple mapped and explored much of the Amazon wilderness and they returned to South America several more times in search of the source of the Orinoco River. They also traveled in India and Europe, and Eleanor died in Paris of a heart attack on July 13, 1937.

  RICHARD NORRIS WILLIAMS (1891–1968)

  R. Norris Williams recuperated well from being half-frozen in a submerged lifeboat. He went to Harvard that fall and soon won several national singles and doubles tennis championships, a doubles trophy at Wimbledon, and a gold medal at the 1924 Olympics. When Collapsible A was recovered by the Oceanic in mid-May 1912, Williams’s fur coat with a whiskey flask in its pocket was recovered and returned to him. He served with distinction during World War I and was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. He later became an investment banker in Philadelphia and died on June 2, 1968, aged seventy-seven.

  HUGH WOOLNER (1866–1925)

  Only four months after the Titanic disaster, Hugh Woolner married Mary Alaia Dowson, the widow of an American. The couple had a son the next year and went on to have five daughters. Woolner’s reputation for unsavory financial dealings was reinforced by a 1916–17 court case in which he was accused of exerting undue influence in the drawing up of the will of an elderly woman with a large estate. Woolner and his wife later divided their time between Hungary and England after they inherited a home in Budapest belonging to one of Hugh’s relatives. He died there on February 13, 1925, of respiratory failure, at the age of only fifty-eight. Woolner’s Titanic sidekick, Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson (1883–1962), stayed in America and in 1917 married Mary Pinchot Eno, a young woman introduced to him by Helen Candee. The couple had no children and lived in a large Manhattan town house. On his death, on May 21, 1962, Björnström-Steffansson left behind a sizeable fortune from his father’s pulp empire and his own investments.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ET: Encyclopedia Titanica website

  FDM to CWS: Francis Davis Millet letters to Charles Warren Stoddard, Charles Warren Stoddard Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library

  TDH: The Titanic Disaster Hearings: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigation, edited by Tom Kuntz

  OBT: On Board RMS Titanic: Memories of the Maiden Voyage, edited by George M. Behe

  ST: The Story of the Titanic as Told by Its Survivors, edited by Jack Winocour

  TIP: Titanic Inquiry Project website

  PROLOGUE: A RARE GATHERING

  1 “a noble apartment” The Shipbuilder, 1912, in Foster, Titanic Reader, p. 32.

  2 “the unsinkable subject” Lord, Night Lives On, p. 1.

  3 “a rare gathering” Futrelle, in OBT, p. 288.

  4 “a small world bent on pleasure” Duff Gordon, Discretions, p. 162.

  5 “an exquisite microcosm” Lord, Night Lives On, p. 6.

  6 “as if some great” Strange [Oelrichs], in King, A Season of Splendor, p. 439.

  7 “The thought occurs that the Titanic is” Lord, in Ballard, Discovery of the Titanic, p. 7.

  CHAPTER 1: AT THE CHERBOURG QUAY

  1 “the porters scurrying around” Williams, “CQD.”

  2 “made a god of punctuality” Lehr, “King Lehr,” p. 164.

  3 “Obnoxious, ostentatious” Sharpey-Schafer, Soldier of Fortune, pp. 130–31. See full text this page.

  4 “Millet,” he once wrote Twain, in Sharpey-Schafer, Soldier of Fortune, p. 16.

  5 “Millet was an artist” Charles Francis Adams, in Sharpey-Schafer, Soldier of Fortune, p. 16.

  6 “Inertia is not one of Millet’s faults” Torrey, “Frank D. Millet, N.A.,” Art Interchange 32, no. 6 (June 1894): 167, cited by Simpson, Reconstructing the Golden Age, pp. 414–15.

  7 “this perfection of a village” Henry James, “Our Artists in Europe.”

  8 “I want a gem” Morgan Library website.

  9 “Pierpont Morgan … is carrying loads” The Letters of Henry Adams, vol. V, p. 377, in Strouse, Morgan, p. 457.

  10 “pre-eminent example” and quotes to follow, Belfast Telegraph, June 1, 1911, in Foster, The Titanic Reader, pp. 254–55.

  11 “I hope that here will eventually be” New York Times, April 7, 1912.

  12 “Pierpont will buy” in Auchincloss, Vanderderbilt Era, p. 199.

  13 “If this sort of thing goes on” Millet in Sharpey-Schafer, Soldier of Fortune, pp. 130–31.

  14 “had the entrée to every house” New York Times, March 31, 1912.

  CHAPTER 2: A NOMADIC HIATUS

  1 departure at 5:30 This time was noted in the diary of Daisy Spedden.

  2 “Riding the waves” Williams, “CQD.” It’s most likely that the tender did not actually go into the outer harbor until after the Titanic was sighted, but remained behind the breakwater, as recalle
d by Margaret Brown and Edith Rosenbaum.

  3 “pawing every girl in sight” Kaveler, The Astors, p. 148. The author was told this by women from Astor’s set.

  4 “It is very questionable” Town Topics, in Kaplan, When the Astors Owned, p. 56. It should be noted that the Astors often received harsh coverage in Town Topics, since they did not pay off the publisher, Colonel Mann, to be kept out of its pages.

  5 “pneumatic road improver” Kaplan, When the Astors Owned, p. 62.

  6 “a walking chandelier,” Ibid., p. 31.

  7 “the poor old lady” “After Holbein,” in New York Stories of Edith Wharton, Robinson, ed., p. 360.

  8 “Mother Force has let no grass” Town Topics, in Kaplan, When the Astors Owned, p. 157.

  9 “continued rumors” New York Times, August 2, 1911.

  10 “best gol-durn” and “built me a home” in Iversen, Molly Brown, p. 55.

  11 “cold, gray atmosphere” and “evil forebodings” Brown, Newport Herald, May 28–29, in OBT, p. 217.

  12 “just a sideline” and “I never” Russell [Rosenbaum], “By the Grace of God.”